Heterosexism in the US in the 1950s

When I was young (and impressionable, which goes without saying)—that is, in the 1950s, my teen years—all the models of love and romance that were held up to a young male in American society were of heterosexual couples. Everywhere one looked, the portrayals were of only heterosexual couples. This was true of songs, movies, musical shows--and books, with the exception of a very few books that still had, basically, "underground" status and which therefore very, very few people had access to or even awareness of. I remember when, here in Chicago, even in this big city, library books with a gay theme were kept not on display but locked away, so that you had to request them from a librarian. Kind of like the embarrassing situation that my fellow teen-age guys had to confront when they wanted to buy condoms, as these also were kept hidden and locked away in the drugstore.

Not only were all the models of romance in movies, etc., of a man and a woman. If you saw a ballet or anything else where there was dancing, it was always a man and a woman who were dancing together--even though that man dancing might actually have been gay and, by summoning up all the acting skills he could muster, had to feign romantic or sexual interest in his partner.

My examples will be from a few songs circa the 1950s. First the song, "There is Nothing Like a Dame," from the Broadway musical show South Pacific—which premiered on Broadway in 1949 and was later made into a movie. Here is a much-abbreviated version of the lyrics to that song (the setting is sailors, etc., on some Pacific island during World War II):

We got sunlight on the sand,
We got moonlight on the sea,
We got mangoes and bananas
You can pick right off the tree,
We got volleyball and ping-pong
And a lot of dandy games!
What ain't we got?
We ain't got dames!

…………

We get letters doused with perfume
We get dizzy from the smell!
What don't we get?
You know darn well!

We have nothin' to put on a clean white suit for
What we need is what there ain't no substitute for...

Any suggestion that of one of the uses (or needs, I should say) for a "dame" is sex is only very subtle here. Such was the morality of the time.

To continue quoting the lyrics of this song:

There is nothin' like a dame,
Nothin' in the world,
There is nothin' you can name
That is anythin' like a dame!

…………..

There ain't a thing that's wrong with any man here
That can't be cured by pullin' him near
A girly, womanly, female, feminine dame!

I get particularly offended by that last part, with its generalization about "any man" who inevitably needs a woman. There is no acknowledgment whatsoever, in this song, of the fact that there might just be some men in the service (and there definitely were!) who had no interest at all in "dames." (Nowadays I imagine a lot of women would object to the use of the term "dames.") Not to mention that, among the chorus boys dressed as sailors who were singing this song, there doubtless was a significant contingent of gay men, who again had to impersonate heterosexuals.

And all libidinous attraction was assumed to be to the opposite gender. Here is a bit of the '50s song, "The Petticoats of Portugal":

There's not a guy alive
Who doesn't thrive
On watching skirts blow free,
Especially the petticoats of Portugal.

Never mind that it would do nothing for this guy nor for hundreds of thousands of people like me: we simply didn't exist, at that time.

Then there was the popular song, "Love and Marriage" (later the theme song of the TV sitcom Married with Children):

Love and marriage,
Love and marriage,
Go together like a horse and carriage.
Dad was told by Mother,
You can't have one without the other.

The message would seem to be that, even for heterosexual couples, if you love one another, ya gotta get married. That should seem silly and maybe even offensive even to straight people! And there's no provision for the possibility that the object of your affection could be someone of the same gender. In the 1950s no one could even conceive of two people of the same sex getting married; and even in 2011, same-sex marriage is still impossible in more than three-quarters of the states of the United States.

So it was easy for me back then, growing up in a smallish town, to believe that I was the only one on Earth who was experiencing an interest in the bodies of other boys.

Since this was a metropolitan area of at least a few hundred thousand people, there probably was at least one gay bar somewhere in the area. But I would not have known about it, and I was too young to visit bars, anyway.

It wasn't until I was in college and studied fields like Sociology that I learned that such a thing as gay bars existed—in big cities. So then I—again like a lot of others—thought not merely that gay people congregated in the larger cities but that they existed only in those large cities.

So the point here is the painfulness of growing up with minority status, made even worse without the benefit of knowing even that others do exist. Accurate representations of any minority sexual interest did not exist because it was a taboo topic.

Copyright © 2011 by Richard Stein

Gay Men: Closeted, Repressed, and so forth

As readers of this blog who have read my bio know, I am a gay man. In blog postings I think I alluded to that fact once, but I have not posted very much, if anything, specifically on that subject. I guess I haven't wanted to make this a "gay" blog.

Well, I had some thoughts I shared with a friend, and I think I ought to make this more widely available. So, here goes:

As practically anyone knows, a lot of gay men are closeted. (It's very surprising, and incomprehensible to me, that even among older gay men--men my age--there is a percentage who are closeted. I have to wonder who they are hiding their sexuality from; maybe their children.)

Also, among gay men my age, a lot of them are or have been married. I've heard some say that when they were young they were pressured by family to marry and maybe have children as well (as an aside: for a humorous look at that sort of scenario, check out a delightful Mexican film called Doña Herlinda y su Hijo--Doña Herlinda and her son).

And many gay men get married, and perhaps have children, for the advantages--career and otherwise--of "passing." Around here there are a lot of guys who are married and yet are trolling the internet for a connection with a guy. That often makes me angry because I think they are trying to have the advantages of both; seems unfair to me.

Plus, many years ago--probably when I was just coming out and felt a need to find out, Just what is this gay thing, anyway?--I read a book called Society and the Healthy Homosexual, where he talks about the psychological toll of hiding one's sexuality. I tend to be a bit preachy on that subject as a result.

And then there are the men who are even more than just closeted: they even deny their sexual orientation to themselves. Maybe "repressed" would be a better term than closeted. The boyfriend of someone related to me, in my view, is one of those. When my relative first told me about this guy who'd entered her life, describing him, I said, "It sounds to me like he's gay." She said, quite defensively, "He's not gay, I can assure you!" Okay, end of subject. But there are doubtless many guys like this one. If they do ever wake up to their gay leanings, and it comes at a pretty late point in their lives, it can be devastating. Those to whom it happens at an earlier age are more fortunate--totally aside from the fact that guys who come out at a relatively mature age feel that they've "missed" a lot. The reader must surmise what that means.

Update, October 3, 2011
Here is a link to an article on coming out at a late age:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/03/15/national/main6299584.shtml

Copyright (c) 2011 by Richard Stein

Yet Another Homophobe Outed As Gay

If you follow the news, you've heard or read about Bishop Long, of a huge (25,000 member) African-American church in Georgia. This is a man who is a very vocal homophobe, and now he is accused of having had sex with (at latest count) four men from his congregation when they were adolescents.

This is just the latest of a long list. Remember these: Foley, Craig, Haggard? I think there have been several more that I can't recall at the moment.

I have to wonder, when will people stop listening to these people with credence and simply question whether the volume of their rhetoric is in proportion to their desire to cloak their own homosexuality?

Here is an article that is excellent and, in my opinion, gives a very good slant on the issue of homosexuality and the Bible.

http://www.aolnews.com/opinion/article/opinion-bishop-long-and-whats-long-overduer-for-christians/19645378

Update, August 26, 2011
Yet another instance to add to the list along with Sen. Craig, etc.--just the latest among many: An Indiana state senator, Phil Hinkle, arranged, via Craigslist, a liaison in a hotel room with a very young guy (either 20 or 18). He claims, "I am not gay."

Copyright (c) 2010 by Richard Stein

Growing Up Gay 50 Years Ago

This posting represents a departure for Mourning Dove Hill. My profile lets on that I am gay but I have not discussed that or any gay matters in a post. So here goes:

When I was growing up—my teen years were in the 1950s, a time that, strangely, is often romanticized—the word gay was never heard. (I first heard it in 1963, when it was explained to me as a code word, a word that you would slip into a conversation to let the other person know you were gay; and if he understood, of course he was gay too.) The popular culture of the time—songs and so forth—depicted a world in which 100 percent of men were attracted to women. In other words, gays didn't exist. For that reason I, and thousands of other young males growing up in small towns in that era, were able to believe, each of us, that we were the only ones in the whole world who were "different" in that way.

Heterosexual males have 50 percent of the population that they can pursue. (Well, we have to exclude the women who are too young, and I was going to add "and women who are married," but let's not be naïve; that doesn't stop a lot of men.) On the other hand, a gay man has to find a partner among the three or five or whatever percent of the male population who share his sexual orientation. I, like millions of others, learned that the major cities had significant gay enclaves, and so wanted to move to the big city. The pickings are a little better there!

The social conservative/Christian/evangelical community keeps insisting that being gay is a "choice." (Here, and in so many other cases, I have become more and more convinced that they do not really believe what they say. They really just are repelled by the idea of gay sex and will find any reason whatsoever—for instance that it's a choice, or that the Bible proscribes it—to justify a prejudice which at heart is disgust stemming from their sexual puritanism.) If you examine this idea with a modicum of reason, it can't possibly hold up. Why would someone choose to be gay when

1. People like them revile us.
2. It's harder to find a partner among that much smaller population.
3. There might be discrimination in finding a job, etc. In spite of all the progress and nondiscrimination legislation passed in many jurisdictions, it's still a disadvantage to be gay.
4. Gays and lesbians don't have equal rights, including the right to marry their partners (in most jurisdictions); their partners may not be able to visit them in the hospital when they are gravely ill; and their partners don't automatically inherit property or Social Security benefits as do spouses in married heterosexual couples.
5. Many gays and lesbians were raised in, and still wish to be affiliated with, churches that tell them that they are sinners. What damage does this do to one's psyche?
6. It's well documented that GLBT teen-agers are subjected to verbal and physical harassment by their peers and even teachers. And there is a higher rate of suicide among GLBT teens than among their straight peers.

If there is a greater incidence of alcoholism and other such problems among gays and lesbians, it very likely is due to the burden we must cope with, that of dealing with society's homophobia. The 1968 play (and 1970 movie) The Boys in the Band—one of the first plays to depict gay characters—leaves us with the sentiment, voiced by one of the characters, "If only we didn't hate ourselves so much."

The San Francisco Chronicle said, when the film version of The Boys in the Band was revived in 1999,

. . . in the attitudes of its characters, and their self-lacerating vision of themselves, it belongs to another time. And that's a good thing.

Of course it's a good thing, if it's true. I believe the Chronicle is saying that gays and lesbians growing up today do not have the baggage of internalized homophobia. I am sure it is correct that it's easier for young gays and lesbians today: there is greater societal acceptance of homosexuality and certainly it's a subject much more out in the open. A young GLBT person today can find others like himself or herself far more easily.

But not all of us of the Boys in the Band generation are yet gone from this Earth.

Copyright © 2010 by Richard Stein

Excuse Me, But--Aren't Catholics a Minority?

Some voices on the political Right are complaining against those who, in their view, advocate imposing "minority mores" on the rest of us. I have to think that they are talking about things like gay rights and same-sex marriage.

Consider that, recently, it was the influence of Roman Catholics who succeeded in getting the Stupak amendment added to the health-care reform bill in the U.S. House of Representatives. This amendment prohibits coverage for abortion in any federally-administered health insurance.

And a week or so earlier, U.S. Roman Catholic bishops, donated $185,000 to further the passage, in Maine, of Proposition 1, which overturned same-sex marriage in that state. Plus, the Catholic bishops had done much the same in California, helping to assure passage of Proposition 8, which overturned same-sex marriage in that state. They not only used dollars but lobbied heavily--and in California they were notably joined in that effort by the Church of Latter Day Saints (Mormons).

Leave aside for the moment the issue that, supposedly or theoretically, church groups are barred from political action or advocacy, at the peril of losing their tax-exempt status—which is apparently never enforced against the Catholic Church or any right-wing church, although an action for removing the tax-exempt status was brought against a minister who had spoken on the other side of the aisle during the reign of George W. Bush.

The people complaining, as quoted above, about "minorities" who want to impose their mores on the majority must not have been talking about U. S. Roman Catholics—although, last I heard, Catholics were a minority—as are Mormons, for that matter. Catholics just happen to be a wealthy and well-organized minority, not to mention sufficiently powerful that they will not be ignored by politicians.

So, as always, the Right is hypocritical: they inveigh against the very things that they themselves are guilty of. It's "if you want rights, you are a minority who does not speak for Us. But when it's us—well, disregard the fact that we are not the majority, just because we happen to be right!"

Well, if they mean Right—Amen to that.

Copyright © 2009 by Richard Stein

Still More on the Police

I don't really want this blog to become solely about the police, or even mainly about the police, but I can't resist the urge to disseminate word about the latest incident of police misconduct.

In this case, a Chicago police officer has been hit with a civil suit by 21 plaintiffs who charge that the officer unjustifiably arrested them for Driving Under the Influence. It is charged that he picked his targets by observing them coming out of gay bars. One of the plaintiffs said (in an interview shown on TV news) that the officer said to him, "You've got two strikes: you're black and you're a fag."

What is this officer's motivation, other than his biases and prejudices? He makes money. When he appears in court in these cases, even if the case gets thrown out, the officer is paid time and half.

Mothers Against Drunk Driving has given this officer a reward because of his uncommon number of drunk-driving arrests--300. It's sad that single-issue constituencies like MADD so typically only scratch the surface of an issue and see only what they want to see. I think they deserve a new acronym, maybe IDIOT, standing for Idiotic Dames Inflicting Obnoxious Temperance.

Chicago has a (relatively) new police superintendent who came to his position with great promise of cleaning things up. So far he has shown too much inclination to defend the police officers under him, rather than getting at the truth and doing something about these abuses of police power.

Copyright (c) 2009 by Richard Stein

Queer Eye for the Straight Guy

I only watched the TV show, "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy," a couple of times, but I have to say that I agree with its premise: that when it comes to matters like style and grooming, gay men know what they are doing, and straight men are clueless.

Let's just take haircuts or hair styles. I used to observe, on the commuter train, that so many men had just dreadful haircuts. I'm sure these guys go to barbers (no barber has cut my hair for maybe 40 years) and get a very poor haircut. You have to wonder why their wives don't tell them and try to get Hubby to get a better haircut. (Well, come to think of it, it probably wouldn't do any good—although these same men are ruled by their wives when it comes to clothes. What percentage of men let their wives pick out their clothes? Do I have to tell you?)

Today I had my hair cut. I go to a stylist. Most of those chain or franchise haircut places aren't very good; their people either can't or won't cut my hair the way I expect it. Nevertheless, one of those outfits--maybe a little better than its competitors-- is where I've been having my hair cut for some months now. I've generally been satisfied with the cut I get there or, you can be sure, I wouldn't go there. 'Cause I'm a gay man and I care about things like how my hair looks. (But, so as not to be over-generalizing, let me admit that I have some geeky gay friends who are just as bad as any straight.)

As I was waiting for my stylist to finish another customer, I was watching the cut this guy was getting: Very closely trimmed on the sides, with the clippers, and longer on top. I thought it was very unbecoming. There's no excuse for a haircut like that unless you're in the Marines. I was considering saying to the stylist, When a guy comes in and asks for a cut like that, you should tell him that you can't do it, because it's illegal.

And, as my hair was being cut, I saw a fairly nice-looking dude come in and sit in the chair of another stylist. His hair, I thought, looked good just the way he had it when he came in. But with this one, too--out came the clippers, and after a bit of buzzing, his hair was too short to look good on him. Little short of a tragedy. Gawd, I wish I could tell these people what they don't seem to be able to see.

And while we're on men's hair, let's talk about facial hair. It's been the fashion for some time for younger guys to have these "goatees" (the quotes are because that term properly applies to a pointed beard, like a goat's). I think that, in about 96% of cases, these are not becoming. Darker-haired guys, like Latinos, often look very sinister with moustaches and goatees. And the guys with lighter hair, if they have a longish tuft of hair on their chins, it simply looks disgusting.

Many guys have long hair together with full beards. Hair just surrounds their faces. There was one like that at a place I was working. Every time I passed him, I wanted to say, Too much hair!

So, sadly, straight guys just can't judge what is or is not good for their appearance. Now, when do I get on that TV show?

Copyright © 2009 by Richard Stein

Jews, Germany, and the Holocaust

I am Jewish, and I want to talk about the attitude of Jews toward Germany. Many Jews hold a very strong animus toward Germany because of the killing of millions of Jews during the Holocaust. Some Jews would not buy a Mercedes or fly Lufthansa or drink a German beer, if they could avoid it.

So I want to tell a little about what feelings I have come to have, where Jews, Germany, and the Holocaust are concerned.

I would never use the word "forgive" because, human nature being what it is, forgiveness surely is asking too much for anyone who has been closely touched by the Holocaust. (In the interest of disclosure, relatives of mine who were still in Europe at the time were killed, but I only heard about this from my mother and I did not know those people. On the other hand, I did know cousins who survived the concentration camps and still had their concentration camp numbers tattooed on their arms.)

I do believe, though, that I have heard some such as the famous writer and concentration camp survivor Elie Wiesel say they can forgive but they can never forget.

For much of my life I just did not know how one should feel about Germany. By now, though, I have had a number of decades in which to form my thoughts.

First, killing of Jews, over the hundreds and thousands of years, was not a new idea conceived by the Nazis.

From pogroms in Russia in the late Czarist era, going back and back: country after country in Europe, where Jews dwelled, at one point turned anti-Semitic and expelled the Jews. In 1492—not coincidentally the same year that Columbus sailed because that was the year that Ferdinand and Isabella completed the Christian "reconquest" of Spain from the Islamic Moors—the Jews of Spain, who had for the most part enjoyed very favorable conditions under the Moorish rulers of Spain, were given an ultimatum: convert to Christianity or get out. Of course many did leave, very large numbers, the ancestors of all the world's Sephardic Jews. Some converted--sometimes not sincerely, thus becoming crypto-Jews or "Marranos" (literally 'pigs'). Some remained and then were tortured to death by the Inquisition.

During the Crusades, it was not uncommon for Crusaders, on their way to the Holy Land, to slaughter any Jews they happened to come upon along the way. All in the course of carrying out their holy mission as urged by the Pope.

During the plagues of the Middle Ages, the Jews often were blamed for causing the plagues. I happened to come across a letter from the bishop of one town to the bishop of another (one of them, if I recall, was in Switzerland), advising his clerical colleague to burn the town's Jews in order to keep the plague away.

(To digress a bit, that kind of thinking is not as outdated as we might hope. Witness the modern preachers who blamed Hurricane Katrina's devastation of New Orleans on that city's "sinfully" permissive attitudes toward gays, etc. And a right-wing member of the Israeli Knesset (Parliament) recently said that earthquakes in Israel were caused by homosexuals. Seems we never learn.)

So, over a thousand years and more, killing of Jews has gone on. The anti-Semitism and persecution of the Jews by the Nazis was nothing that new, and anti-Semitism could be found in France, England, Hungary, Bulgaria—well, everywhere. The Germans simply applied their characteristic thoroughness and efficiency, although to even say this certainly conjures up gruesome images.

So what is the attitude toward Germany that I have arrived at? I find it hard to believe that there can be such a thing as an intrinsic flaw in the German national character. Germany had been the most cultured and enlightened country in the world. (There was a TV drama about the experiences of a Jewish family in the 1930s as the storm clouds gathered around them. The wife said to her husband, "This can't be happening here. This is the country of Lessing [a playwright who preached tolerance in his play about a Jew, Nathan der Weise], Goethe, Beethoven." The husband replied, "Unfortunately, none of them is in power right now.")

So, Germany was okay before a certain time, and I'm willing to presume that now, after three generations—when few mid-century Nazis are still alive—that it's okay now. They have paid reparations to the Jews, they have erected monuments to Holocaust victims.

True, some of the Nazis directly involved, like concentration camp commanders, were monsters—and in a way, or on a scale, that boggles the mind. I prefer to think these few Germans were a minority. Other Germans risked their lives to save Jews—for example, Otto Schindler, about whom the movie, "Schindler's List," was made. A list is kept of "Righteous Gentiles" who helped save thousands of Jews, often at risk to their own lives. Four hundred fifty-five Germans are on this list* but it must be admitted that there are more individuals on the list from nine other countries.

There was also a very interesting story about a German woman who had to learn, only much later, in her adulthood, about her father and his role as a concentration camp commander. There was no loyalty to, or defense of, her father, but only revulsion, horror, and shame. (In this case, and even in the larger issue of how we feel toward the country, we might ask whether we agree with the stern edict in the Bible which says, "The sins of the father are visited upon the children.")

And there have been other examples of genocide in human history. Some meliorists believe that the human race has been evolving, but it's not clear to me that genocide has become less common in modern times. One example, on nearly the scale of the Nazi extermination of the Jews, is that the Turks, over three years starting in 1915, wiped out perhaps 1.5 million Armenians. More recently we've had genocide in Rwanda. And Stalin in the Soviet Union and Pol Pot in Cambodia killed hundreds of thousands of their own people.

Any nation, any group of people, has its good and bad eggs. For a variety of reasons, which I won't go into, it was easy for Nazi propaganda to stir up hatred against the Jews. (No, I do not think it was easy because the Germans were inherently more prone to such manipulation. View other postings on this blog which discuss the use of propaganda, and dehumanizing of "the other," to arouse hatred of an enemy.) I am not sure that it couldn't happen as well somewhere else, even here. We certainly have neo-Nazi hate groups here, today. Look at the Netherlands, often pointed to as a country that always remained hospitable toward the Jews during World War II. The other side of that is that the Dutch Nazi Party had 15,000 members—a small number, but it's a small country. And some fine, upstanding Dutch person turned in Anne Frank and her family.

So, I feel what is to be concluded is that the Germans are not somehow inherently flawed, nor any worse, as a group, than the general run of humans. However, I do not presume to tell anyone how they should think. You can't, really. This is only a summation of the point I have arrived at, after many years in which to think about this issue.
_______
* From Wikipedia: "Including Oskar Schindler, the businessman who saved over a thousand Jews by employing them in his factory, and Hans and Sophie Scholl, sibling members of the White Rose resistance movement, Captain Gustav Schroeder who commanded the "Voyage of the Damned", and German army officer Wilm Hosenfeld."

Copyright © 2009 by Richard Stein

Me and Sports

I like to imagine I can know everything. Well, of course I can't, and I do know that—at least in some of my more rational moments. There are a few things that I don't really want to know about, like sports, or pop culture, or anything having to do with the military.

Let's talk about me and sports. As one of my friends once put it, I'm your old-fashioned faggot who doesn't know anything about sports. I even pride myself on that. And what's up with all this identification with your local sports team? Here in Chicago, if you're a South Sider you're—I don't quite get how this magically comes about—a White Sox fan, and if you're a North Sider you're a Cubs fan.

In Chicago, we have one sports team called the Cubs and one called the Bears. I asked whether Cubs grow up to be Bears.

I wondered whether the opposite of pro football was anti football.

I asked whether water polo is played by riding on sea horses.

Seriously, why do professional athletes (and, for that matter, others who entertain us—movie stars, rappers, etc.) have to earn obscene amounts of money—while teachers and even scientists make a fraction of that? Only CEOs of big companies earn salaries of that magnitude. I think I read somewhere that gladiators in ancient Rome made a very good living—so I guess we, just like the ancient Romans, place a very high value our "bread and circuses."

Copyright © 2009 by Richard Stein