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

Do We Need to Teach Gay and Lesbian History?

One of our radio stations, which I don't usually listen to, just had a commentator talking—negatively—about a bill in California to introduce the teaching of gay and lesbian history in that state's schools.

There was a phone number for listeners to call with comments. I didn't phone, for a variety of reasons, including my lack of confidence in my ability to organize my thoughts in anything like a persuasive manner while speaking. That plus—this needs to be mentioned--the fact that I stutter.

One of this guy's points was that history largely includes bad guys, like Hitler. So he said, "Okay, if you want to find a gay marauder to include. . . ."

But I thought he missed the point. History and other courses in our schools have been tilted and slanted to favor sort of a majority, history-gets-written-by-the-victors point of view: male, white, Euro-centric, and of course heterosexual. As just one example: We might learn about Jane Addams and Clara Barton. But there were lots of very fine woman painters. How many can you name? Possibly, at most, these three who are very well known: Georgia O'Keefe, Frieda Kahlo, and Mary Cassatt. And it's not a coincidence that two of those are pretty modern; earlier ones never got much attention.

In the last few decades women and African-Americans have become vocal in pointing out how their contributions have often been overlooked or downplayed. It's a similar story with the contributions of countries and civilizations outside of those which, for several hundred years, have conventionally been thought to be in the path of the transmission of civilization from East to West. In other words, it's been Mesopotamia and Egypt, then Greece, Rome, Europe, and the U.S.

As just one little example of how wrong this is: It's been found that bronze smelting and casting was done very early in Vietnam. Is Vietnam and its contributions to world civilization included in our history?

Now, as to gay and lesbian people: In many fields there have been contributions by people who were gay or lesbian. Leonardo, Oscar Wilde, Walt Whitman, E.M. Forster, Noel Coward, Tennessee Williams, and so many more. Their sexual orientation has usually been very deliberately omitted from discussion when these people are discussed in our schools. Forster was not free to publish a homoerotic novel he'd written. Whitman was forced to change the pronouns in his poetry, changing them from talking about love of males to females. When history is thus "cleaned up" or sanitized for consumption by our students, not only is an injustice done but we find ourselves in the business of dispensing half-truths which are masquerading as truths.

So it's just a case of how far we feel we need to go to redress the balance. In a way it's the same issue as with affirmative action: Do minorities who have been overlooked, suppressed, discriminated against, now need special emphasis or consideration? They would not, if they had been getting a fair shake all along. And, your answer to that question might just reveal what your prejudices are.

Copyright © 2011 by Richard Stein