backing him up), Jerry Lee Lewis and Buddy Holly—were setting the stage for the rock and roll era.
At the movies, we had Marilyn and Ava and Lana and Rita, not to mention Rock and Marlon and Montgomery and the endless rebel himself, James Dean. You could drive to your favorite theater in one of those fabulous cars; American cars ruled the world, great metal sculptures with names that sang to the ageless boy in all of us—Wildcat, Clipper, Hawk. (Who could possibly get excited about cars like Escort or Prizm? Or, worse yet, Passatt? That sounds like someone breaking wind, doesn’t it?)
Didn’t feel like going out? Stay home. It was the “golden age” of television, too. Lucy and Jackie were blowing home audiences away and Dinah Shore was blowing kisses. Playhouse Ninety and Lux Video Theater and others offered the likes of The Days of Wine and Roses and Twelve Angry Men and Requiem for a Heavyweight, all original live tv dramas. And every Sunday night came with its own “really big show.”
Alternatively, you could curl up and read. Say, Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, or Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. Or if it was more to your taste, Peyton Place, by Grace Metalious.
Julia Child had not yet ignited that whole foodie thing but there were good restaurants where you could count on a real steak and maybe pan-fried chicken, practically non-existent by the end of the twentieth century. Every bartender knew how to make a real martini and the banana sidecar and Sex-on-the-Beach had not yet sullied that noble profession.
All of which is to say that, contrary to what you might have heard, the fifties were practically a time of Heaven on earth. Unless, of course, you needed to think or feel or give in to your sexual urges. Well, nothing is quite perfect, is it?
For the gay man or woman these were the dark ages, only more so. Homosexuality had always been officially frowned upon but in the twenties and thirties no one seemed to give it much mind, and in the forties the war made everyone horny, the way wars do.
Unfortunately, by the fifties everyone had gotten their rocks off. Like the randy jock who agrees to a blow job and when it’s over remembers that he disapproves of that sort of thing, by the fifties some of the same men who had paused a decade earlier in a dark doorway for a quickie were now pounding their pulpits and denouncing those who had knelt before them so adoringly.
It’s difficult for those who grew up after the sixties to comprehend the world in which gays lived before the revolution. It wasn’t just gay activities that were illegal—the simple fact of being or even appearing gay was often enough to get you arrested; indeed, in some states, Florida for instance, it was against the law just to be homosexual, practicing or not.
In San Francisco, one of the country’s more tolerant cities, a homosexual could be arrested for loitering at a place of business—which is to say, if a police officer thought you were looking with too much interest at the wrong buns you could be pinched at your local bakery, whether anything was cooking or not.
In California a third arrest required you to register as a sex offender and that label was with you for life. Sadly, you didn’t have to engage in sexual activity to become a “sex offender.” I had one friend who was cruised in a park restroom. He told the individual who approached him, “Honey, don’t you know that you can get arrested for that in a place like this?” And, boom, next thing he knew there were handcuffs on his wrists. It wasn’t safe even to turn down a pass in those places.
It was dangerous just to be in a gay bar. You could be sitting in a beer bar on a rainy weeknight, alone and speaking to no one, when the police, uniformed and plain clothes, might appear, going along the bar and picking patrons at random—”You—and you—and you” who were arrested for lewd conduct.
In those days before court-appointed attorneys it could be all but impossible to find anyone to represent you on a gay-related charge. Even in Los Angeles there were only one or two attorneys you could turn to. One of those, a woman who was known as much for her flamboyant hats as for her legal skills, automatically pleaded you to disturbing the peace. The fine was $600.00, but you avoided jail or sex registration and had only a misdemeanor charge on your records.
I was lucky. I avoided public restrooms except in direst emergency, when I neither spoke to nor looked at anyone. And I was at a couple of those “walkthroughs” in the bars so I know whereof I speak, but I was not arrested. I liked to think, “There but for the grace of God,” but I was ever so mindful of his evident lack of grace for the less fortunate. Nevertheless, until Sioux City, as I have said, my only real legal difficulty was that divorce case back in Dayton.
1950 was a black year in gay history (it was also not a very gay year in black history but that’s another subject). In that year the chief of the vice squad in Washington, D.C. charged publicly that the federal bureaucracy currently employed what he estimated at 3,500 sex perverts—300 to 400 of them in the State Department.
When Senator Clyde Hoey (a classic name-freakism if I’ve ever seen one) of North Carolina looked into the matter, he found no fewer than 4,954 perverts, mostly in the armed services. And to think military heads in the nineties were worried about their boys showering with homos! In 1950 you dropped the soap at your own peril.
Not to be outdone by anyone’s Hoey, J. Edgar Hoover came up with a staggering 14,414 federal workers whose backgrounds were “suspect.” Armed with these numbers, he got additional money from Congress to start his “Sex Deviates” program. Handsome FBI agents in sexy costumes began to spend their time cruising in gay bars and clubs—a tactic that police would employ right into the present era. Talk about a cushy job. Soft lights, good music, the occasional blow-job—and no nasty robbers taking potshots at you. Oh, a jealous queen might try to scratch your eyes out, but you have to expect some downside.
You can be sure that some of the information these dedicated cruisers gathered went into their own little black books. You never knew when you might be faced with a cold, lonely night.
The rest of it went into Hoover’s files and was used to warn colleges and law enforcement agencies, among others, of the dangerous perverts within their organizations. The rationale for this was that as homosexuality was illegal, the knowledge of an individual’s homosexuality made him subject to blackmail. That this threat could be negated by removing the legal constraints on homosexuality seemed not to have occurred to anyone at the time.
It was not until 1977, by the way, that the Sex Deviates files were destroyed—or at least we are told they were destroyed. No one ever said what happened to those little black books. By that time the official files numbered between a quarter and a half million pages. To put that in perspective, think of each page as the potential ruin of a life, the destruction of a career. Sadly, there were many for whom the tragedy was more than “potential.”
Things got worse. In 1954 the crusaders turned their attention to the comic books, beloved of the nation’s youngsters and not a few oldsters as well. As early as 1948, New York psychiatrist Fredric Wertham had launched his attack on the comic book industry, charging that comic books created juvenile delinquents and made perverts of their youthful readers. Wertham was a senior psychiatrist for the Department of Hospitals of New York City, and treated mostly troubled children. He found that without exception these children were reading comic books—nearly all children did in those days. Wertham saw a cause and effect in action. Comic books were teaching these youngsters that crime pays, good doesn’t always win over evil, and authority figures needn’t be taken too seriously.
At first no one had taken him too seriously. Undeterred, in 1954 in his book Seduction of the Innocent he broke the news to the unsuspecting world that Batman and Robin were gay, pointing out their “sumptuous quarters, with beautiful flowers in large vases.” Even the presence of Alfred, the butler, was somehow proof of the pair’s perversion, though personally
