BijouBlog

Who? What? Where? 

Why would this story make the front cover of the then fledgling gay newspaper, The Advocate, in September 1967? 

 

 

 

The 1960s may have been swinging and sexually liberating for some heterosexual segments of the population (were there any openly gay hippies?), but a gay person could still get arrested for kissing a member of the same sex in public, could not join the military (which could be a way to avoid the draft, then going on because of the Vietnam War), and could be fired from a job because of his/her orientation. 

A co-worker of mine handed me a list he found on the Internet. I don't know how reliable the source is, and issues of what turns people on tend to be vague. In fact, it seems like every hour there's a list that pops up somewhere, ten body parts women find attractive in men, or what a gay guy finds hot on another guy, etcetera, etcetera. 

Remember that famous scene from Network when Peter Finch urges everyone in America who does not feel valued in a chaotic world to open their windows and yell, “I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it any more!” 

I recently combed through one of my favorite books, The Gay Decades, by Leigh W. Rutledge. I found this fascinating tidbit about some stars from the Bijou Classics collection. On January 15, 1983 (hard to believe that was thirty years ago), quoting Rutledge: 

A long, long time ago, in 1960, right before the sexual revolution, two psychoanalysists, Eberhard and Phyllis Kronhausen, published a book called Sex Histories of American College Men. The book was praised not so much for any groundbreaking insights into male sexuality (the famous Kinsey had done that previously), but because it wasn’t pornography in a time when certain muscle magazines with mildly or vaguely homoerotic content were considered obscene.