A Queer History of the United States (28 page)

As the 1950s evolved into the 1960s, the two types of American masculinity appeared in different artistic forms and guises. The emotional power of rock and roll was in its sexual exuberance. Early white rock-and-roll performers, such as Elvis Presley, Bill Haley, and Buddy Holly, displayed a juvenile delinquent image that was overtly sexual, exhibitionistic, and flamboyant. They chose this image in part because they were drawing on the highly emotive African American roots of rhythm and blues in the music of Fats Domino, Chuck Berry, and Bo Diddley. Social reformers, clergy, and conservative civic groups claimed that rock and roll caused juvenile delinquency and called for a boycott of record companies and radio stations. In California, legislators banned certain records from public play; in Memphis, Tennessee, local police confiscated jukeboxes that contained “offensive” records. Linda Martin and Kerry Segrave note that in 1954, the industry was so worried about the backlash against risqué lyrics that
Billboard
, the industry trade magazine, urged radio stations not to play some songs that were listed on the magazine’s Top Ten charts.
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To the moralist, the threat of rock’s sexual content was often linked to homosexuality. Little Richard, whose flamboyant stage presence and appearance was seen by most audiences as an indicator of homosexuality, changed the lyrics of “Tutti Frutti” when he cut the record in 1955. His original version included the lines “Tutti Frutti, good booty / If it don’t fit, don’t force it / You can grease it, make it easy.” W. T. Lhamon argues persuasively that Little Richard’s “Long Tall Sally” is about the singer’s Uncle John’s involvement with a transvestite, the “bald-headed Sally,” who is “built for speed” and with whom he is sneaking into alleys.
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If Elvis and Little Richard were the bad boys—the delinquents—of rock, the new wave of pretty, teen-boy crooners such as Frankie Avalon, Fabian, Pat Boone, and Ricky Nelson were the musical analogues of the new, more gently masculine male stars. These young men, almost all in their mid to late teens with crew cuts or pompadours, resembled the young, preening, less muscled physique models. Teen culture at times overtly acknowledged the influence of male homosexual culture. In the 1964 film
Muscle Beach Party
with Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello, the wholesome teens’ beach fun is threatened by professional musclemen wearing hot pink and lavender trunks and capes. The film is filled with coded jokes about homosexual bodybuilders; for example, the men are being managed by a promoter named Jack Fanny.

In the postwar era, style and dress for heterosexual women and men evolved quickly as they began reacting to changes in gender roles and gender presentation. Gay men and lesbians had created cultures that produced specific physical markers—clothing, speech, imagery, affect, and deportment—crucial to identifying one another and creating group identity. Ironically, many of these styles and new ways of displaying gender, which often made gay and lesbian people more vulnerable, were ultimately adopted by mainstream culture. The changes for men were perhaps the most striking. Robert Wood argues that mainstream male fashion trends in the 1950s and early 1960s were primarily influenced by trends that first surfaced in the male homosexual community. Popular styles such as patterned and brightly colored shirts, strapped undershirts, black sports shirts, tighter-fitting pants, chinos, loafers, and low-cut boots all began as homosexual fashions. The same was true of flashy watchbands, ornate rings, pinky rings, wrist jewelry, and neck chains. All of these fashions were worn to eroticize the male body or to make it more sexually attractive through ornamentation.
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Styles for women had already begun to change during the war, and women’s dress and grooming were becoming increasingly more casual. Women “bobbed” their hair in the 1920s, shedding the Victorian style of long tresses, but short hair became far more common in the 1940s and 1950s. The idea of women wearing pants and men’s shirts was popularized during the 1930s by actors such as Greta Garbo, Katharine Hepburn, and Marlene Dietrich. The war made these once-bold fashion statements into everyday wear. By the 1950s, heterosexual women took many presentational cues from lesbian’s wardrobes, partly because they were in essence a rejection of older fashion that sexually highlighted the female body for the male gaze. Even with fewer women having full-time jobs than during the war, the level of social engagement—caring for children, driving to stores, running parent-teacher associations, participating in community groups—was higher than before and demanded far more casual clothing. These changes gave women the social permission to wear slacks at home or at informal events and to choose simpler blouses, blazers, and outerwear, such as car coats, that were practical and not necessarily glamorous.

“Hiding” in Plain View

The emerging gay culture was beginning to be acknowledged by heterosexuals as a major influence on mainstream culture. This was especially true of the influence of gay males on the mainstream arts. Censorship on the Broadway stage had loosened up enough so that homosexuality could be discussed—even if it occurred offstage—in plays such as
A Streetcar Named Desire,
Tennessee Williams’s 1948 Pulitzer Prize winner
.
John Van Druten’s 1950
Bell, Book and Candle,
a comedy about witches who live in Greenwich Village and have their own hidden clubs and code words, was understood by New York theatergoers as an obvious allegory about a homosexual community. Two years later, Christopher Isherwood’s
Berlin Stories
—whose main character, based on its author, is clearly gay—was adapted for the stage by Van Druten as
I Am a Camera
. Robert Anderson’s 1953
Tea and Sympathy
was a hard-hitting look at suspected homosexuality in a New England boys’ school. That same year, Calder Willingham adapted his novel
End as a Man,
which examined homosexuality in a military school, for Broadway. Tennessee Williams won a second Pulitzer in 1955 for
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,
about a married man haunted by his love for his late best friend. In 1956, Patrick Dennis’s best-selling novel
Auntie Mame
became a stage hit by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee. Although the play had no overt homosexual content, its sensibility, as in the novel, drew enormously from homosexual culture, and the main character changed her elaborate outfits as often as a drag performer. The popular revue
New Faces of 1956
featured T. C. Jones, a noted female impersonator who had already toured extensively with the Jewel Box Revue. The following year Jones appeared in his own show,
Mask and Gown,
to great acclaim. Clearly, Broadway audiences were more than accepting of male homosexual themes and culture.

Hollywood was eager to film these plays; all of them, with the exception of the two Jones vehicles, were made into movies, with adjustments to the homosexual content. Film censorship was finally breaking down as producers and directors dodged the Production Code.
Some Like It Hot,
predicated on men dressed as women, and
Suddenly Last Summer,
clearly about homosexuality, were released in 1959. A film of Lillian Hellman’s 1934 play
The Children’s Hour
grappled with a lesbian scandal, and the 1961 British film
A Taste of Honey
portrayed a gentle homosexual man. At least three movies in 1962 featured gay themes:
Advise and Consent,
centered on a Washington, D.C., political scandal; the British film
Victim,
which took a sympathetic look at homosexuals who were being blackmailed; and
That Touch of Mink,
a sex comedy. Lesbian characters offhandedly appeared in
All Fall Down
and
Walk on the Wild Side
in 1962, and in
The Balcony
and
The Haunting
in 1963. The next year, Gore Vidal’s
The Best Man
combined politics and sex;
Goodbye Charlie
tossed lesbian jokes into a sex comedy; and
Black Like Me
grappled with homosexuality and race. Open homosexuality was clearly now a staple of mass entertainment.

During this time, openly gay artists were writing and presenting their work without the interference of mainstream producers, managers, or curators. This new wave of theater, film, and art emerged in urban areas with thriving lesbian and gay communities. Caffe Cino, a Greenwich Village coffee house founded by Joe Cino, was the first off-off-Broadway theater. Joe Cino began by producing dramatic readings, but soon moved to presenting works by homosexual writers such as Oscar Wilde, Thornton Wilder, William Inge, and Terence Rattigan in ways that brought out their coded subtext. The radicalism of Caffe Cino and other companies that followed—Judson Poets’ Theater, Ridiculous Theater Company in 1964, the Cockettes in San Francisco in 1968, and New York’s Hot Peaches in 1969—was in presenting plays with explicit gay content in an openly gay environment. Major American playwrights such as Robert Patrick, Al Carmines, Lanford Wilson, Tom Eyen, Charles Ludlam, Jean-Claude van Itallie, and William M. Hoffman all emerged from this setting.

Most of the people involved in these companies (with a few exceptions, such as the lesbian playwright and director Maria Irene Fornes) were white gay men, reflecting the fragmentation of both communities and movements. African American companies were formed later; the New York–based New Lafayette Theater and the Negro Ensemble Company were both founded in 1967. Lesbian theater thrived later as well, with the growth of women’s and feminist theater companies. The alternative arts scene in New York culture, including theater, fine arts, music, and literature, was intricately tied to the continual growth of homosexual culture. Similar cultural scenes were evolving in Los Angeles’s Silver Lake and San Francisco’s North Beach. The impact on national American culture was enormous.

Concurrent with theater, underground film culture was thriving during the 1950s and 1960s. As early as 1947, twenty-year-old Kenneth Anger, formerly a child actor in Hollywood films, made the homosexual-themed
Fireworks,
a masturbatory dream film starring himself.
Firework
s became a touchstone for underground film culture. By the early 1960s, openly gay filmmakers such as James Broughton, Michael and George Kuchar, Andy Warhol, and Jack Smith—whose 1964
Flaming Creatures
was continually banned throughout the United States for decades—were in the forefront of redefining the possibilities of American film. This was a pivotal cultural moment for homosexual artists. They now had the permission to produce openly gay work without clear traditions and antecedents.

The filmmakers began drawing on past mass-produced popular culture—1930s films, classic film stars with exaggerated gender expression, and vintage mass-produced artifacts such as lamps, jewelry, and clothing—to express their ideas. This reclaiming of past popular culture, often making fun of it while simultaneously using it to comment on the present, was called “camp.” Lesbian cultural critic Susan Sontag states that “the essence of Camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration. And ‘Camp’ is esoteric—something of a private code, a badge of identity even, among small urban cliques.”
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Sontag’s “small urban cliques” were homosexuals, who had traditionally used codes as a way of identifying one another and, ostracized from the mainstream, formed their own satiric take on “normal.”

This transformative use of material entered the mainstream imagination and became a predominant means of expression. Andy Warhol noted that “drag queens are ambulatory archives of ideal movie-star womanhood.” Considered the primary theoretician of the pop art movement, Warhol specialized in taking the everyday and the mundane—the familiar image of a Campbell’s soup can—and insisting that viewers adjust their reality to see them differently.

As Warhol stripped away artifice by calling attention to it, another artistic movement called attention to the radical potential of what was left after exposing themselves emotionally and psychologically. The Beats were members of a small literary movement that started in the homosexual and bohemian enclaves of San Francisco and New York in the early 1950s. The movement produced great works that changed American culture, such as Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Howl,” Jack Kerouac’s novel
On the Road,
and William Burroughs’s
Naked Lunch
. The word “beat,” with origins in drug and jazz culture, originally meant “robbed,” and came to mean, for these writers, “The world is against me.”
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Ginsberg noted that “the point of beat is that you get beaten down to a certain nakedness where you are actually able to see the world in a visionary way.”
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The Beat movement and homosexual culture were inextricably intertwined. The Beat writers’ rejection of enforced gender roles and sexual behaviors, their reliance on self-expression through the arts and resistance to censorship, their antimilitarist and antistatist stance, and their insistence on being true to their own vision were all qualities that had been manifested by homosexual communities. Not all Beat writers were openly homosexual, but many were: Allen Ginsberg, John Wieners, Robert Duncan, William Burroughs, Peter Orlovsky, Jack Spicer, Steve Jonas, Herbert Hunke, Harold Norse. Some heterosexual Beats, such as Kerouac and Neal Cassady, also had sex with men.