For boys, and not just those who are branded as gay, walking through a hallway is like running a gauntlet of homophobic insults as their male classmates imitate effeminate men and hurl homophobic slurs.When I was a youth (the 1970s), that gauntlet already existed, although it was more manageable. My biggest problem: I liked classical music. In those days, nobody questioned a young man's masculinity if he bought records by Elton John, Freddie Mercury, David Bowie and those prancing freaks in Kiss. But Beethoven? Wagner? Mahler? Fag shit.
In general, I hated sports and liked art, attitudes which, as you might guess, invited trouble. Fortunately, anyone looking over my shoulder soon noticed that I liked to draw girls. Big Frazetta fan, I was, so you can imagine what my work looked like. Although this choice of subject matter won me some respite from the "fag" shouters, they remained a problem.
Question: Do you think the problem is worse now?
They say this new "don't-be-hatin'" generation has forsworn intolerance. And yet young people keep using the word "gay" used as a synonym for "foolish" or "despicable." ("That car is so gay" = "I don't like your car.") I cringe every time I hear that slur, and I've been hearing it for quite a few years now. The word was not used as an insult back in the "less enlightened" era of the 1970s.
In my opinion, people were more tolerant then. What do you think?
5 comments:
i will be 60 years old in a month and a half, a fact that astonishes me every time i think about it... however, i can tell you, when i was in h.s., even the SUBJECT of homosexuality was in the closet... it wasn't even acknowledged, much less used as a taunt... imagine my surprise and delight when i learned from my children and their friends in h.s. that the existence of gay classmates was taken as a matter of course, and, at least for my children, those classmates were integrated into their groups of friends without a second thought... i am sure there are schools - and groups within schools - where a gay person or even the subject of being gay is a matter of derision and scorn, but i am extremely comforted to know, if that is the rule, there are significant exceptions, and, maybe, just maybe, the exceptions are indeed becoming the rule...
In 1977, in the school hallway (college), one of my female students said derisively "That's so gay", referring to a guy who walked by with his jeans tucked into Frye boots. Her favorite author was J.D. Salinger (she gave me her copy of "Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: an Introduction"). She was a large 19-year-old, that is, tall with very athletic legs, and she ran track in high school. One day she was a beautiful woman in a pastel dress, the next day she looked manly in straight-leg Levis when flares and bell-bottoms were still catching on among the older crowd. A year later she wore those hilarious platform shoes. Woody Allen has called her 'type' "androgynous". Maybe a very smart psychiatrist can explain her state of mind.
You might want to check out the (great) Peter Boyle's 1970 role in "Joe", or check out the trailer for it on YouTube. Very likely, the Archie Bunker character was derived from Boyle's role. Very very likely, kids watched Archie Bunker in "All in the Family" but were much too young for irony, parody, and satire. If the adults in their household seemed to admire and love Bunker, the 'impressionistic' kids might have cultivated some of Archie's homophobia. That said, you can't take my word for it because I never watched an episode (though I heard many episodes from another room). I figure Norman Lear has a lot to answer for, brainless knee-jerk 'liberals' being high on the list. Wait, we're not finished. Billy Crystal in TVs "Soap" (1976) probably engendered derision in many homes, derision being one of the sides in that breakout controversy of those times. One can never underestimate the effect of "How disgusting!" pronounced with parental decree while something's on TV.
Out on the street I also had worn my jeans tucked into my boots -- you had to have read Umberto Eco's little essay about the meaning of wearing jeans for him, to get a sense of the tactile feeling; maybe not. I liked how Keith Carradine looked in "Nashville"! But after that student said that, I caved and never tucked them in again.
I think you are wrong about "All in the Family." (God, I can remember the debut!) In the early seasons, Mike was supposed to be the voice of the young generation. Archie was the comic foil. Over the years, Archie softened and Mike started to be the butt of jokes. But I don't think anyone ever sympathized with Archie's racism.
You bring up a matter that has long perplexed me. What IS it with the pants-tucked-into-boots thing?
At one time, that look was considered masculine. Think of the uniforms in the original Star Trek series. Or take the uniform worn by the Pirate Roberts in "The Princess Bride." And what about V's costume? What about Alex and his droogs?
I always liked that look, and I can't see anything non-hetero about it. Captain Kirk and Alex De Large never lacked female companionship.
But at some point in 1972, some committee somewhere decreed that tucking pants into boots was "faggy." And we've followed that decree ever since.
Why? I mean, what's so gay about pants tucked into boots? Why was that look considered gay after 1972 but not gay in all the centuries before? Who MAKES these decisions?
A theory about the pants tucked into boots:
I'm thinking it might have to do with military uniform and opinions about the Vietnam War in the early 70's.
.R.S.E.
1972 sounds just right, it's when RJR's magazine ads for Winstons and Camels played fast and loose with sexual identities and genders. In one, a young guy with very dark hair, full beard & moustache holds a pack of Winstons and is withdrawing a cigarette while looking you in the eye. The large ad copy print has him saying things like "Once, I smoked like everyone else, now I know what real taste is, blah blah Winston." His fly on his faded jeans isn't open, but it looks open because of the zipper's wrinkled flap. The print almost-but-not-quite obscures a barber's comb and scissors in the breast pocket of his denim shirt. He's a hair stylist! Another Winston ad with very similar copy employs a male model who is a female impersonator, impersonating a woman in denims with a somewhat opened shirt without visible cleavage. 'She' holds the box of smokes like a guy would hold it, almost with a baseball grip. (The model had been on TV talking about his work as a female-impersonator photographer's model.) My fave is for Camel Filters showing a guy in the foreground at a place like Malibu Beach. He has very dark hair that resembles Sluggo's girlfriend Nancy's helmet-do, and a Brando/Zapata moustache. His white shirt is open to the waist, and though he appears to have nice pectorals, you're looking at nice tits and nipples (if you mask the rest of the pic, 100 out of 100 viewers would identify female breasts), while his jeans crotch has that Jagger bulge. Yeah, he's a hermaphrodite all right. The bold ad copy reads "One of a kind". In the background two women (in bathing suits, one with a surfboard) gaze at him. Between them is an old woody station wagon. The other woman (really in the middle-ground) is in a pose at the station wagon, with her hand on her hip in a perfect replication of the legendary "woman on the Camel pack" (embedded in the camel's foreleg). This is a decade before Joe the Camel. (On the ad is the 1972 copyright.) My second-fave is a Benson & Hedges 100's ad during their 'too-long' cigarette ad campaign, when the cigarette was always bent/broken. This ad shows a dark-haired woman with the bent cigarette in her mouth. You could say it looks like a tobacco pipe, smoke rises from it, and the smoke is a partially abstract sculpture of a very very feminine nude with a tiny waist and large hips and breasts. (a 'pipe dream'?) The woman wears a straw sun hat, her cheeks are darkish but not from any shadows, and the yarn fringe from the top of her blouse falls down her chest as if it were hair. She's smiling with the cigarette in her mouth and the only ad copy reads "oh well, nobody's perfect" above the pipe/cigarette, and "that's the breaks" below it -- the first line, of course, quotes Osgood from the payoff line in "Some Like It Hot" (if you haven't seen that movie I won't spoil it with an explanation; if you've seen it, you get the point of the ad.)
Then came the anti-ambiguity machismo backlash, and by the end of the 1970s, the Village People to boot.
Maybe some French intellectuals could explain how the boots morphed into a Michael Jackson's white socks and a single glove.
About pants inside boots, you didn't mention the riot cops in Chicago in 1968 during the Democratic National Convention. (Finder's Fee waived.)
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