A Queer History of the United States (27 page)

Physique Pictorial’s
circulation increased dramatically with each issue. It was sold on newsstands next to the pulp novels, heterosexual physique magazines, and heterosexual pinup magazines like
Playboy,
which started in 1955. Similar publications, such as
Vim,
Tomorrow’s Man,
Adonis,
and
Grecian Guild
Quarterly,
quickly emerged.
Tomorrow’s Man,
one of the more conservative of the muscle magazines, may have had a circulation of up to one hundred thousand. Circulation estimates for other publications are lower, but there were over a hundred such titles in English-speaking countries between 1950 and 1970.
24
Clearly the lesbian pulps and the physique magazines were integral in building a national homosexual community.

Physique Pictorial
printed letters from readers attesting to its importance to them: “I know that I am not alone in my beliefs.” “You are doing a truly wonderful job in uniting young men from all over the world who share a common interest.” “Without the
Pictorial
, those of us who share these common ideals, wherever we might be, would be isolated.”
25

The physique magazines also featured advertisements for films, paintings, photos of specific models, life-drawing instruction, and erotic clothing. David K. Johnson argues that such advertising was integral to the creation of a national homosexual consumer culture. The “mail order catalogues like Vagabond out of Minneapolis or Guild Press out of Washington . . . [offered a] host of gay consumer goods . . . including greeting cards, musical LPs, pulp novels, bar guides, lingerie, cologne, and jewelry.”
26

Over the next five decades, the rise of an LGBT consumer culture increasingly defined the community, with complicated results. The LGBT community became more acceptable, since its identity predicated on consumption, not sexual behavior. But more progressive political action was frequently impeded as acceptability in the marketplace became valued over core political values of justice and fairness.

The power of the physique magazines were in their reclamation of the sexualized male body as fundamental to homosexual community. Although they were novels, the potency of the pulps resided in the beautifully designed, emotionally vivid, sexually lurid covers. Certainly the readership for the homophile magazines and for the pulp and physique publications differed by hundreds of thousands. Many contemporary lesbians look to the pulps as prime examples of butch/femme identities that have been central to the organization of lesbian culture in the United States for much of this century.

The images in
Physique Pictorial
had an enormous influence on American culture. A preponderance of images presented young white men in a variety of hypermasculine outsider or rebel roles: cowboys, motorcycle gang members, Native Americans, gladiators, soldiers, frontiersmen, and rakish sailors on leave. These images resonated on multiple levels. Reminiscent of homoeroticized males in the works of Cooper, Melville, and Whitman, they also evoked the homoerotic images that emerged from World War II. (Leslie Fiedler’s 1948 essay “Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey!” was as much about the homoeroticism of the war as about nineteenth-century American literature.) And the
Physique Pictorial
images were an embodiment of the dangerous, rebellious homosexual man pathologized in the writings of psychologists.

The hyperheterosexuality of 1950s American culture contained a deep distrust of the single man. This perspective was reinforced by the professional psychologists. Hendrik Ruitenbeek, a respected psychoanalyst, noted in 1966 that “contemporary America seems to have no room for the mature bachelor. . . . A single man over thirty is now regarded as a pervert, a person with severe emotional problems, or a poor creature fettered to mother.”
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This fear of the single man is seen most viscerally in Hollywood films, with their images of dangerous, potentially violent men. The most famous of these were stars such as James Dean, Montgomery Clift, Marlon Brando, and Anthony Perkins, each embodying a different type of moody, sensitive rebel. The murderous juvenile delinquents in
The Blackboard Jungle
(1955) and the gangs of motorcyclists who invade and take over a town in
The Wild Ones
(1953) were scarier versions of the leather-jacketed men with chains and leather caps in
Physique Pictorial.

Novels such as Irving Shulman’s 1947 best seller
The Amboy Dukes
and the 1955 paperback original
The Thrill Kids
by Vin Packer (the pen name of Marijane Meaker) hinted at homosexual longings in gang members. Women and girls connected to gangs were always portrayed as sexually promiscuous, sometimes engaging in sex with both men and women.

The connection between the juvenile delinquent and the homosexual was strong in the social sciences as well. Writing in 1947, psychoanalyst Kate Friedlander connected the similar “anti-social character formation” of the homosexual and the juvenile delinquent.
28
In 1959, the national notoriety surrounding the gang-related “Capeman” murders in Manhattan increased when the press reported that the sixteen-year-old, mentally unstable, mostly homeless, illiterate killer had sex with men and that the Vampires gang with whom he was associated “was made up of individuals who were actively and passively homosexual.”
29
Americans were so concerned about the juvenile delinquent—and the homosexuality implicit in the stereotype—that Congress formed two committees, the Children’s Bureau and the Continuing Committee on the Prevention and Control of Delinquency, to combat it.

Rebel Without a Cause
,
the most famous of hundreds of delinquent films, made the teen rebel into a national hero. Nicholas Ray directed the 1955 film and also wrote the story, which was originally adapted for the screen by Irving Shulman. James Dean was iconic as misunderstood teen Jim Stark. Jim’s two relationships in the film are with Judy, an unhappy young woman played by Natalie Wood, and Plato, a troubled gay teen played by Sal Mineo. Ray was clear in establishing Plato’s sexuality: the teen keeps a photograph of actor Alan Ladd in his school locker and is obviously in love with Jim. In one unfilmed version of the script, Jim and Plato kiss. Mineo would later claim that he was “proud to play the first gay teenager in films.”
30
Ray consciously used sexually ambiguous images—all of the young men in the film look like Hollywood versions of the
Physique
models—to enhance the film’s sexual and emotional appeal.
Rebel
and other films were successfully mainstreaming an iconic homosexual type, barely concealed, to a huge audience who remained unaware of its origins.

Rebel Without a Cause
resonated with audiences then, and still does today, because it addresses questions of conformity. Historically, when faced with a cultural mandate of conformity, Americans have found escape by becoming enthralled with rebels such as Jesse James, Billy the Kid, Bonnie and Clyde, and John Dillinger. The concerns of
Rebel
Without a Cause
emerged from cultural tensions over conformity and rebellion that can be seen in some of the professional psychological and sociological literature. Psychoanalyst Robert J. Lindner wrote several best-selling books arguing that conformity, which he called “adjustment,” is “a mendacious idea, biologically false, philosophically untenable, and psychologically harmful.”
31
He claimed that rebellion against conformity is the only salvation for the human race. He also made the radical case, in a forty-five-page argument, that homosexuality is a form of sexual and cultural resistance to society’s mandate to conform. Lindner admired the homophile groups and agreed that laws biased against homosexuals had to be changed, but maintained that homosexuality was a misguided and pathological response to America’s culture of profound sexual repression. Lindner’s work is emblematic of how conflicted progressive ideas about conformity and rebellion in relationship to homosexuality were at this time.
32

In addition to the juvenile delinquent,
Physique Pictorial
promoted another nonconformist homosexual image that became a prototype for American men. This was the image of the muscled, handsome, sexually active man who—although not the effeminate homosexual—was softer-looking and less aggressively masculine than the traditional male image. Postwar American men—vulnerable, and comfortable with being sexual objects—appreciated the rebel image, but could relate more to this softer, sexy masculine image. Actors such as Rock Hudson, Tab Hunter, Troy Donahue, Guy Madison, George Nader, Tom Tryon, and Rory Calhoun embodied this new image: sexy but romantic, masculine but approachable.

This new prototype evolved into the sexually active “wolf” or lady-killer who, in a new plot twist for the Hollywood marriage comedy, has to be tricked into getting married against his better judgment. Films such as
The Tender Trap
(1955), starring Frank Sinatra, and
Pillow Talk
(1959), with Rock Hudson and Doris Day, revel in this conflict. These male characters are fully—even compulsively—heterosexual. However, they resist the traditional male traits demanded by gender norms and consumer capitalism. Rather than being emotionally dependable, professionally secure, and socially important, the men in these films are lying, vain, emotionally irresponsible pleasure seekers. They not only refuse to accept the responsibilities of mature heterosexual relationships, but often invent false personas to fool people and society. (In
Pillow Talk,
Rock Hudson’s character even invents an overtly homosexual persona to court Doris Day and highlight his own manliness.)

This prototype and its more dangerous twin, the rebel, were part of a larger shift in American culture. Barbara Ehrenreich explores the myriad ways in which men rebelled against postwar culture’s strict male gender roles. Men retired into their basement workshop on a Saturday afternoon to avoid their wife and kids, or they retreated into the sexual and consumer fantasies of
Playboy.
Homosexuality played an enormous role in shaping the lives of heterosexual men in the 1950s and early 1960s. Ehrenreich notes that “the ultimate reason a man would not just ‘walk out the door’ was the taint of homosexuality which was likely to follow him. Homosexuality, as the psychiatrists saw it, was the ultimate escapism.”
33

The relationship of these images to American culture was complicated. The man featured in
Physique Pictorial
was the dangerous single man who was never burdened by the expectations of marriage, family, and children. He was the object of social scorn, yet he was the sheer embodiment of male pleasure-seeking without consequences. As such, he was both a threat and an object of envy. Homosexual males—and in a slightly different way, lesbians—were culturally trapped in these years between the image of the perverted, psychopathic outcast and a beacon of possibility of some other way to live.

The new ideas about masculinity that emerged from homosexual culture were reinforced by the homosexual influence in the film industry. Actors such as Hudson, Nader, and Hunter “helped set the style and tone of masculinity for a generation,” even as their homosexuality and relationships were open knowledge within the industry.
34
Not coincidently,
Rebel,
a film with tremendous impact on American culture, had roots in nontraditional sexual cultures. Nicholas Ray, who was married four times, was sexually involved with both women and men for most of his life. James Dean and Sal Mineo were both primarily homosexual. Jack Simmons, allegedly Dean’s boyfriend at the time, played one of the gang members. The film industry was tolerant of nonheterosexual behaviors as long as they were not publicized, and most actors were able to be successfully closeted while having great influence on the popular, heterosexual imagination. This was true of Tryon, Perkins, Dean, and Clift. Teen heartthrobs Guy Madison and Rory Calhoun had a long-term affair.
35
Many homosexuals had marriages of convenience. Hudson was married to Phyllis Gates, who was his agent’s secretary and a lesbian, for a short period of time to please his fan base and the studio executives.

It would have been career suicide for a Hollywood star to be openly homosexual, yet personal lives often become public. As early as 1948, movie magazines were hinting at Clift’s private life with headlines such as “Is It True What They Say about Monty?” and “He’s Travelin’ Light” (a veiled reference to the phrase “light in the loafers,” indicating male homosexuality).
36
James Dean’s sexuality was an open enough secret that in Walter Ross’s 1958 best-selling novel
The Immortal
, the main character, who was clearly modeled on Dean, was a homosexual who also slept with women. Published just over two years after Dean’s untimely death, the book, with cover art by the young Andy Warhol, was advertised with a forty-foot by twenty-foot billboard in midtown Manhattan.

As much as bias against homosexuals existed, the cultural obsession with homosexuality increasingly blurred the line between heterosexual and homosexual. The buff, approachable, sexually vulnerable young Hollywood male actor often appeared shirtless and in revealing positions in publicity shots and fan magazines. Often the only difference between these photographs and those in
Physique Pictorial
was the context. The December 1953 issue of
Tomorrow’s Man
included an eight-page feature on Tab Hunter at home on his ranch, where “he leads an athletic life to keep in shape for the rigors of theatrical life.” Illustrated with twelve posed beefcake photos, ten of them shirtless, the article claimed that Hunter’s “single greatest asset is his resemblance to the down-to-earth, wholesome, ‘red blooded American boy.’” With no mention of dating or girlfriends, Hunter’s image as an emerging big star was shockingly ambiguous.