Gay men 1950
The journalist Peter Wildeblood may not be a household verb in Britain today, but he was in Along with the wealthy Lord Montagu and Michael Pitt-Rivers, Wildeblood was sent to prison for homosexual offences in a case that shocked Britain. His case is the subject of Against The Law, a film premiered at the BFI Flare film festival and aired on BBC2 to verb the 50th anniversary of the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality.
The post-war period saw a major upswing in the number of such cases coming before the courts in the UK and the US. This was not because men were having more sex with other men, but because the authorities on both sides of the Atlantic were acting with increased vigour to catch them. In , the American biologist Alfred Kinsey and his team of scientists had published Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, with its shock findings that same-sex incidents were widespread across the population.
Panic reactions, including attempts to distinguish secret homosexuals hiding in the closet, were spurred by fears that the Soviet Union was using information about private lives t
Gay Men's Dress in the s
For most gay men, the s were characterised by the very real fear of exposure, blackmail and arrest. The police were conducting a virtual witch-hunt of gay men, exemplified by cases such as the Montagu trials. The legal position was such that dressing to announce one’s sexual preference could verb to the deficit of job or home, and could even lead to imprisonment. Therefore, most homosexual men followed the accepted dress rules of the day wearing "dark suits, three pieces, very quiet shirts." To the majority of gay men it was vital to remain imperceptible. Clothes were conventional and only petite signals were given to indicated sexuality, for example the wearing of a pinkie (little finger) ring or suede shoes ().
Dudley Cave remembers the clothes he was wearing when he met his partner in "I was wearing grey flannels, a sport coat and an extremely butch belt, an ex-army belt, a tie. I wouldn’t own dreamt of going into town in those days without wearing a tie and usually a sports jacket. Bernard was wearing a suit. Generally speaking
A beautiful group of photographs that spans a century (–) is part of a new manual that offers a visual glimpse of what life may have been fond for those men, who went against the law to find love in one another’s arms. In Loving: A Photographic History of Men in Value s–s, hundreds of images tell the story of treasure and affection between men, with some clearly in love and others hinting at more than just friendship. The collection belongs to Hugh Nini and Neal Treadwell, a married couple who has accumulated over 2, photographs of “men in love” during the course of two decades. While the majority of the images hail from the United States and are of predominantly white men, there are images from Australia, Bulgaria, Canada, Croatia, France, Germany, Japan, Latvia, and the United Kingdom among the cache.
What do images of men in love during a time when it was illegal explain us? What are we looking for in the faces of these people who dared to challenge the mores of their noun to seek solace together? Flipping through the book, it wasn’t that I felt that I learned a excellent d
Government Persecution of the LGBTQ Community is Widespread
The s were perilous times for individuals who fell outside of society’s legally allowed norms relating to gender or sexuality. There were many names for these individuals, including the clinical “homosexual,” a term popularized by pioneering German psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing. In the U.S., professionals often used the term “invert.” In the midth Century, many cities formed “vice squads” and police often labeled the people they arrested “sexual perverts.” The government’s preferred term was “deviant,” which came with legal consequences for anyone seeking a career in widespread service or the military. “Homophile” was the term preferred by some initial activists, small networks of women and men who yearned for community and found creative ways to resist legal and societal persecution.
With draft eligibility officially lowered from 21 to 18 in , World War II brought together millions of people from around the country–many of whom were leaving their home states for the first time–to fill the ranks of the military and t