Sex and sexual freedom

Let’s call this post “The Pill, the Pope, promiscuity, and PAGEANT.”

Pageant was a popular small-format magazine published from 1944 to 1977.  It went somewhat against the grain in publishing, since it carried no advertising.  To judge from this issue, it was a little on the low-brow side, a little on the salacious side.  There is a remarkable number of articles about sex here– premarital sex on campus (describing the by-now famous Barnard co-ed Linda LeClair as “one of that growing body of ‘value rebels’ who will lead us into a more hopeful future”); post-marital sex (couples should get an annual sex “check-up”); a photo feature on “Glamazons” in the movies (Barbarella and her cinematic sisters); and an article about teen promiscuity by a Unitarian minister (he thinks it’s OK).

The cover image–a pregnant woman holding a protest sign reading “Who says the Pill is perfect!”– has, oddly, no direct connection to anything inside the issue.  But flaunting a kind of j0key hipness about “the Pill” in 1968 was a way of attracting attention on the newsstand.  The first FDA-approved oral contraceptive had been on the market only since 1960, as historian Elaine Tyler May has written about recently in her wonderful book, America and the Pill: A History of Promise, Peril, and Liberation (Basic Books, 2010).   In 1968, the Pill, as Prof. Tyler May points out, was still considered something only for married women.  Prescribing oral contraceptives for single women was still banned in several states.

But there was another reason that 1968 was a signal year in the history of birth control: the publication (”promulgation”) on July 25th of the encyclical letter “Humanae Vitae” by Pope Paul VI.  It was the long awaited official response by the Catholic Church to the recently transformed landscape of birth control, and it proved a massive disappointment for advocates of liberalization.  The Pope–speaking “ex cathedra,” that is, infallibly– condemned all “unnatural” forms of contraception,” including new pharmaceutical contraceptives, which went against “the moral order which established by God.”

As for some of the other claims on the cover of this issue–for example, that falsetto-crooner Tiny Tim was “1968’s answer to John Wayne” or Ronald Reagan’s belief that “young Hitlers” were running our colleges–we will have to wait for another time to investigate those.

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Wrestling with sharks, joining the Foreign Legion, and . . .  buying elevator shoes?

Amidst all the social upheavals and political drama, most things in life in 1968 went on just as they had in 1967, or even 1957.  Take men’s magazines, for example.  Not the skin mags (we’ve already been there in this blog), or the car mags (we’re getting there soon), but rugged, he-man, adventure mags.   Anyone of the male persuasion who ever went to a barber shop in the 1950s or 1960s spent some time thumbing through copies of True, Field and Stream, and Argosy.  This was (and still is, somewhat, although the landscape has changed a good bit) a special corner of American journalism, populated by lots of dead things with antlers, large fish that put up a huge but ultimately futile fight, extreme adventures along treacherous rivers or freezing mountain passes, and rugged, independent Men with a capital M.  Women, clothed or unclothed, are nowhere in sight.  This is a Guys’ World.

Unlike some of the others, Argosy actually had quite a distinguished (?) pedigree, having begun publication in 1882 as what is now recognized as the first men’s and boy’s “pulp fiction” magazine.  For decades, Argosy turned out only fiction, but all that changed during World War II.  Apparently, fiction had a hard time holding its own against the gruesome facts of modern combat, and Argosy began to publish “true-life” adventures.  By 1968, the magazine was all true-life stuff, all the time.   Ironically, for a magazine that traded in stories drawn from the “here-and-now,” there is in these pages not a whiff of the revolutionary goings-on of the larger culture of the 1960s, not even very much about the war in Southeast Asia.

Instead, there are predictable articles about sharks (as in the cover story here, “After the Man-Eaters with a Rope–and a Prayer”), hunting (”Getting the Drop on that Foxy Deer”), and being a soldier-of-fortune (”The World’s Last Foreign Legion,” in the Spanish [i.e., Western] Sahara).  This issue also has an interesting report about the booming prostitution trade in Alaska, following the pipeline workers.

What’s most instructive, however, about any given issue of Argosy from this era is not the editorial content but the ads.  One can see fairly quickly that it did not seem to be directed to an audience of actual alligator-wrestlers, would-be Legionnaires, cross-oceanic one-man sailboat mavericks, or piranha-defying adventurers.  (Maybe there was another magazine for those guys.)  No, to judge by the ads, Argosy seemed aimed, to put it charitably, at armchair adventurers, many of whom seem to have been (again, charitably) underemployed and lacking in manly confidence, or at least had not figured out what they were going to do now that they were grown-ups.   In addition to ads for cigarettes, motor oil, and Turtle Wax, there are numerous smaller ads:  ”You Can Be Taller Than She Is,” with elevator shoes. A full-page ad for correspondence school.    ”Learn Meat Cutting.”  ”Surveying Pays Big.”  ”Learn How to Be a Game Warden.”  ”Customize/Repair Auto Interiors.”  A full-page color ad for metal detectors.  ”Free! Powerful Muscles Fast!”  Classified ads offering “love-hungry gals” from Mexico, Japan, and other countries.  An ad headlined “Embarrassed?” that tells the reader how to avoid drugstore embarrassment by buying condoms by mail order.  (We have been here before, as loyal readers will recall:  in a post last year about action-hero comic books and their ads.)

“But wait! There’s more!”  Yes, in the “New Product News” (barely-disguised ad placements) there is a blurb for Popeil’s “Pocket Fisherman,” a product beloved of late-night TV aficionados and the butt of countless jokes and parodies.   Operators are standing by.

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Rachel, Rachel, starring Joanne Woodward and directed by Paul Newman

Another one of the best movies of 1968, and I’m just now catching up with it (thanks again to Turner Classic Movies).  Rachel, Rachel, released exactly 42 years ago on August 26, 1968, was one of the nominees for the Best Picture Oscar in 1969 (nominated with Funny Girl, Lion in Winter, and Romeo and Juliet, and the year’s winner, Oliver!. Notice, by the way, that the mind-blowing 2001: A Space Odyssey didn’t make the cut, although its director, Stanley Kubrick,  received a nomination.)

Rachel, Rachel is a quiet, small character study, a hybrid of an “art movie” and a mainstream “star” picture.  Rachel Cameron is a New England spinster, age 35, who feels life passing her by, rapidly.  ”Nothing’s real, nothing is now,” she confesses to her friend Calla.  ”If somebody pinched me, I wouldn’t even hurt.  I’ve only got one life.  I say to myself, maybe next time, this or that comes around, I’ll grab it, but nothing ever comes around, does it?”  She falls for (and has sex with) an old high school chum, who of course turns out to be a cad who dumps her when she gets too close.   There are things about Rachel, Rachel that mark it as a “contemporary” (1960s) movie–a lesbian subplot (Rachel’s fellow teacher, played by Estelle Parsons, comes on to her); some flashes of fantasizing by Rachel (she has lurid flashbacks to her childhood–she’s the daughter of the town undertaker–and she imagines overdosing her overbearing mother); a short dream sequence; a surprising scene of a somewhat countercultural religious awakening; and what must have seemed at the time to be some fairly explicit sex scenes.

The movie attracted a disproportionate amount of attention in the press for one key reason:  its producer and director, Paul Newman (left off the list of Best Director nominees that year).  At age 43, Newman was one the biggest Hollywood stars of 1968, the blue-eyed heartthrob who commanded the Sixties box office with Cool Hand Luke, Hud, The Hustler, Sweet Bird of Youth, Exodus and other less memorable flicks.   Rachel, Rachel was his first directorial effort, and this — far more than the picture itself or its star, Newman’s wife, Joanne Woodward– was The Story for numerous magazine and newspaper articles, beginning months before the film’s release.

In this article in Saturday Evening Post in February 1968, when the movie was being filmed and was then called A Jest of God, reporter Jane Wilson gets the obvious fact about Newman out of the way quickly:  “In person he is so astonishingly handsome that it is impossible not to stare at him, and everybody does, all the time–men, women, children.”  Newman is reported to be “tired of playing superstar, feeling ‘burned out’ as an actor.”    In an October story in LIFE, Newman said about Rachel, Rachel:  ”I wanted to prove to Hollywood that you can make a motion picture about basic, simple people without violence and a band of Indians scalping settlers.”  (Newman shared this cover with his wife, but he had already been on LIFE’s cover once in 1968–for a May article about Hollywood stars getting involved in the political campaigns, mostly for McCarthy and Kennedy.)

Although Joanne Woodward still lives in Connecticut, Paul Newman died in 2008–a fact one would not be able to glean from websites for “Newman’s Own” food products.  Paul and daughter Nell Newman (who appeared in this movie as young Rachel) still grace the packaging of a line of organic foods.  He may have become a “brand,” but he’s still better looking than Orville Redenbacher.

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Shacking up, 1968-style

It’s unlikely that New York Times reporter Judy Klemesrud envisioned the hornets’ nest she was poking exactly 42 years ago, on March 4, 1968, with this article about cohabitation at U.S. colleges.  ”College administrators dryly refer to it as ’student cohabitation.’  But to the students themselves, it’s better known as ’shacking up,’ ‘the arrangement’–or, more commonly, just plain ‘living together.’”  That lead paragraph  packs in a lot euphemisms for what is left unsaid, that is, it’s about “young people having sex.”  Klemesrud (already carving out a reputation as the Times‘ most incisive reporter on women’s issues) reassuringly writes:  ”Some view an ‘arrangement’ as a necessary prelude to marriage; very few say it is primarily for sex.”   Students offered a long list of factors that led to their choice to live together: “birth control pills, alienation from parents, new liberal student housing rules, drugs, the love philosophy of the hippies, liberal-minded landlords, and the influence of such musicians as The Beatles and Bob Dylan.”

Sex and women’s rights

The issue might have gone away, dismissed with a little tsk-tsking about “those kids today,” had it not been for the ill-advised revelations made by one of the couples, here identified as “Susan and Peter,” a Barnard sophomore and a Columbia junior, both 20.  The article says that “Susan is supposed to be living in a dormitory,” but she had gotten a waiver because she told the school she was taking a (fake) job as live-in maid.  Barnard officials quickly tracked down the perpetrator — real name: Linda LeClair–and called her before the college’s judicial council, where she was charged with lying about her housing arrangements.  Meanwhile, LeClair had written letters in the school newspaper, arguing that women were being discriminated against, since Columbia men were not obliged to live on campus in single-sex dorms (the only kind of dorms there were in 1968).   The council found her guilty, but called for reconsidering the college’s housing regulation.  Her punishment was being banned from the school cafeteria.  The Barnard president, Martha Peterson, rejected the council’s decision as too mild, and put pressure on LeClair to drop out, which she eventually did.

Moralism and salaciousness

As historian Beth Bailey writes in her book Sex in the Heartland:  ”The media were quick to take up a story that offered such potential for twinned moralism and salaciousness.  And so LeClair’s conduct and her fate became the focus on what amounted to a national referendum on the sexual mores of the nation’s youth.”

“Linda LeClair, the issue”

Nearly two months after the Times story, LIFE carried a photo story about the same phenomenon, also called “The Arrangement.”  The  photo at the top of this post is the story’s title spread, and Linda and her boyfriend are depicted upper left.

It also included an interview with Linda, who said that, in the intervening weeks, she was finding it “hard to think of myself as a person any more.  I have ceased to exist.  I am Linda LeClair, the issue.”   The LIFE reporter writes: “A sexual anthropologist of some future century, analyzing . . .the artifacts of the American Sexual Revolution, may consider the case of Linda Le Clair and her boyfriend, Peter Behr, as a moment when the morality of an era changed.”

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A new breed of gay plays–and the 1968 ancestor

A front-page article in the New York Times on February 23, 2010, offered an analysis of “a new breed” of plays with gay themes, plays that present “gay characters in love stories, replacing the topical and political messages” of the 1980s and 1990s, and placing “the everyday concerns of Americans in a gay context.”  http://nyti.ms/cRU0MH Timely, I thought, since I was just about to add a post to “Covering 1968″ about Mart Crowley’s play The Boys in the Band–the granddaddy of all gay plays–which was first produced on the New York stage at Theatre Four on West 55th Street on April 14, 1968.

The Boys in the Band, cover, first edition, 1968

1968 becomes 2010

I’ve never seen the play or the 1970 movie version (directed by William Friedkin, who would direct The French Connection the following year), but I had just read the play for the first time.  I was going to write about how funny and smart it was, but also how incredibly dated it seemed, how it evoked as many cringes as laughs, and how I could not imagine it being revived in this day and age.  Wrong:  the very next day in the Times was a review (http://nyti.ms/b8pkEw) of a new production, staged in an actual penthouse apartment in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood (which, in 1968, was probably not called “Chelsea” and was certainly not fashionable or as gay as it is today).

Gay, off-Broadway, and a smash hit

The original off-Broadway production of The Boys in the Band was an undisputed hit, playing just over 1,000 performances before closing on September 6, 1970.  It was a period that encompassed the event known simply as “Stonewall”–the June 1969 police raid on the Stonewall bar in Greenwich Village and the subsequent nights of rioting, nearly universally recognized as the birth of the gay rights movement.   In retrospect, the period of triumph and celebration and some measure of acceptance that followed in the wake of Stonewall–an “era” that was in part symbolized by the success of this play in New York–was tragically brief.  By the early 1980s the gay male community was beginning to be engulfed by the horrors of the AIDS epidemic–which would eventually claim five of the original cast of The Boys in the Band.

Self-loathing as a way of life

“The “boys” of the play’s title are nine men, their names and ages and descriptions listed in the front of the play’s text (e.g., “Michael, thirty, average face, smartly groomed,” “Larry, twenty-nine, extremely handsome”), gathered in Michael’s fashionable New York apartment for a birthday party.  One of the guests is black, one is notably more outrageous and campy than the others (and gets most of the laugh lines), one is a “too pretty” street hustler (a “midnight Cowboy”) whose services have been bought as a birthday present; and one is ostensibly straight–Michael’s college roommate, Alan.  Except for Alan, the guests are described by Michael as “the same old tired fairies you’ve seen around since day one.”  The evening proceeds in ways that were familiar to anyone who had seen Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962) — lacerating, at times vicious humor, fueled by plenty of alcohol.  The language is mildly profane and scatological (mild in today’s terms, at least), and the many sexual references are couched in snarky innuendo.  At least two of the characters launch into speeches in which they “blame” their domineering, smothering mothers for making them gay.  The bitchy zingers fly fast and furious, but the ultimate impression one is left with is one where self-loathing seems to be a way of life. In the play’s most quoted line: “Show me a happy homosexual, and I’ll show you a gay corpse.”

A funhouse hall of mirrors

From Times theater critic Ben Brantley’s review of the 2010 production:  ”The feelings of entrapment enforce a sense of unhappy men trapped in personas that are either lies or exaggerations of qualities they may possess but also hold in contempt. They are also trapped, it seems, in a masochistic funhouse hall of mirrors in which they serve as one another’s unflattering, distorting reflections….  Audiences expecting a frolicsome the-way-we-were evening are advised to stay home. This time the boys of ‘Boys’ demand that you feel their pain.”

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Ladies Home Journal was not, to put it mildly, a political magazine.  Not in the 1960s, not now.

But for the first issue of 1968, that most “political” of years, the chief editors at Ladies Home Journal–every single one of them men, by the way–decided to take a different tack.  As the editor-in-chief, John Mack Carter, wrote in his “Dear Reader” column, this was because “there are more and more problems in our world and fewer and fewer answers– not only national and international problems, but increasing friction about community, family and personal matters.”  LHJ announced that each issue would “be consciously planned not only to entertain and inform you better than ever before, but to be used–to solve your problems, to help improve your life.”  Readers would be offered “the opportunity to participate in the making of each issue . . . to put you in touch with the triumphs and defeats of 13 million other Journal women.”  New features were added:  a “Journal Board of Experts,” who would answer readers’ questions.  The Board included personal finances advisor Sylvia Porter, TV journalist David Brinkley, psychologist Bruno Bettelheim, and etiquette maven Amy Vanderbilt.   A new monthly readers’ poll, “The Voice of Women,”  was begun, surveying thousands of readers by mail.

Reaching for relevance

The Journal was, in short, reaching for the most 1960s of goals:  Relevance.  Henceforth, the magazine would serve their readers in new, meaningful ways, to help them make sense of a world that–suddenly– seemed a lot more complicated.   Naturally, the covers would need to reflect this more engaged identity.  Ladies Home Journal “cover girls” in 1967 had been the usual lineup:  Mia Farrow, Jacqueline Kennedy (pre-Onassis), Twiggy and other fashion models, cute kids and Moms.  This one doesn’t feature a celebrity at all, but rather an unidentified woman in a sweater festooned with an array of slogan or campaign-type buttons.  The words announce the issue’s contents: an excerpt from Bobby Kennedy’s new book, To Seek a Newer World, which came out just before he entered the presidential race; a true story, “My Son is On LSD. Is Yours?”; an article by an obstetrician, writing under a pseudonym, confessing that he prescribes birth control pills for unmarried “girls”; and an article on how “We Can Close the Generation Gap.”  The new poll feature concludes that “We’re Scared of Our Kids,” revealing that “many parents are so tyrannized by their children that they are not altogether sure that adults are still running the world.”

A story in need of revision

My personal favorite story in this issue is an excerpt from a forthcoming (1968) biography of Charles A. Lindbergh, The Last Hero, by Walter S. Ross (one of many unauthorized biographies that had appeared since 1927, all of them despised by Lindbergh).   The introduction to the excerpt here says that Lindbergh–who turned 66 in 1968–was “scarred by tragedy [i.e., the kidnapping of his son in 1932], and retreated into a shell of secrecy.  Inside it, however, Lindbergh raised five children to be responsible, self-reliant young men and women.  To him, the Generation Gap was just another Atlantic–and he spanned it with an unusual mixture of fatherly love and iron discipline.”   The cover “button” that calls Lindbergh “America’s Most Remarkable Father” is richly ironic, of course, since we now know that the 1960s were exactly the years that Lindbergh was carrying on three separate extramarital affairs in Europe, and fathering no fewer than seven additional illegitimate children.   Remarkable.

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Cavalier:  A “hipper” Playboy?

Cavalier magazine began publication in 1952–a year before the first issue of Playboy, to which it is usually compared. By the 1960s, it was striving to be a hipper Playboy, something for the college guys, or the “lads” as they might be called today.  Like Playboy, Cavalier is still being published, though to judge by its website, it’s a lot raunchier today, more like plain old porn. But in the 1960s, there are serious articles, some of them by famous writers (in this issue, Leonard Feather writes about jazz); smutty cartoons, many of them with topical references to hippies and LSD; fashion spreads with pouty (male) models; advice columns (here the lads learn about making a proper cocktail); fiction; and profiles of up-and-coming “cavaliers” (in this issue, it’s artist Jamie Wyeth, at the time 21 years old).   And, oh, almost forgot:   there are photo spreads of bare-breasted women.  Everything–the articles, the fiction, the cartoon, the naked women– was down a notch or two from Playboy in terms of finish and quality.  (Did Playboy ever carry ads for life-size, inflatable “Instant Party Dolls”? I don’t know.)

What if JFK had lived?

Two interesting things about this particular issue:  a feature “If JFK Had Lived,” with illustrations and retouched photographs and a text speculating on JFK’s future after he survives the 1963 assassination “attempt” in Dallas. He is re-elected in 1964, and in January 1969 turns over the White House to his successor, Robert McNamara.  (Not a chance.) The magazine’s summer 1968 deadlines seem to have missed the big Kennedy news, since in the “news stories,” Bobby Kennedy is still living when JFK dies in June 2000.   (RFK had become Secretary of State under McNamara.)  Along with his brother, President Ted Kennedy, JFK celebrates the demolition of the Berlin Wall in 1980 (the prediction misses by 9 years), and JFK remarries in 1989, four years after the death of his first wife Jackie in a plane crash.

The Adventures of Fritz the Cat

The second feature of note is a three-page spread, the black-and-white comic strip, “The Adventures of Fritz,” by Robert Crumb.  ”Fritz the Cat” was one of the first “head” comic strips, written by and for people who were stoned.  (Crumb had, in fact, been experimenting with LSD just before publishing this series in Cavalier in 1968. )  Fritz is described in the strip as a “sophisticated, up-to-the-minute young feline college student” — just like the typical Cavalier reader, in other words.

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Couples: John Updike in 1968

A recent article in the New York Times Book Review about American male novelists and their fictional portrayals (or avoidance of portrayals) of sex had me returning to John Updike’s Couples.  (The NYTBR essay is by Katie Roiphe, and you can read it here: http://bit.ly/92OgMV)

A 1968 shocker

Born in 1932, John Updike died in January 2009.  By 1968, he had already gained a reputation as l’enfant terrible of American letters, on the strength of his first four novels, which included Rabbit, Run (1960) and The Centaur (1963).  But Couples was — like a lot of other things that happened in 1968– a real shocker.  It is filled with exceedingly graphic sex scenes, but since it’s Updike, the scenes are richly drawn, complicated, on a sentence level dazzling and satisfying, though ultimately kind of wearying, too.

What becomes of the “greatest generation”?

The novel is set in the village of Tarbox, outside Boston, during the years of the tragically brief Kennedy administration. There is so much detail about politics and current events at the endless cocktail parties you can almost date the chapters precisely:  the USS Thresher disaster; the death of the newborn Kennedy baby; and a lengthy, boozy, and irreverent party on the night of the JFK assassination.  The plot, such as it is, revolves around a set of 6 or 8 (I lost track) married couples– most of them in their 30s,  making them the tail end of the “greatest generation.”  Some of the men are World War II veterans; most of them are college-educated (including the women); and some of the men commute into Boston or Cambridge for work.  There are children, of course, but the adults don’t seem all that interested in them.

“A black mass of community sex.”

The milieu of Tarbox (widely assumed to be Updike’s Ipswich MA by another name) is not quite suburban, not exactly Revolutionary Road or The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit territory, but close, very close.    Television’s Mad Men comes to mind, though Updike has almost no interest in the work life of men and much more interest in fornication.  The title could well be “Coupling,” given the novel’s virtually un-mappable network of marital infidelities, all of them within the tight confines of “the group” of couples.  The affairs are supposedly clandestine, but it’s clear that “everyone” knows about everybody else’s business in this fishbowl.  As TIME magazine’s editors put it:   “The fact is that beneath this suburban idyl, Updike’s couples are caught up in a black mass of community sex.”

Couples– and the sensation it caused–landed Updike on the cover of TIME on April 26, 1968.  (Updike’s second TIME cover came in October 1982, after his third “Rabbit” novel, Rabbit is Rich, received the Pulitzer Prize.) The extent, the casualness, and the voraciousness of the dalliances truly astonished American readers–and, in fact, I was also more than a little incredulous.  ”This is my parents’ generation,” I thought to myself:  ”Was this really going on?”  (Probably not, I assumed: the class/religious differences probably meant that my parents’ circle of couples–Catholic, working-class, “traditional”–was more chaste.  But . . . doubts linger.)

Tarbox and the material world

There is such a wealth of period detail in Couples!  It’s as if Updike had set himself the task of delineating a precise place and time– the minutiae of household decor, of dress and hairstyles, of music (the couples play records and dance in their living rooms at parties).  The couples engage in tedious, often inebriated chit-chat about “the world” outside their world, which could mean the next suburb over, or another hemisphere away.  There is talk of the space race, the Cold War, and the barely audible sounds of conflict coming from Vietnam.  And then there is “the Pill,” which–they all acknowledge–has given “everyone” so much freedom to play around.

The novel’s timeline edges just into 1964, and thus misses the upheavals and notorious events of 1968.  Still, Couples still provides a remarkable “picture window” into the affluence, cynicism, and complacencies of the entire postwar era.

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Generation gap– a Sixties “meme”

Certain phrases migrate from being just a combination of words to something with a little more immortality.  Mundanely, we might call them “catchphrases.” Today we would probably call these virally spreading cultural nuggets ”memes.”  That word probably had little currency in the 1960s, but one of 1968’s most pervasive memes was “generation gap.”  It was the upheavals of the 1960s that gave rise to this term, if not the actual phenomenon, which had been around for centuries.  Sociologist Kenneth Keniston, in his influential 1968 study Young Radicals: Notes on Committed Youth, found his informants to be “hostile . . . to patterns of power and authority.” No lesser lights than Bruno Bettelheim, Erik Erikson, and Margaret Mead all produced social-psychological studies focusing on generational divides and challenges in this era.

Understanding the gap

Margaret Mead, in the book Culture and Commitment (subtitled “A Study in the Generation Gap”), based on a series of lectures in 1969, turned her anthropologist’s eye to the problem:  ”Today, nowhere in the world are there elders who know what children know, not matter how remote and simple the societies in which the children live. In the past there were always some elders who knew more than any children in terms of their experience of having grown up with a cultural system.  Today there are none.”  Classically, of course, young people define themselves in relation to—if not always in opposition to—the values of their parents’ generation. But the Sixties sharpened this process, compelling one to find a place on one side or the other of a yawning “generation gap.”

To be young again

A national obsession with youth and youthfulness and youthful rebellion was evident throughout the decade.  LIFE magazine, with this May 17 issue, was actually a little behind the curve in finding currency in this concept.  TIME, after all, had declared “Men and Women Under 25″ to be their “Persons of the Year” way back in January 1966.  LIFE’s hook was to document an actual gap, to publish the conflicting views of two men–Richard Lorber (age 20) and his uncle, Ernest Fladell (age 42), both New Yorkers, who decided to write a book together about their experiences when young Lorber moved in with his uncle in 1967.   That’s Lorber’s head on the cover, with his uncle pictured in his right eyeglass lens.  (Of course, it’s not surprising that LIFE’s choice for these stand-ins for “the gap” are both white males.)

Communicating across the gap–or not

The pair have some archetypal adventures together:  Richard turns Ernie on to pot; Ernie enjoys it, but Richard turns resentful when afterwards Ernie professes great insight into the drug’s appeal:  ”It is as if he had crashed a very private party I was having with myself.”   Richie and Ernie hook up with Richie’s friends in Greenwich Village (Ernie wants to meet a “few bona fide hippies”), and it gets a little weird with some girls they hang out with. (Ernie proclaims that “the so-called sexual revolution isn’t what it’s cracked up to be.”) They visit a few head shops in the East Village (e.g., the “Psychedelicatessan”).  They disagree–strongly–about the “Negro riots” which Richie sees as “the most hopeful sign I have seen in the past year;” he understands “exactly” how blacks have been “driven to violence.”  Ernie is appalled:  ”I don’t think he knows what he’s talking about.”  Richie and Ernie (a veteran of World War II) disagree on military service.  After Ernie’s draft board reclassifies him, he gets worried, and tells Ernie that he was “facing one of the most agonizing decisions of his life.”  Ernie says: “I went to war weak with fear but strong in pride. Richard has only fear.”

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The Decision, by Jules Feiffer.  Published in Playboy, November 1968

This is an addendum of sorts to the last post, which was a general summary of the November 1968 issue of Playboy.  The magazine always ran a lot of cartoons, most of them apparently chosen because they boosted the monthly quotient of pictures of bare-breasted women.  But this month, there was this rather extraordinary, full-page cartoon by the renowned Jules Feiffer.

A typical Feiffer male is shown packing a suitcase and leaving his wife, telling “Doris” (an intentional reference to that famously wholesome 1960s blonde, Doris Day?) that “marriage is not a natural state for a man,” that he feels his identity “softened, demeaned, eroded.”  ”A man has to feel– FREE!” he tells her.  And in the last panel, as he exits, he says: “I’m going back to Charles.”

Could this be the first gay-themed cartoon in Playboy?   And gay humor that’s not sniggering or demeaning or cruel?   Feiffer’s cartoon also has a thing or two to say about the state of masculinity, marriage, and heterosexuality, too.  But it’s the gay punchline that sticks.  Maybe it’s a sign that by 1968 gay sensibilities were beginning to find their way into mainstream, or at least heterosexual, Playboy or Esquire culture–although admittedly, Feiffer’s affluent, arch urbanites hardly constitute “mainstream.”  There were other milestones in gay cultural history this year, chief among them the phenomenally successful Broadway run of Mart Crowley’s The Boys in the Band, which opened in April 1968.  And a few months later, in June 1969, the streets of Greenwich Village would erupt in the Stonewall Riots, the iconic “premiere” of the gay rights movement.

If you’ve got suggestions for other signs of GLBT cultural life in 1968, please post a comment.

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