The Way It Was

From The Advocate via Joe.My.God:  the 1967 CBS Reports:  The Homosexuals.

Homo = pervert = sick = dirty = disgusting = miserable = doomed:  this was the world I grew up in and remember so vividly.  The attitudes and prejudice and total condemnation that drove a lot of guys to suicide, and deeply wounded those of us who survived - wounds that still hurt and still deeply affect our lives all these years later. 

I didn't see this show when it was first broadcast, and that's probably a good thing, but I do have a memory from just a couple of years later that I want to share with you.

When my father died unexpectedly in my junior year of high school, an older lady I'd never met before, some friend of the family, started a conversation with me at the viewing.  She pulled a photograph out of her purse and said, "This is my grandson, we just buried him a few months ago.  He killed himself with a shotgun in his car one night.  Look at his picture:  he was such a handsome young man, smart, athletic, popular.  I just can't understand why he would do a thing like that.  Can you?"  I suppose because I was nearly the same age as her grandson, she perhaps hoped I would have some younger-generation insight into this unfathomable mystery that obviously grieved her deeply.

I looked at the photo, his senior portrait:  yes, a smiling, goodlooking guy with wavy blondish hair, neatly dressed in sport jacket and tie, the kind of guy who might have been elected class president or won a scholarship to an Ivy League school.  The kind of guy who would have been popular in school, who could have had lots of friends, and plenty of girls lined up to date him.  I had to tell her no, I couldn't understand it, either.

But years later, I remembered:  and it flashed on me.  What if he was gay?  And then it all made sense:  the fatal sense of guilt, the inward shame, the disgust with one's self, the need to hide and pretend, the unanswered prayers, the hopelessness.  The knowing that you would never be what everyone thought, what everyone expected you to be.  The despair.  The unremitting pain.  The one way out.

There was no hope for small-town guys back then.  Do watch this and learn just what the world was like for us gays not so long ago, just in my lifetime; and notice that some straight people's minds have not moved one inch forward in the forty-three years since then.



Some quotes from Mike Wallace:

“The average homosexual, if there be such, isn’t interested in or capable of a lasting relationship like that of a heterosexual marriage. His life, his love life, consists of series of chance encounters in the clubs and bars he inhabits, and on the streets.”
“Homosexuality is, in fact, a mental illness.”
“The church has a great deal of sympathy for those who are handicapped in this way.”
“[Being a homosexual] automatically rules out that [the man in question] will remain happy.”

The men (no mention of lesbians is ever made) who aren’t on camera as representatives of fledgling gay rights groups at the time, like the Mattachine Society, are interviewed in shadow or behind plants, and say things like, “I know I’m sick inside . . . immature.” And then comes the segment on a 1955 homosexual witch hunt in Boise, Idaho, one that apparently turned the whole town upside down with fear and paranoia, with a close-up of an op-ed piece in the Boise newspaper titled “Crush the Monster.”

On a related note:  here's a trailer for the 2006 documentary The Fall of '55, about the Boise witch hunt:



It's available from TLAvideo here.