We watched this last night while eating supper at the kitchen bar. I'm sure many of my truckbuddies will recall thumbing though those catalogs as M.P. and I did in the 70's. It wasn't nearly as good as Playgirl, but sometimes it was all you had to dream on.
Bonus: In this a local news report on West Hollywood in 1980, you will get a glimpse of the International Male store there. I never knew they had an actual store building.
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| The best tool is the one that fits all your needs. |
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| Watch the continuous live stream from Westminster Hall without commentary via Sky News here. |
I hadn't planned to run a series of gay documentaries on the Blue Truck, but I guess YouTube finally figured out that I am gay and is now pushing a lot of these in front of me. This one is an HBO documentary, first aired in May 1984: a very different time for gay people. Video quality is not great, but it's watchable, and still relevant to our experience in many ways.
By the way, the gay man in the screen shot below, identified only as Tom in this video, was Dr. Tom Waddell, founder of the Gay Games.
For the record: In 1984, President Reagan was starting his fourth year in office, the word condom had never been said on television, and the AIDS crisis was a growing menace, still largely occurring in the big, far-away cities. What we had heard about it down here was damn scary, but what caused it and what to do about it were still uncertain. There were no antiviral treatments, so the diagnosis was a death sentence. The term safe sex was not yet in common parlance. Rock Hudson's diagnosis was not made public until a year later, a few months before he died.
If you want to revisit the plague era, here's a compilation of gay-related clips from the NBC news archives spanning the whole decade. In some ways, it was a very different era; in others, not so much, maybe. We still have to deal with the haters and the homophobes, who nowadays are constantly inflamed by social media and fanatical "news" channels - but at least for now, the law is on our side. I sure hope it stays that way.
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The battle for LGBTQ rights hasn't only been fought on the streets of coastal cities; it has also taken place on the dirt roads, campuses, and in the homes of rural America. In this new short documentary‚ released 50 years after the Stonewall riots, which brought LGBTQ rights into the national consciousness‚ gay men living in central Tennessee, and their families, share stories of struggle and self-acceptance. We meet the retiree who spent his entire professional life in the closet, his devoted partner of 20 years, a pastor determined to overcome his own prejudices, and the pastor's gay son, newly in love and just starting to come into his own.
The location is Centerville, Tennessee, about 60 miles southwest of Nashville; Nashville is the home of Vanderbilt University, a large, prestigious private college.
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| A photograph released today of the Queen with two of her ponies, exemplifying her love of horses. |
Her Majesty's lifelong devotion to duty and service to her people, as well as to the other 53 nations of the Commonwealth around the world, are beyond the measure of human acclaim. Your Head Trucker can add only his humble admiration, and wishes for her every happiness.
God Save the Queen.
Bonus: For a comprehensive, behind-the-scenes look at the Queen's public and private life, I highly recommend the BBC's beautifully done Elizabeth R, filmed in 1990-91 with Her Majesty's full cooperation - before the unpleasant events of the annus horribilis:
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The other day, I just happened to come across this chilling, eye-opening documentary, which shows how easily American elections can be - and have been - stolen, ought to be required viewing for all Americans. (Caution: may be anxiety-producing.)
Ever since the dawn of the Digital Age more than 20 years ago, your Head Trucker has always thought that electronic voting machines and ballot-counting machines are simply and obviously an invitation to electoral fraud, and furthermore, that the only verifiable voting method is by paper ballot. It takes no technical expertise to see that, only common sense.
I am gratified to see that some experts are now - just three weeks before the election - speaking out and saying these very things I have been saying to anyone who would listen all these many years. (See links below.)
Programmable, hackable machines should never have been used to record or count votes in any election. And it's far too late now to change the system for this year's election. I expect many challenges on both sides to the initial returns, and who knows how long it will be until the nation has a bona fide tally of the votes in all states. We are used to knowing the winner by the next morning at the latest - but these are not normal times.
Be that as it may, we have to do what we can do, and not worry about what we can't. Because if we don't vote, the result is certain, and abominable.
NBC News: How to Make the Election Trustworthy, 10/13/20
PBS News Hour: What Election Officials Think about Paper Ballots and Voting Machines, 10/14/20
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A few days ago, I came across this bit of doggerel, which I never heard before, in the comments on a different YouTube video:
Hard times create strong men;
Strong men create good times;
Good times create weak men;
Weak men create hard times.
I have no idea who said it first, and no doubt it would raise some people's hackles, but there is a good bit of truth there. And it does chime with insights of my own I've had over the years but never bothered to press into words. It did occur to me years ago that the comforts and conveniences of modern life have made us, collectively, softer, less hardy, and less resilient than our ancestors were, in a number of ways.
I have often thought of how very different the modern world and my own life are from the world my grandparents were born into, and the hardscrabble lives they led growing up on small farms deep in the backwoods, in a time before electric lights, telephones, or motor cars. I remember their stories of the old days, when daily life was so very different from what I took for granted in the suburbs of the mid-twentieth century.
In a poetic sense, their memories have merged with mine, now that I am an old man too, and so I can look back in my mind's eye to the latter decades of the Victorian era, and see the broad sweep of time, the vast movements of ideas and technology that have carried us far from that other world that seems so tranquil in retrospect. It was actually full of alarums and excursions, as every age is - but there is a difference between a gently simmering pot, and one that is boiling over, as ours is today.
Perhaps another time I'll write more about that, but suffice it to say that from childhood on up, my grandparents took in their stride difficulties and discomforts that would leave us modern folks bewildered, wailing, and weeping now - that was already true in the 1960s, and much more so today. And I long ago realized that it was very good for my grandparents' character to learn how to meet difficulties with hard work and quiet determination at an early age, as flopping down in front of the TV set or whiling away a sunny afternoon with a pile of comic books was not very good for mine, perhaps.
But I wish now that a little more had been asked of me sometimes, in some ways. One's muscles grow only when they are exercised; the same is true of one's character and abilities. My fond parents made few demands on me - it was just an unspoken assumption that I would be a good and decent person, and fortunately for them, I pretty much was, with only a few minor childhood peccadillos along the way. (Little gay boys usually are very well-behaved youngsters - have you noticed? I wonder why that is.)
The only thing they really insisted upon was my getting a good education - "They can't take that away from you," they and all my older relations used to say, and so I did exert myself as far as I could go in that direction. And when all was said and done, what I learned is summed up very nicely in the first chapter of Ecclesiastes; but that belongs to another post.
And yet, while higher education may be a worthy goal, it is not the end-all and be-all of life. Some things cannot be learned from books, and when the divine reckoning is made, mayhap not a few simple people in humble circumstances may exceed in glory all the scholars of the world, if their characters here below were sturdy and rightly directed.
Gregory Peck, along with Jimmy Stewart, Gary Cooper, and others we could name, often portrayed characters who seemed to embody the best of American manhood - honest and hard-working, decent and determined, self-effacing men of ordinary abilities who believed so much in something greater than themselves that they somehow revealed the extraordinary nobility of the common man: the imago dei.
Of course it may be said that these fellows we admire so much were merely acting out certain roles, not living them, and that is true. But even so, their artistic pretense serves to remind us all of the Something More that is always calling us higher: Lift up your hearts. And we timorous humans, weak and faltering and greedy as we are, do need frequent reminding.
This is a long-winded intro to a fascinating documentary I hope my truckbuddies will enjoy as much as I have - a mix of film clips and the actor himself answering questions from an audience about his life and work. Much more interesting - and dare I say, uplifting - than the nightly news. Give it a try.
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