BijouBlog

I remember when I was growing up in the seventies talk of streaking; and given the penchant of pubescent boys of lying about physical (and sexual) exploits, several of my classmates claimed to have streaked. I'm pretty sure their only streaking may have been running wet and dripping from the shower to their bedrooms. 

But given my sheltered upbringing, I knew nothing of the legendary Robert Opel Academy Awards streaking incident, not that the Academy Awards was forbidden television viewing in a household which banned Maude because the character had an abortion. 

(Little did the Catholic household I grew up in know that streaking occurs in the Bible See Mark 14:50-52 for the famous naked youth in the Garden of Gethsemane; also go here for more information. Of course, the blog urges one to run from temptation. I would rather run toward it.) 

According to Leigh Rutledge in The Gay Decades: 

“April 2, 1974 Having inexplicably fascinated the nation for roughly six months, the fad of “streaking” reaches its apogee with gay photographer and former advertising executive Robert Opel, thirty-eight, plunges naked across the stage during a live broadcast of the Academy Awards ceremony in Los Angeles. Opel's “streak,” almost certainly the most witnessed stunt of its kind, occurs during the most popular part of the telecast, the announcement of the award for Best Picture, thus guaranteeing him an estimated audience of more than one billion television viewers worldwide.” 
 

Yes, this really happened; here's a link to the true story. 

But there's more, and it's even more shocking. 

Robert Opel was murdered by an intruder at his art gallery who demanded drugs and money in 1979. Opel was famous for publicizing the works of gay artists Robert Mapplethorpe and Tom of Finland. 

Opel was a well-known leatherman as well. 
 

His nephew -- Robert Oppel -- created a documentary aiming to find out exactly what happened. 

The film, Uncle Bob (now on DVD), is an innovative fantasia filled with vintage clips, interviews, and segments with the young Oppel playing at being his uncle while re-creating his filmmaking, his TV appearances, and even his bloody death. 

Streaking, leather, nude young men in the Bible, the Oscars: what a gay combination! 

If you've been following the LGBT media in particular, you've undoubtedly heard for some time about the Fascist-style scapegoating of LGBT persons in Russia by forbidding “gay propaganda” that supports “non-traditional sexual relations,” pretty much an excuse for police state tactics ranging from censorship to house searching to arbitrary arrests of protestors beaten up by homophobic thugs. 

In the early stages of their power, the Nazis burned books and shut down museums that showed “decadent art” (like Picasso and the Bauhaus school). They left one modern art museum open on the third floor of ramshackle building, according to James Shirer in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, to show how offensive it was in comparison to the official state art; the lines were so long to get in that the Minister of Culture had to, much to his embarrassment, shut it down! 
 

The decadent art of Putin's Nazi-style Russia is exemplified by the now infamous “Putin in Women's Underwear” painting by artist Konstantin Altunin.

Altunin's painting was seized by the Russian police from the “Museum of Power” gallery in St Petersburg for breaking unspecified laws. 
 

The police also removed from the gallery, housed in two rooms of a flat in the city, a picture depicting the head of the Russian Orthodox Church with his torso covered in tattoos, and two artworks mocking anti-gay lawmakers Vitaly Milonov and Yelena Mizulina. 

St. Petersburg deputy mayor Vitaly Mironov, who features in a further painting where his face is merged with the rainbow flag of the gay rights movement, said that the pictures were inappropriate and “of a distinctly pornographic character." How is a rainbow pornographic? 

Gallery owner Alexander Donskoy said as well as seizing paintings, the police also shut down his gallery and offered no explanation for their acts. 

The parallels here to the Nazi regime are obvious, but what's even more disturbing is Altunin's fate. Like most exiled artists of the past, he found refuge in Paris.

But he's not lounging around in cafes sipping cafe au lait or hobnobbing with gallery owners by the Seine; according to his wife Elena (who still lives in Russia with their young daughter), he is living rough on the streets. 

There are so many issues of serious concern here, but I do wonder if boycotting vodka and the Winter Olympics or a presidential reprimand of the dictator's policies is going to ease up on the oppression. There's a strong contingent of Westerners (mostly those holy haters) who support Putin's policies.

And despite outcries from popular celebrities like Lady Gaga and others, the average fan may pay lip service to the endorsements, but he or she is more concerned with the latest song. Social media both aids and harms the cause (the antigay thugs in Russian are using the Internet to lure unsuspecting gay victims to beat and kill). 

Many people these days don't know about the St. Louis, a ship that carried 900 Jewish people ostensibly to asylum in Cuba in the 1930s as part of a Nazi propaganda campaign to show that the government was willing to take care of the “Jewish problem” in a humane way. The Nazis knew full well, however, that neither Cuba nor, if Cuba refused them, the United States would accept them. The ship had to turn back, but luckily France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and the Britain took the exiles in. This incident has been called by many “The Voyage of the Damned.” 
 

Would the United States (or any Western country) be willing to do the same if Putin wanted to dispose of his current scapegoat en masse in the same way? That's the question all citizens of the West need to wrestle with.

The answer might not be a resounding yes, even in a time where all forms of pluralism, including sexual, are becoming the norm.

Now, at one point in the movie, Reverend Mother guilt-trips the girls into entertaining one day during the holiday season the residents of what appears to be a women-only old folks home with “refreshments, songs, and readings.” Hayley aka Mary Clancy and her partner in mayhem Rachel are actually cooperating for a change. 

Then Mary sees Mother Superior comforting an elderly woman who is weeping. Her family will not be able to come to see her for Christmas. The woman feels slighted, perhaps because she gave them everything when they were young (nothing was too much), why can't they come see her? I have gifts for them she laments. But it's not just that she is laying on selfish guilt. She feels unwanted, useless. Why? Because she can't give to them. 
 

The Mother Superior perhaps senses this feeling. But she challenges the woman to give her family one more gift. “Be happy!” she gently commands. “Put on a pretty face and come down to the party!” 

Now, I think there's more going on here then that old trope of the clown smiling through the tears like Pagliacci, which could be tied into that stereotype of the closeted gay man “covering” because of individual and social rejection. The flamboyance and the wit and the camp supposedly conceal a deep hurt and self-hate. 
 

For the holy haters, being gay means not being happy or even capable of happiness. That a gay person is somehow broken or incomplete. Some like the British romance novelist Norah Lofts in her book Queens of England have even claimed that the word gay, which can still mean happy, “has been debased” (how ironic, given the title of her book). 

Now that gays are out and proud and can “come down to the party” without hiding, both stereotypes are offensive and insulting. But when you hear Mary Clancy's angry response (she, like many others, misses the point) to the scene, “I hope I die wealthy!” I wonder if there's something here that a gay person (or any person) can connect to. 

Giving is not just giving gifts or money or affection or prayers as objects. Giving is giving the self as a subject, without expecting an object in return. The total person, gay or straight or transgender or bi-curious ad infinitum is a gift, and by simply gifting himself to others (coming down to the party), he loses his feeling of being unwanted; his sense of self is no longer determined by what he quantitatively does for others or by what others do to him. Voila! Happiness. 

So be happy and be gay! Live, live, live! Life's a banquet, and too many poor suckers are starving to death! (Well, Auntie Mame was wealthy, but that's beside the point here!) 
 

 

 

I was in grade school and then high school for the last four years of the decade, pretty much insulated in the segregated Western suburbs of Chicago from the “big bad city” where undesirables (anyone not white, straight, or Catholic) preyed on young white Catholic school kids. 

Little did I know (and this is mostly anecdotal evidence) that guys in the burgeoning “gay ghettos” at that time were enjoying lots of sex, and not just inside, but outside. Now, they had been having public sex from some time, and the risks of arrest were still there, but … One person I know told me about several encounters between men that inevitably resulted in sex. A glance … a look at the crotch … constant cruising. My friend made it seem that these “quick tricks” were par for the course. I've heard stories about sex in and on trucks, sex in hardware stores, sex at the YMCA (all you needed to do was leave your door open) … was life really like a porn movie at that time? 
 

Not that sexual liberation was confined to the gay community or other countercultural movements. The Baby Boomers who were gradually settling down in the suburban subdivisions (mostly white upper middle class couples with money and leisure time) were experimenting with “swinging.” I read recently on the Huffington Post about swinging parties: 

Long before car keys were collected at parties from those who drank too much, suburban swingers in the 1970s collected them for a different reason. As they entered the party, the men would deposit their car keys in a bowl by the front door. On the way out, the women would fish a set of keys from the bowl and that's who they'd go home with. 

(Not exactly, it seems, an even power exchange; why are the women “fishing out” the men's keys, and not vice versa?) 

Everyone, it seems, was looking for Mr. Goodbar, but Mr. Goodbar wasn't necessarily someone you would marry and procreate with. 
 

And now that the gay community was evolving socially into something close to what people like me who came out later became, social structures resembling a heterosexual norm (such as marriage) were not just questioned, but even rejected. In fact, the leaders of the Gay Liberation Front in New York said in July 1969, "We expose the institution of marriage as one of the most insidious and basic sustainers of the system. The family is the microcosm of oppression.” 
 

Gay pride parades resembled militant marches. Life in the urban gay communities was focused on bathhouses, at that time veritable “sex palaces,” bars, adult movie theaters, discos, campy cabarets, and a handful of accepting churches and community organizations. Gay macho (think the Brawny paper towel guy) was in. The total look was big, in your face and in your crotch: big boots, big hair, big moustaches. Out, loud, and proud! 
 

But outside these islands of what seemed to be nonstop partying, just blocks away from the long lines to get into the Bijou Theater in Chicago, one could still be fired for being gay. Gay sex between consenting adults was still a criminal offense in many states. The American Psychiatric Association's proclamation that homosexuality was not an illness was still comparatively new and not generally accepted by large segments of the population. The holy haters like Anita Bryant and others in what would become the Religious Right Movement were slowly gaining political and social power. 
 

 

Being out, loud, and proud outside of the urban gay enclaves could mean social rejection and even death. 

And in the next decade, gay sex itself became a death sentence as the AIDS epidemic swept over these communities still fighting for survival.