BijouBlog

Lately I've been something of a social media maven for Bijouworld and its ancillaries, Bijou Video and the Bijou Theater. In addition to our Facebook,Twitter, and Tumblr sites, we just started a couple of Pinterest sites, Bijou Vintage Gay History, and Bijou Vintage Gay Erotica. Because we do specialize in vintage (or retro) gay sexuality, I've noticed we seem to be, I guess the term is, “trending.” 

And it's not just the usual older folks sitting on the porch, “I remember when” … I am thinking of the whole Mad Men cult, and even some short-lived show on TLC that featured women trying to live exactly like they were living in the 1950s (kind of like a retro Real Housewives!). 
 

It's like anything retro exudes some kind of fascination that I think goes beyond nostalgia. I wonder if it's because so much of the retro items we've been posting and repinning were lovingly created. It's not like someone just took a picture with a digital camera. These items, ranging from a late nineteenth century tobacco box, or even a magazine cover from a 1940s muscle magazine, show a real attention to detail and design. Imagine trying to create these items without today's technology. 

Here's a couple of images we either posted or repinned: 
 

I'm not saying that art becomes less than great because it's easier to make, but in the social media world, where a post can become ephemeral in one second, our retro images and movies can evoke beauty with a capital B in addition to hot with a small h.

Oh, there is a difference! 
 

Check out our pinterest sites for more retro items.

July 20th was the 45th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. I vaguely remember watching it on a black and white television set at my mother's urging, not realizing the import of what happened. 

Now, looking back in hindsight, I remember being fascinated with astronomy and science fiction UFOs and ancient aliens even at that early age, perhaps prefiguring my desire to escape the mundane world. I even told my parents, much to their horror, after watching the made-­for-­tv movie about the famous Betty and Barney Hill UFO abduction with Estelle Parsons and James Earl Jones that if a UFO descended, I would say, “Take me away!” 

And then I remember reading astronomy books from the 1950s which predicted by the year 2000 we would be living on Mars or Venus or in floating space colonies. (Hasn't happened ... and let's not get into flying cars on The Jetsons.) 

We've landed on the moon, one of the Voyagers is now outside the solar system, and there was an article about prediction by NASA that we will find alien life on planets with earth­like conditions in about twenty years. 

I've often wondered if such a discover may transform even further our views about sexuality. Now most sci fi sex (at least the type I remember) is pretty much pumped­up heterosexual sex in revealing costumes. Think Barbarella. Or Captain Kirk fucking every beautiful stacked cosmic computer priestess on the original Star Trek. 
 

And now that we are discovering that sexuality exists on a complex spectrum that doesn't conform to traditional or heteronormative gender binaries, perhaps we could hypothesize that life on other planets is just as diverse sexually. 
 

Could a planet's ecosystem have developed three sexes? Or perhaps like the sea horse, males carry children and give birth? Or, and this would really be breaking boundaries, perhaps one planet thrives on some kind of interspecies sex?

(Remember, that's how Spock came to be!)

In Greek mythology, Chronos, son of the god Uranus (essentially means “heaven” in Greek), castrated his father and threw his dick into the sea. Aphrodite, goddess of love, rose from the sea where Uranus's penis had fertilized the waters. So much for heavenly love, or filial love, for that matter. It's all about sex and power. 

In ancient Egyptian mythology, Typhon (also known as Seth, god of chaos) slew Osiris (dismembering him) and kept his dick as a souvenir.. To honor Osiris, his wife Isis mandated that the phallus be an object for worship. (Osiris did get put back together again. I wonder if they found the dick.) 

Early ads for poppers in the late 1960s called them "aromas." At that time, aromatherapy was little known outside of France.

In 1969, outfits like JacMasters began to sell vials or "inhalers" containing isobutyl nitrite, and the first brand name was trademarked: Locker Room. Isobutyl nitrate, or amyl, is the original popper formula.

During the 1970s, poppers or "aromas" were marketed like a sexual incense to gay men. Rather than inhale the newly popular “aromas” of patchouli or sandalwood, gay men could inhale locker room or armpit scent, the smell of hot, rough, uninhibited sex. 

Poppers had become so popular that, by 1977, The Wall Street Journal and Time Magazine claimed that the use of isobutyl nitrite as a recreational drug had become a substantial $50 million a year business.

And even more brands such Bolt, Hardware, Thrust, Quicksilver (not thunderbolt) were first introduced around 1977-78.

The Bijou started selling them around that time because the company (Great Lakes Products) that was making these poppers was renting space from us to manufacture their poppers These name brands were owned by Rush (someone named Joe Miller).

By the late 70s, the popularity of the drug even extended to straight men and women.

In the August 1979 issue of Playgirl, a "cautious" user's guide to drugs and sex reports that amyl nitrate intensifies orgasms but also smells like glue. The article reports that amyl was banned by the FDA and replaced by butyl, "which smells like old tennis shoes and is sold as a 'room deodorizer.'"

Old tennis shoes? Could be quite stimulating in certain situations, depending on your fetish.  And that smell certainly does evoke the locker room, literally!

Some of the ads appealed to icons of masculinity: the traditional statue of David, harking back to pre-Stonewall gay bars, and the then-popular gay macho images of leathermen and cowboy.

The ubiquitous popper Rush was able to advertise in a plethora of gay publications; one famous add shows a giant bottle of “Rush” hovering over the “rush hour” of a city, which, in those days, didn't take place at the dusk of 5 p.m., but rather, in the late night and early morning hours (as implied in the image of the city) when the bathhouses and gay porn theaters were hopping.

The popper bottle and the potent aroma one inhaled from it essentially powerfully rules from above but also, because it it releases an enveloping aroma, binds together the collective gay sexual culture represented by the titles of  gay magazines (as well as straight, looking at some of the magazine titles in the ad) of that time together. It was more than a powerful tool or symbol of sexual liberation; it became sexual liberation itself.

As the seventies progressed, the popper ads in gay magazines became more creative and catered to a variety of sexual tastes in this era of sexual liberation. For example, the ad for JacMasters in a 1976 Drummer Magazine shown below seems both campy and erotic.

The bulging jockstrap on one of the action figures harks back to the physique magazines like Physique Pictorial. Yet the hand holding what vaguely looks like a bottle by the logo probably represents a handjob. Big bottle equals big cock. Inhaling the aroma will make your cock big and hard. Or even like a giant cock to the little men holding the big bottle of aroma!

And the imagery of fighting and bullets (in the ad above, the guys look like little G.I. Joes) often found in the ads featuring poppers was most telling; at one level, it fed into the archetypal sex-death trope, but it also could be read in hindsight as a frightening prefiguration of AIDS, when sex literally caused death. And now the gigantic brown bottle over the city in the Rush ad now becomes something a bomb or a missile.

 In the 80s, the AIDS epidemic swept away the sexually-charged gay culture of the 70s that created and responded to the popper ads, but poppers themselves went underground (unfortunately, in many cases, in fake, or non-amyl, formats). The mainstream gay press, because of the possible connection between HIV and the use of nitrate, eventually stopped running ads for poppers, but not after a struggle.

According to one source, “before the first official reports of AIDS in 1981, relatively few voices in the gay community had been raised to question what health problems poppers users might be causing themselves. A few attempts were made to curb sales, but the manufacturers always got around it by changing either the chemical formula or the product name. And the gay press, dependent on revenue from ads, did not care to blow the whistle on its own advertiser.”

Frighteningly, information linking popper use to karposi's sarcoma was apparently suppressed by both the gay media (because of the power of the advertisers) and by the right wing press, which of course saw AIDS as a deserved punishment for promiscuity.

The FDA at first stood aside; as long as poppers were marketed as “room perfume for fags,” they would do nothing.

And one popper manufacturer even sent a letter to all the gay papers, reminding them just who was "the largest advertiser in the Gay press."

Then, upon the instigation of some activists and researchers in the mid-eighties, Congress passed a law outlawing the original amyl nitrate formulas; now the major ingredient is butyl.

There are numerous poppers being distributed under different names, and most people have their favorites: for example, Rush and Brown Bottle are old standbys for most people who first buy poppers (not taking away from long-time users that only like these brands); as time went on, people graduated to other brands.

Regarding false types of poppers,  for example, Can Opener, Private Stock, Platinum, and others, are truth are the same formula as Brown Bottle, but in different packaging, done to deceive people. Other current brands such D&E, Nitro, Zap, Man Scent, and Mr. Wonderful, will give people headaches; their manufacturers produce them to make money, not caring about quality and the intended purpose of the product.

About three years ago, the outfit that made the popper brand Rush was raised by the police. Supposedly, Joe Miller, the long-time manufacturer, committed suicide (this cause of death cannot be verified).

Six months ago, the story was circulating that someone had bought out the company. The outfit was back again selling its authentic product.

Will poppers ever become as “poppular” as they were in the 70s and 80s? As activities that were once part of the sexual underground become more mainstream in the 21^st century, perhaps poppers in their true form will become once again become an exciting but now safe part of our diverse sexual culture.

 

Flahback to election 2012: the Republican presidential candidate, Mitt Romney, is a Mormon. 

In fact, he is some type of elder in the church. Those facts had proved to be controversial, but the Mormon Church had previously created controversy by supporting Proposition 8 in California.

Now the church has supposedly lessened (slightly) its anti-gay stance by supporting a Salt Lake City ordinance barring housing and workplace discrimination based on sexual orientation. 

Why is this? What do the Mormons believe about homosexuality? Perhaps a magazine published by gay Mormons (yes, they exist!) can give us some insight.