400: Gay Bar 1: Shel Silverstein

Gay bars and discos are an opportunity to show a whole load of homosexuals in one place. What do they do? How do they behave together? What do they drink and how do they dress? If one homosexual is funny, then surely a whole mass of them should be a scream. Bearing in mind that for the longest time a gay bar was a barely legal venue, only operating under sufferance because of organised crime backhanders, with the patrons still subject to sudden arrest by cops and prosecution resulting in loss of their jobs and social shame. Fun times.

from “Silverstein in Greenwich Village”
Shel Silverstein
“Playboy”, September 1960

So here are some contemporary denizens who huddle together in the modern metropolis. Like knows like because they have overly styled, lengthy hair, expressive eyes with long lashes or eyebrows for men. Sensitive features and postures. An earring on the bartender. At least one patron looks as though he’s eying up another across the bar.

The gag in the cartoon is a reverse with the unexpected interposition of heterosexuality.

The psychiatrist is also a 1960s touch, particularly since it seems almost every, or at least every other, gay man of the time was seeing a shrink to try and deal with his sexuality.

To put this bar in some sort of context: “The New York Times” ran a lengthy feature , “Life on W. 42d St. A Study in Decay.” by Milton Bracker on 14 March, 1960. A large part of this “decay” is devoted to the homosexual presence on Times Square and 42nd Street. The reporter details encountering such homosexuals as “a Negro who wore fluffed up hair and heavy black make-up on his brows and lashes” and a "a white youth with thick blond hair and handsome features who wore makeup on his eyebrows" who "spoke effeminately and shifted his hips and legs as he spoke." Disgraceful. Worse may be a heterosexual “youth in a black jacket and tapered trousers” who listened to “‘nothing but rock’n’roll’” and considered “homosexuals … ‘nice people.’” He should know better. Amidst all the sex cinemas there’s also the Jewel Box Review – with "25 Boys and 1 girl – Astounding Deception!!!" it was a drag show. Drag will play a big part in the forthcoming depictions of gay bars in the 60s and 70s.

379: Golden Chestnuts I

A small selection of jokes which will stand in for all the other occasions when cartoonists and humorists have used the same joke. Not that they’re employing the same joke because they’re necessarily plagiarising each other, or because it’s a simple cliché. But because certain themes and phrases provoke the same reaction, and hence the same joke crops up. So these are intended to be early examples of jokes which are relatively flogged to death over the succeeding decades, since each time the perpetrator thought he was having some ingenious new comic idea. But there is little that is new under the sun.


from “Shel Silverstein in London”
in “Playboy” June 1967

This is the earliest instance of a recurring English joke. And it’s in “Playboy”, an American magazine. Here it has a certain freshness, because it’s contemporary with the subject of the joke, homosexual legalisation in the UK in 1967.

The joke, in its most common form:
A man is emigrating from England. He’s asked why he’s leaving. He replies, “At one time homosexuality was illegal, then it became tolerated, now it’s legal. Blimey, I’m leaving before it becomes compulsory!”

Normally it’s used by slightly bigoted people, and had some frequency in the ‘70s and ‘80s. Trotted out for slightly nostalgic effect nowadays. Here, in just about the earliest instances I can find in print, Silverstein puts it in the mouth of a gay man, which rather heightens the militant effect of the joke.

121: Shel Silverstein on Fire Island

in “Playboy”, August 1965

I (slightly) take back some of my more perfervid declarations about “Playboy” and accusations of a general unwillingness to feature homosexuality at all in its pages (maybe it’s a prejudice on my part against tits everywhere). In 1964 Playboy explicitly adopted a policy of gay-rights, so this cartoon appears in the aftermath of that change of editorial attitude.

Shel Silverstein has such a diverse career as children’s author, songwriter and humorist that it can be forgotten that he was one of the defining spirits of the first decade of “Playboy”. His cartoons in their own comic manner exemplified the hip, modern, worldly pleasure-loving American male ethos that Hefner was trying to represent and foster.

This was a late instalment in Shel Silverstein’s cartoon travelogues. They began appearing quite early in “Playboy”. Silverstein, made himself an actor in the cartoons, thereby giving them a different and maybe slightly complicated viewpoint as to where the humour lay: in the scene, its observer or some third combination of the two. Silverstein became a slightly naïve citizen of the world, as he and the cartoons explore different and exotic cultures and scenes. The cartoons lampoon and deflate the expectations of the tourist, humanising the apparently foreign, yet for comic effect they ring new changes on those same foreign and cultural stereotypes. From travelling the world, Silverstein turned to exploring outposts of an America which had started to ‘swing’, and its new subcultures of beatniks, nudists, hippies and, in this instance, homosexuals.

Luckily today, the introduction cannot be read as mocking of homosexuals themselves. It does, however, play up a slightly shrill panic for humorous effect. And a couple of Silverstein’s own jokes in the piece are about his suddenly discovering that he is being flirted with from some unexpected corner. Which is what takes it out of the usual ”Playboy” comfort zone. There is some irony in this, since as “Playboy” cartoons, this series often featured Silverstein on the make with the native colour, laced with satirical overtones about sex and culture.

Like other pieces I’ve seen from the 60s, there is a tendency for “fagot” to be spelt with only one “g”. Go figure why?

The cartoon about rough trade and this particular type of self-loathing masochistic relationship is probably more of its time than now.

The travelogue makes the expected jokes about gay men/drag queens being women or just confused as to whether they want to be women, but Shel has the good grace to place these in the context of dialogues where he admits that he is also confused

The statement on bottom of the first page could probably have been made anytime in last forty years. And there has often been a slightly self-comforting prissy argument that being homosexual satisfies some desire to be separate and special (- this becomes a big point of debate during debates in the 70s about the homosexual community and what a fight for equality means)