YES. I’m 100% with you on this.

This is a teevee show you’re talking about?

Hum, my sister is going to Vassar.

Wow, Amanda, spot on.  I quibble with whoever said the European guy was Russian when he clearly wasn’t.  The guys are called the “Smiths” and I’d hope that if he had a spanish accent we wouldn’t assume he’s Mexican

Also, I think people assume they can figure you out based on your musical and artistic tastes across the board - whether you like modern or classical art, indie rock, pop, hip hop etc.  I assume you just listed those because those are your tastes and people assume they can figure you out because of them.  But have you ever found yourself thinking you’ve got someone figured out because they only listen to top 40 or only enjoy classical european painting?  Just sayin’

Anyways, I’m in a nitpicky mood - awesome post.

“Lesbian” was a code word, as was “Sapphic”. They were an attempt to hide from uneducated people that women might be sexually attracted to each other. Funny thing is that Sappho also wrote about sexual desire between men and women. Things were different back then. Most men and women were expected to have a few same sex relationships even though they married and had children.

While the ancient Greeks were pretty cool with same-sex activity, this didn’t transtlate into liberation for women, they had a tough lot in the old days: No vote and few property rights. While homophobia and anti-feminism are strongly connected today, it was not always thus.

Great defense! I especially like the note about Betty being a reader.

One small note: Betty is actually supposed to be a bad cook. I recently watched Mad Men season 1 & 2 with commentary (all the episodes, all the commentaries - I work from home and like to have TV on) and Matt Weiner and January Jones mentioned, multiple times, that Betty is not supposed to be a good cook - she’s a bad cook. I think that’s part of how she doesn’t fit into the housewife mold.

Henry Holland: Just read a history of lesbianism in the 20th century. Most people’s grasp of homosexuality was not sophisticated, but most people knew what it was - esp. those at women’s colleges. This is largely because they were taught to fear it and root it out, so again - not sophisticated. But they knew what it was.

Addendum to comment above: “Just read a history…” was not meant to be a command, but rather “I just read a history…”

It might have made sense for Betty to make the lesbian crack in the mid-70s, but frankly, as one of the few on this board alive and sentient in 1962, it was jarring as an anachronism.

My sister, who asked for trucks instead of dolls for Christmas, was called a “tomboy,” even after she requested a set of bar bells at 9 (around 1962), and my father compromised by giving her a punching bag.

Everybody thought it was cute that she was such a “tomboy.” (She worked out on that bag every day after school, AND played sandlot football with the local boys, and still the word “lesbian” never came up.) Our aunt had been a “tomboy,” too, married and had a child (more the Salvatore Romano type) so…

The even more boyish-looking next door neighbor’s daughter who, after boarding school, went to work in a factory doing something mechanical, was also referred to as a tomboy — at least, before the mid ’70s when she began living with a woman old enough to be her mother.

Of course, both my sister and the neighbor grew up to be lesbians, but I believe the word was rarely used in a family situations (even in an ironic fashion, by a graduate of the Ivy League.)

Our neighbors with the “tomboy” daughter were Ivy League graduates, with the husband also as a raging alcoholic.

In the summer, when all the windows were open and he’d be lit, we could hear him scream and berate his wife endlessly, using every curse word imaginable — and yet, I never heard the word “lesbian” once.

Didn’t berate his wife for the “lesbian” daughter — believe me, he hit every other note imaginable for berating one’s wife, but that word never came up.

And yes, there were lesbians in ‘60s fiction (I read The Group when it came out), but I don’t remember the lesbian/tools connection in any of ‘em.  I believe, the stereotype of lesbians and tools was more a ‘70s thing, after the Stonewall riots and the Gay Liberation when enough lesbians had come out of the closet to inspire the stereotype.

Oh and please, yessssssssssssss I know not all tomboys grow up to be lesbians.

But I read The Group and a shit load of other ‘60s books (including some pulp fiction of the day) with lesbian characters and it never occurred to me that my sister might be a lesbian until she came out in the mid-70s.

Again, Betty’s lesbian crack would have been more likely to have been made in the ‘70s than the early ‘60s, no matter how sophisticated, well-educated or well-bred.

Yes, Draper is the classic cheating husband who is secretly in love with his wife.  His condescension toward her and the tomcatting he does is to compensate for his deep fear that if his identity is exposed, she will see that he’s not good enough for her.

Henry-

I actually read a brilliant history of lesbianism in literature back in the 1700s in England and it basically showed how for a literate women in those times, it wasn’t fully hidden and the basic terminology to describe women-loving both in positive and negative connotations was being formed by at least the 1800s and by late 1800s it should have been widespread enough to be known of in the basics.

So someone being basically literate to the term in the 1960s should be perfectly common.

But you are right in that it wouldn’t be a good bet that that would translate to any form of sane translation to what the term meant. Thus someone might know that some people were “that way” and that the words gay or lesbian or queer referred to those “free spirit degenerates”, yet think that meant all forms of moral perversion or evil.

I see it as similar to transsexuality during the 90s or even a little today, where people are literate to its existence and the basics of what it means, but the majority of people assume it means something akin to the Jerry Springer stereotypes or a slightly more upscale drag queens.

I just rewatched that particular scene again and remembered something else from my queer history readings. Lesbian used to be a default term for women who were non-gender conformist, basically people believed lesbians were women who wanted to be guys and do guy things and that the sleeping with women part was just what happened when you got confused about roles and started thinking you had a right to a sexuality.

Betty uses the term absolutely correctly in that context. So yeah, not anachronistic.

Good character assessment. Betty’s whole life has been one bait-and-switch after another perpetrated by men, followed by a struggle to get some sort of refund on what she was promised anyhow. Even Bryn Mawr was intended by her father to “finish” her for marriage rather than to educate her. The marriage to Don, as you observe, is another example. And all she has to hang onto are the books (and you’re right, they always make a point of showing her reading in bed and during her downtime).

No wonder she’s so bitter and resentful and cold—when a strong-willed and smart person claws back those scraps from those to whom she’s pledged herself under false pretenses, she’s gonna make sure to leave some scratches when the opportunity presents itself.

I love the Betty Draper character - and she’s no bimbo!  She’s smart, well-educated and is trying to do the best she can with the cards she’s been dealt.

She’s been gutsy - her flirtation with a fellow rider, kicking her philandering husband out, her abortion discussion with her doctor (so painful because he insists she’s in the financial position to have another child - as if she’s a child), her quickie in the bar storeroom…

Amanda, your Mad Men blogging puts my piddling efforts to shame.  Great work—and very nice linking of Betty to The Group.  I’ll bet the rent that the show’s writers are familiar with it.  Just two things:

the dark joke of the show is that Don keeps cheating on Betty with intelligent, sophisticated women, and he doesn’t realize that Betty would be the kind of woman he finds exciting if he didn’t oppress her and make her feel small all the time

Yes yes yes.  And moreover, his first two flings are Jewish—the bohemian artist from way out yonder in Brooklyn (long before Bklyn was cool) and Miss Mencken. 

The only time you see Don pick up a literary work is when pressed to

I think you’re mistaken about this.  He picks up O’Hara’s Meditations in an Emergency because he’s sincerely interested in what that Hipster at the Diner is reading, and because—despite his organization-man demeanor, telling the Brooklyn bohemians to “make something” of themselves—he’s genuinely curious about their work.  As you pointed out in that other post, Don is going to be one of the vehicles by which Madison Avenue co-opts the counterculture.  He’s also an artist in his own right, albeit in the creative-corporate mold, which makes it all the more regrettable that he can’t see how smart and savvy Betty really is.

Don met Betty while she was working as a model in Manhattan and Europe.  He’s attracted to educated, sophisticated women (probably in part because his own sophisticated background is fake), and I get the impression that Betty fit that mold when they met.

It’s telling that when Betty finally blows up at Don in the second season, it’s over the Heineken incident.  It seems like a minor issue compared to some of the other shitty things Don has done to her (she’s pretty much known all along that he cheats on her), but apparently Betty is very sensitive to being treated like she’s stupid.  She knows she’s smart and educated, but she probably worries that her sheltered suburban life is making her dumber.

Thanks for bringing up The Group; it was the first thing I thought of when I saw people claiming that women in the early ‘60s wouldn’t know the word “lesbian.”  The stereotype of women’s colleges as a breeding ground for lesbianism was comfortably in place by the 1950s, an era when there was a backlash against women going to college in general, and Betty, as a Bryn Mawr girl, would have been familiar with both the rumors and the truth.

I’m way behind on “Mad Men” (like the first two seasons), but this reminded me why, as I get older, Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate looks more and more like a tragic heroine.  She’s a smart, sophisticated, still beautiful woman who’s trapped in a marriage with a shallow boor.  The only entertainment she gets is seducing boys just out of high school, because at least they don’t treat her like she’s stupid.

There’s a reason why the camera focuses on Anne Bancroft’s face when Dustin Hoffman’s character tries to make conversation after sex and she says she hates art.  “What did you major in in college?”  She says, “Art history.”  Basically, she got knocked up in college and it ruined the rest of her life.  Oh, not financially—the family is clearly rich.  But it ruined her as a person.

Michael: Fair enough on the “Meditations” reference, but I don’t know.  Don only picks it up because that beatnik shamed him, telling him he wouldn’t get it. When Don hooks up with Joy and she’s reading The Sound and the Fury, he’s pretty disinterested, and, if I recall correctly, doesn’t know who Faulkner is.  Betty would have never made that mistake.

That said, the O’Hara situation is ambiguous.  He picks it up on a dare, but is genuinely intrigued.  He clearly gets it, or I feel that his read that his fake ex-wife would relate to O’Hara is correct.  From my point of view, the contrast between O’Hara and Don is extreme, and not just because of cultural differences, but just the honesty gap. 

I think Don’s contribution to the Madison Avenue takeover of the counterculture is going to be his hiring and mentoring of Peggy, though.  She is going to be the best copywriter at Sterling & Cooper, and the reason is going to be that she’s got a wide-eyed love of the new directions the culture is moving.

Living in NYC in the early 60’s, Betty might’ve caught this movie, even if in a cut form:

French director Roger Vadim’s Et mourir de plaisir (literally And to die of pleasure, but actually shown in England as Blood and Roses, 1960) is based on Carmilla and is considered one of the greatest of the vampire genre. The Vadim film thoroughly explores the lesbian implications behind Carmilla’s selection of victims, and boasts cinematography by Claude Renoir. The film’s lesbian eroticism was however significantly cut for its US release.

Which is kinda like the theater owner who shortened showings of The Sound of Music by cutting out all the musical numbers, but you get the point.

When I still have to edumacate people that no, being a man-loving-man has nothing to do with whether my mom was strong and dad was weak or whether I was molested as a child (!!), I think you give far to much credit.

Let me be clear: They didn’t understand homosexuality in the early 60s.  That was probably the height of pop psychological explanations for everything, and I have no doubt that people in the 60s thought lesbianism was the result of penis envy or whatever. 

But that they didn’t get the “why” of it doesn’t mean that they denied the reality of it.  The existence of homosexuals wasn’t in question.  Not in New York in the 1960s.  As far as I can tell, there wasn’t even a whiff of the current dialogue about how it’s a “lifestyle” or a “choice”, in part because there wasn’t enough of a gay rights movement to shift the dialogue into that shell game.

Or to be more succinct: The question wasn’t was there homosexuality, the question was whether or not they were a group that deserved rights.

Some of the discourse on this show implies that this stuff happened a lot longer ago than it did.  When I was a child, I was closer in time and in historical relativity to 1962 than I was to 2009.  When I was born, 1962 was only 15 years in the past, but 1977 is now 32 years in the past.

From reading interviews with Ann Bannon and other authors of lesbian pulp fiction from the 60’s, it was my understanding that those paperbacks were sold right in everyday drugstores and were popular, titillating reading. If you’ve seen the covers (usually of two women in bra and slip, one looking particularly lecherous) it’s very clear what they’re about. I wasn’t around then but I thought “Lesbian” was a pretty clear concept. My mom went to a women’s college in that timeframe where it was a common joke.

Mnemosyne - totally with you on The Graduate. I get so annoyed when I hear people reduce Mrs. Robinson to a boozy predator because the film makes it pretty obvious that this is a lonely person with complex motivations for her actions. Ann Bancroft was so phenomenal in that role and was easily the most interesting character in the film.

One of my favorite of Roger Ebert’s reviews is his review of the rerelease of “The Graduate”: “Seen today, ‘The Graduate’ is a movie about a young man of limited interest, who gets a chance to sleep with the ranking babe in his neighborhood, and throws it away in order to marry her dorky daughter.”

Don actually tears the last page out of Faulkner’s novel . It made me cringe when he did it. No book lover would ever do that…

He’s like the people who snarl at fans of modern art or indie rock, assuming that because they can predict your taste means that they’ve got your figured out, and that there’s no real substance to your tastes.  In reality, they’re just covering up for their own limitations, and Don is an expert at covering up his own limitations.

Sounds very much like the snobby older relatives and some upper-east sider high school classmates who felt classical music/jazz are the definitive musical genres for sophisticated intellectual elites and that everything else was rubbish for the uneducated peons. 

Real ironic when I encountered and befriended conservatory majors who told me that that snobbishness was not only a sign of assholishness as I felt, but oftentimes…a way for them to pretend they are one of the “sophisticated cultural elite” when they are not. 

Nowadays, love it when I confound people who found I cannot be easily labeled or judged by musical tastes,....or predict them by my mannerisms. 

“Seen today, ‘The Graduate’ is a movie about a young man of limited interest, who gets a chance to sleep with the ranking babe in his neighborhood, and throws it away in order to marry her dorky daughter.”

I’m wondering how much of this is also to stroke the egos of the boomer generation at the expense of the teen/young adult characters who could now be seen as stand-ins for the “inferior” Gen X and millenials considering how the boomers are now closer in age to Mrs. Robinson than her daughter or Dustin Hoffman’s character than their youth when many of them rallied to statements like “Don’t trust anyone over 30”. 

The bimbo thing comes from the first season, I think, when she was trying so hard to BE the perfect “mom,” and really acting out the vapidity of that role. She couldn’t do it, because of all the things Amanda brings up, and if that wasn’t clear in the first season, it certainly is given the later seasons.

That was my take-away from the parking lot scene with the neighbor kid. She needed an Other so very, very desperately, and she was trying to find it through her role as a mom and the people available to her. “I don’t really know what fifteen minutes is” was the climax of the arc, utter defeat in her attempt to be that person.

Since, she has gotten a lot less patient with the kids, she’s finding activities for herself, she’s socializing and developing a sexual identity that isn’t dependent on Don. But season one was a lot of her trying very, very hard to be a bimbo.

Good for you, exholt.  But I fail to see how dismissing modern art as “something my kids could paint” or telling yourself that hipster-types don’t really like what they say they like isn’t the most snobby form of snobbery their is, and a lazy one at that, one that revels in being hidebound.

Also, you’d be surprised how un-unique having varied tastes is. I think I have them.  One week I’m into indie pop, the next all I want to listen to is funk, etc.

In the 60s my sister was friends with a plain-looking girl with a pretty sister. I had a crush on the sister (imagine a grown-up version of a Betsy-Wetsy doll). until my sister kindly told me she was a lesbian. Her plain friend was straight. So maybe judy, like me, simply lacked gaydar back then.

Their mother was literally beautiful, by the way, breathtaking even in her forties.

Amanda:

Don only picks it up because that beatnik shamed him, telling him he wouldn’t get it.

True dat.  But he does want to get it, and he not only gets it—he sends a copy to Anna, the “original” Mrs. Draper.  Which reminds me that his friendship with Mrs. Draper is one of the better things about him.  That and his visiting Peggy in the hospital.

Back to the main topic:  Erving Goffman’s Stigma was published in 1963, and Mad Men follows it almost to the letter.  Who is stigmatized?  Well, pretty much everyone who’s not a heterosexual white guy.  Dark-skinned folks, check.  Divorced women, check.  Unmarried women over 30, check.  (Joan gets engaged to that creepy rapist fellow largely because someone pinned her driver’s license—and her age—to the office bulletin board.)  And homosexuals, double check.  Everyone knew they existed, and certainly in New York in 1962.  But actually saying, “I love the man and not the woman” in public?  Completely unheard of.  And when the Russian’s friend and colleague says something about how no one should be surprised that there are gay men in the ad business, Cosgrove—for all his cosmopolitanism and general OK-ness—is shocked and disgusted.  Which made me sad for Sal.  And as I’m sure everyone knows, homosexuality would continue to be classified as a mental illness for another eleven years….

But I fail to see how dismissing modern art as “something my kids could paint” or telling yourself that hipster-types don’t really like what they say they like isn’t the most snobby form of snobbery their is, and a lazy one at that, one that revels in being hidebound.

Amanda,

I may not have been very clear, but I am agreeing with you as the classical/jazz musical snobs from the upper-east siders and older relatives IME are very much like those snobs you mentioned who dismiss modern art, indie rock, or anything else that does not fit their notions of “sophisticated taste”. 

Also, you’d be surprised how un-unique having varied tastes is. I think I have them.  One week I’m into indie pop, the next all I want to listen to is funk, etc.

Outside of those conservatory majors and an extreme few college classmates, most people IME tend to only listen to a a few genres and dismiss the possibility one could find good music outside of their preferred genres.  This is regardless of whether the individual concerned loves disco/80’s, punk, classical/jazz, rap, metal, R&B;, folk, country, etc. 

Heck, I’ve seen people enter into heated arguments and even blows over perceived “slights” over their favored genres because someone dared point out that their preferred genres are not the only ones where one can find good music.  And that’s only sticking to music in the US/Western world.

Okay, let me explain again from a “I was there” prospective: I’d read The Group by high school, and much younger those pulpy paper backs with “lesbians” and so was aware there was such as thing, as were adults.

But the word, “lesbian” wasn’t bandied about in 1962, especially not in a family situation. What we think of now as stereotypically “lesbian” “mannish” behavior was referred to as “tomboy,” without the link to lesbianism.

Even in fiction, pulp or otherwise, the stereotype of lesbians as tool users, lovers appeared in none of the lit I read in the ‘60s.

In The Group, Lacey is just that, “feminine” beautiful, not butch. She’s lacy, get it? The Children’s Hour, other than Shirley McLaine’s pixie haircut, nope, not noticeably butch.

The lesbian as butch turned up in the Killing of Sister George (1968) an English film, but still no tool use.

Again, from one who was there, with a gay sister (and as it turned out) a gay brother, reading all the popular literature Betty is presumed to have (and then some), I can categorically state that Betty’s crack might have been made in the ‘70s—but was unlikely to the point of improbable in the early ‘60s, no matter how “sophisticated” or “Ivy League” her character.

As for my not having gaydar back in the day—that’s the point, NO ONE had gaydar, then.

It would take a severly swishy guy to come up on the radar, but again, what would be now be considered stereotypical lesbian behavior in a girl (my 8-9 year old sister working out on a punching bag everyday after school, her truck toys, playing sandlot football, etc.) was laughed off genially as “tomboy.”

judibrowni:

Again, from one who was there, with a gay sister (and as it turned out) a gay brother, reading all the popular literature Betty is presumed to have (and then some), I can categorically state that Betty’s crack might have been made in the ‘70s—but was unlikely to the point of improbable in the early ‘60s, no matter how “sophisticated” or “Ivy League” her character.

I would agree that Sally wouldn’t know what the word Lesbian meant.  That may have actually been the point, like spelling a word in front of a toddler.

It would also be sending a message to Don that she’s not sexually parochial.

Jesus Christ on a cracker—I can understand that those who didn’t live through the early 1960s may misinterpret them through a distortion of the decades they have experienced, but why the fuck are you people so damn thick you don’t accept eyewitness testimony?

No less someone who has lived through the whole arc of time, including the decades that are your only reference.

Sally isn’t in the room when the character Betty uses the word “Lesbian” and “sexually parochial” or not isn’t on the table—since an actual Betty wouldn’t have uttered either part of that sentence in the early ‘60s: the word “Lesbian” or the stereotype of lesbians using tools.

“Tomboy” and tools, yes. Because tools were considered mannish, and little girls who did boy things were innocently considered “tomboys.”

The lesbian connection simply wasn’t being made in ordinary life, no matter the lesbians in literature (lit lesbians who also weren’t being portrayed in the butch stereotype, just yet.)

Sigh.

I did not see that episode of Mad Men. The two tomboys I grew up with turned out to be straight—rather emphatically so in one case.

Thanks for asking, wrongside, my diatribe above was written before your post and not directed at you.

I was 10 in 1960, and 12 in 1962: but perhaps preternaturally aware of both race and gender issues in that era for a variety of reasons.

Mad Men gets the window dressing right on target (clothes, furnishings), and usually is spot on for both race and gender issues.

The roles women and people of color were expected to play were the straightjackets Mad Men portrays, with disasterous results for individuals.

There were exceptions, of course (Peggy rising through the secretarial pool to copywriter), but they were the exception, not the rule.

(There were no “negroes” for a good 50 miles from where I lived in a leafy suburb of New Jersey, but my mother made it a point to find a nice middle-class black “lady high up in the Girl Scout organization” to befriend.  Although using the word “black” here is anachronistic, would have been considered rude in the period.)

My mother had risen up through the ranks at the local unemployment office during World War II through dint of hard work and high scores on civil service exams “to run the place” only to be displaced by returning servicemen, and after marriage, forbidden to work 9-5 by my father.

Really.

In general, the only professions expected for women in the early 1960s were secretary, teacher, nurse—no higher (maybe, supervisor of a grade school.)

The lower-ranked pink-collar jobs also excluded women from the higher-paid blue collar professions.

I wrote an earlier post on the accuracy of what we would consider the sexual harrassment of the Mad Men period, gauged from my experience as I butted up against the middle-aged dinosaurs still trying to enforce the old rules when I entered the workforce in the ‘70s:

(http://pandagon.net/index.php/site/comments/mad_men_extravaganza/site/comments#146764)

Also: Betty’s visits to the psychiatrist, and the psychiatrist reporting to Don, are uncomfortably close to my mother’s experiences then:

http://www.lippsisters.com/2009/06/26/mothers-little-helper/comment-page-1/#comment-40167
http://www.lippsisters.com/2009/06/26/mothers-little-helper/comment-page-1/#comment-40640

In general, Mad Men gets more right than wrong, closer than almost any other movie or TV show I’ve seen, about that particular period.

As I wrote earlier, yessssssssssssssssssssssssssssss many “tomboys” grow up to be straight—in fact, that was the assumptions pre-1970s period, in every case.

Although both cases I’m most familiar with grew up to be lesbians, the tool-using, butch “masculine” Lesbian stereotype didn’t gain popular traction until sometime in the 1970s.

Which, again, is why Betty’s crack is anachronistic.

That’s another thing Mad Men usually, otherwise, seems gets right: attitudes toward homosexuality in the period.

Sal deep in the closet, marrying, etc.

I don’t find it incredible that a woman who went to Bryn Mawr and traveled in Europe in the early 60’s would’ve known the word Lesbian.

The character Betty may well have known the word “Lesbian” (even at 12 I did, in a culture that did not discuss homosexuality with the easiness that it comes up in the news and popular conversation of today.)

But Betty would. not. have . used. it. in. that. particular. sentence. in. that. way. in. 1962. (Read my previous comments through the thread for the reasons, if you don’t want to take my word for it, in general.)

The word “Lesbian” also wasn’t bandied about, especially in a jocular way, in the early ‘60s.

One reason the word “lesbian” wasn’t bandied about in the 1950s and early ‘60s, although homosexuals were being portrayed in books and films, was the usually negative way in which it was portrayed.

There had been an easing of obscenity laws in the 1950s, but portrayals of homosexuality may have been out-of-the closet but routinely portrayed as “shocking” or “perverse,” or with generally a tragic outcome to the lives of homosexuals.

For instance, in Tennessee Williams “Suddenly, Last Summer” whose homosexual character has been murdered by the boys he preyed on, the lesbian who committs suicide at the end of The Children’s Hour, and so on and so forth.

In The Group, that’s the “shocking” denouement: Lacey is a lesbian. Although, unlike many of the fictional homosexuals of the period, she isn’t killed off for her sin—possibly because this fiction was highly autobiographical, and McCarthy unusually outspoken and realistic about sexual matters in that period. And no, I’m not saying McCarthy was a lesbian, but it’s generally acknowledged that The Group is noted for “its complex mixture of autobiography and fiction,” so McCarthy more likely to write the reality of at least one lesbian life.)

So, again, unlikely that Betty would joke about her daughter being a lesbian.

You were, by your own admission, 12 years old in 1962, so it’s unlikely that you’re an expert on adult conversation of that day.

Oh have it your way Dark Avenger: I wasn’t a precocious child (who wasn’t only reading Tolstoy by 12, but the pulp fiction of the day studded with “lesbians”); I didn’t see films portraying homosexuality back in the day on TV, I didn’t have to hear my Ivy League neighbor scream every imprecation at his wife and child over a period of years, BUT the word “lesbian;” I didn’t grow up with a brother and sister who would come out as gay in the ‘70s, so I of course I also didn’t see the attitudes toward homosexuality change in the culture over a period of decades.

I bow to your greater wisdom of the past, although you weren’t there, all I know is shit.

You win. Now shut the fuck up.

Ooops, sorry I meant to write that I wasn’t reading Tolstoy by 10 years old, actually, along with a melange of serious fiction on a variety of subjects, including homosexuality.

Nope, not me.

Oh and by the by, although Tennessee Williams was homosexual himself, he kills off his major homosexual character in a particularly gruesome way: as sliced up and eaten by the boys he’s solicited.

Okay, that character may be portrayed as a pedophile, but back in the day, there were virtually no positive (or even naturalistic) portrayals of homosexuality in fiction, film, nor, of course, television. (Bar the fussy, slightly swishy Uncle Tom-ish character who is never named as a homosexual.)

At best, homosexuality was a presented as a “shocking” aberration (The Group) but homosexuals were usually portrayed as tragic figures.

And again, no tool-box lesbian stereotype, even in the considerable pulp fiction I’ve read from the period—that is still at least, a decade or more way in time.

Sorry, but it could be possible that Betty had experience of actual lesbians at either Bryn Mawr or in Europe who didn’t had a tragic relationship(s) or other experiences that mirrored the fiction of the day.

Of course, let’s remember E.M. Forsters’ Maurice, which didn’t have tragic homosexuals, and as a result, couldn’t have been published in the writers’ life time, but which he showed to Gore Vidal after the latters’ The City and the Pillar came out, which didn’t have the ‘tragic homosexual stereotype, and which therefore made Vidal a target of hostility for refusing to play the game, as it were.

From the Wiki:

The novel is remarkable for its time in describing same-sex love in a non-condemnatory way. Forster resisted publication because of public and legal attitudes to homosexuality — a note found on the manuscript read: “Publishable, but worth it?”. Forster was particularly keen that his novel should have a happy ending, but knew that this would make the book too controversial.[1] However, by the time he died, British attitudes and law had changed.

BTW, I was acting in small parts on stage when I was 8 years old, including Shakespear monologs, and I was reading Science fiction as well, but I wouldn’t presume to be an expert on all topics and words used in adult conversation of that time.

As I said, the preponderance of homosexual characters were portrayed as tragic, perverse, etc., in the 1950s and early ‘60s fiction, plays, etc.—just as the preponderance of evidence I’ve offered on this thread, rather than just the one point, is the reason it’s unlikely Betty Draper would utter that sentence, jokingly.

Gore Vidal had family money and standing, and a popular hit or two under his belt. He was remarkably above the fray at the time.

Maurice wasn’t published until the 1970s, but the picture it gives of homosexual life earlier in the century includes the damning silence about homosexuality, except in the negative: ie, the arrest of one of the friends, such a shaming (and criminal) event that it pushes Maurice’s first love into marriage with a woman.

It’s telling that Foster wouldn’t (or couldn’t) publish it even in the 1960s, with its’ happy ending.

I’ve also read on other blogs discussing this subject, that there may have been homosexual lives on campus in the 1950s and early ‘60s, but it’s was viewed so negatively, even in the Ivy League, to the point that students were expelled, professors in the closet. (as in “Rubyfruit Jungle,” for instance.)

But in that previous thread, I believe the commentor mentioned something to the effect that McCarthyism had infected the Ivy League to the point of witchhunts of homosexuality there.
Don’t have time to research it at the moment.

Again, not a joking matter.

Gore Vidal had family money and standing, and a popular hit or two under his belt. He was remarkably above the fray at the time.

Actually, he had no money from his earnings as a writer by then and he had no ‘hits’, which is why he wrote three mystery novels under the pseudonym “Edgar Box”, as well as writing screenplays for television productions and plays when his novels didn’t sell well due to the hubbub generated by TCATP.

just as the preponderance of evidence I’ve offered on this thread, rather than just the one point, is the reason it’s unlikely Betty Draper would utter that sentence, jokingly.

It’s telling that Foster wouldn’t (or couldn’t) publish it even in the 1960s, with its’ happy ending.

Yes, that indicates what was preferred in fiction, not that fiction mirrored the reality of that time.

I’ve also read on other blogs discussing this subject, that there may have been homosexual lives on campus in the 1950s and early ‘60s, but it’s was viewed so negatively, even in the Ivy League, to the point that students were expelled, professors in the closet. (as in “Rubyfruit Jungle,” for instance.)

Of course, her European experience might’ve included meeting people who knew Alice B Tolkas and Gertrude Stein,  which certainly wasn’t a closeted relationship or tragic, for that matter.

As for your suggestion to “shut the fuck up”, that’s a good way to demonstrate you’re in favor of dialog and debate, not one-sided “Believe me or else” approach to things.

Several Ivy/Seven Sister purges of faculty and students occurred over the years, a well-known example being that of an English prof. Arvin Newton at Smith College, circa 1960-1961.

judybrowni, I don’t see how someone saying that you, at age 12, wouldn’t have had the definitive view of the limits of what could have happened in any household in the early 60s anywhere, is an insult.

Just because the family you were in and the families you knew didn’t use the word “Lesbian” doesn’t mean some suburban housewife might not.  Having a gay sister and brother doesn’t make you an expert in every adult’s beliefs and behavior.  Most people <> no one.

Lesbian pulp novels of the fifties featured “butch” characters who were portrayed as trying to be men.  It’s not in any way odd to think that a well-read and curious (and sexually frustrated!) woman who went to a women’s college in the 1950s might be familiar with that concept, and might use it to try to shock or surprise her husband.

Hello!  I followed a link from Twitter and am thrilled to see people discussing The Group (which my Women’s Writing students at my Australian university will be reading for the next three weeks.)

I’ve got the book very fresh in my mind so a couple of points about it:  Elinor Eastlake is nicknamed Lakey, not Laci, though she is seen by the other group members as gorgeously femme.  In part that’s something the novel seems to agree with, and in part it’s coloured by their envious perception that she’s gotten even more chic while they’ve gotten dowdier, with motherhood and work and so forth.

I also think the Group’s thunderstruck recognition that Lakey is a capital-L Lesbian is actually a sign of their cluelessness or perhaps innocence about homosexuality, because they way they understand it, Lakey is a lesbian and therefore her companion Maria is her ‘man.’ They read the relationship entirely within the framework of heterosexuality.

I’ve always thought it was an interesting move on McCarthy’s part to put in this very, very faux revelation right at the end of the book - sort of a decoy bombshell?  The real closeted homosexual in the novel is Kay’s husband, Harald.

Lucytartan, I haven’t read the book, but I think now I will.  It seems a treasure trove of midcentury attitudes about sex.

I had an opportunity to buy a cache of lesbian pulp novels at an estate sale, but didn’t, and have been kicking myself ever since (probably 15 years ago!).  The family hid it under a blanket.