Dick Lesch’s Gui to Seventi Gay Slang | The New Yorker

Contents:

• REVIEW: 1970S GAY STREET FASHNS AND OTHER VTAGE DISVERI ‘PHOTOGRAPHY AND LANGUAGE’
• POIGNANT, EXUBERANT PHOTOS OF GAY LIFE THE ’70S — JT TIME FOR PRI
• DICK LESCH’S GUI TO SEVENTI GAY SLANG
• DISVERG THE “GAY LIFTYLE” THROUGH 1970S MAGAZ
• VTAGE GAY FASHN

REVIEW: 1970S GAY STREET FASHNS AND OTHER VTAGE DISVERI ‘PHOTOGRAPHY AND LANGUAGE’

)And while the nickname was ially pejorative, the clone perd marked perhaps the first time that gay men prented themselv wh a queer-signalg uniform that was a direct rponse to societal stereotyp. “The clone was a reactn to thgs you would see movi of gay men beg flty and nelly, ” says John Calendo, a wrer who lived LA and New York Cy throughout the 70s and 80s, and worked as an edor at the clone-cubatg sk mags Blueboy and In Touch for Men. ”) “That’s the kd of imagery”—backwards stereotyp that basilly villaized queer people—“that a lot of my generatn who beme the clone people grew up wh the ccible of the 60s, ” Calendo ntu, when the civil rights and gay liberatn movements were expandg ias of equaly and eedom.

POIGNANT, EXUBERANT PHOTOS OF GAY LIFE THE ’70S — JT TIME FOR PRI

Drsg like a clone, he says, was a rejectn of those olr gay ’s not so easy to ppot precisely who origated the clone ial, guys who were alive at the time ually brg up Al Parker, an adult film star turned producer and director who worked om the 70s to the early 90s. “The clone look was certaly about a whe gay man’s rponse and engagement wh those archetyp, ” says Ben Barry, the an of the school of fashn at the New School’s Parsons School of Dign, whose rearch foc on fashn’s relatnship to masculy, sexualy, and the body.

Amid the flurry of rabow-lan rporate logos, sponsored events and news ems about gay pengus, is difficult to turn on a televisn or set foot public durg June whout the remr that is Pri Month for LGBT and queer people. Gee Dudley, a photographer and artist who also served as the first director of New York Cy’s Llie-Lohman Mm of Gay and Lbian Art, documented scen om pri paras New York Cy om the late 1970s through the early ‘90s.

DICK LESCH’S GUI TO SEVENTI GAY SLANG

The years saw Ana Bryant’s homophobic csa through the “Save Our Children” mpaign 1977, the electn and assassatn of Harvey Milk 1978, and the Whe Night rts the followg summer after the lenient sentencg of Milk’s murrer, Dan Whe. “The guy a drs wh a beard, nng ont of the task force banner, ptur a lot of the atmosphere of the early gay liberatn muny, bee so much of me out of the hippie movement, ” says Saslow.

Sli 1 of 13, A ftg acpaniment to the NYC Pri celebratns around the cy this weekend, the Llie-Lohman Mm of Gay and Lbian Art on Wooster Street has an exhibn up this season centerg on a sgular era gay history: the post-Stonewall, pre-AIDS 1970s.

DISVERG THE “GAY LIFTYLE” THROUGH 1970S MAGAZ

But that didn’t stop the mastream om dismissg as a gay rag—skewered a 1993 Sefeld episo and the 2003 movie Zoolanr—even as the talog raked $100 ln at s height (mostly fueled by straight women buyg for their men) and h 3 ln hom wh quarterly 1986 vers.

Courty of ALL MAN: The Internatnal Male Story, © Brawn,, Internatnal Male never said was a gay publitn, but that “also speaks to the general tenncy of the fashn media to really mouflage, to some extent, their ntent, ” Filippello says. “[The imagery] would appeal to gay men, who then were able to vt their intifitns and their erotic fantasi those imag, ” Filippello ntu, “which the end beme part of queer cultural herage.

The doc tracks the way Internatnal Male shaped and reflected male body image, om the lanky look of the ’70s to the mcle-bound bodi of the ’80s and ’90s, which were a direct ntrast to the ail forms of dyg men durg the early days of the HIV and AIDS might be temptg to look back now, as we’re reexamg masculy this post-#MeToo culture, and assume that the staff was on some vert missn to advance gay rights, one paisley top at a time.

VTAGE GAY FASHN

Durg the ’80s and early-’90s heyday of male molg, the pany would hire mols h om Versace nways and logne ads (though some mols wouldn’t work wh Internatnal Male, sce was looked at as a “gay” brand).

’ ”At the time, though—and even more so when Burkard and others left, after the talog giant Hanover Direct purchased Internatnal Male, 1988, and tried to make mastream the ’90s—there was a tightrope walk when me to tryg to not “appear” gay. It was there that Vermazen first heard discsn of same-sex marriage—an outrageo thought at the time—and the first time he met the late Sheldon Anlson, the Universy of California’s first openly gay regent.

) And while the nickname was ially pejorative, the clone perd marked perhaps the first time that gay men prented themselv wh a queer-signalg uniform that was a direct rponse to societal stereotyp. ”In 1959, when Lesch was twenty-four, he left his fay home, Kentucky, for New York Cy, where he found work as a pater, a bartenr, a rator, a journalist, and as the unpaid print of the Mattache Society, one of the first gay-rights anizatns. When the Stonewall rts broke out, three years later, he was the only openly gay reporter on the scene, verg the event for a new gay-focsed magaze lled The a recent Friday eveng, Lesch’s buzzer rang.