taking advantage of today's good internet connection . . .

[kindkit]

. . . to say that I probably ought to be ashamed that my main reaction to these photos of British gay rights pioneers is, "damn, people were ugly in the 1970s."

Seriously. It's not just the, er, experimental clothes or the hideous stringy hippie hair. Their faces are lumpy and weird, even allowing for a bad camera and terrible lighting.

And this was the era when people were having lots of sex, all the time! I don't understand.

Comments

[lilacsigil]

I don't know, they look like regular people to me! Though the beards don't help.

[tree_and_leaf]

The beards are pretty disastrous. But other than that, I think they just look odd because of the harsh overhead lighting combined poor use of flash. They... look like a pretty normal selection of British people to me, and having just come back from the States, I don't think we are actually any more hideous than Americans.

[kindkit]

Yes you are! Americans are perfect and beautiful and blessed by God! LAND OF THE FREE AND SEXY! USA USA USA!

Okay, maybe not.

As for the photos, maybe it is just the trifecta of bad grooming, bad fashion, and bad photography that makes them look like a horror movie about a hill tribe of mutant cannibals. My reaction was probably not helped by the fact that this particular Tumblr usually depicts attractive people from less scruffy eras, creating a painful contrast.

[kiwisue]

I had to look, and look again, just to get my head back into that era - I was at university in NZ from 1973, so the styles are familiar, although I don't recall ever seeing anything quite like that massed assemblage of bad clothes/hair/fashion (Dunedin being rather more conservative than London). But having achieved the correct headspace orientation, I have to say they look pretty normal to me.

I think the pics were tumblerised (is that even a word?) from here: http://www.urban75.org/blog/the-brixton-fairies-and-the-south-london-gay-community-centre-brixton-1974-6/

You might be interested in this blog post about Gay News magazine, referenced in Pros episode "First Night": http://www.thestirrer.com.au/denis-lemon-gay-news/
The guy on the left of the Pride photo is now living in Melbourne and presenting on GLBTI community radio.

[kindkit]

Thanks for the links! I have no doubt that they were brave people doing important work, and probably perfectly normal-looking in earlier and later eras. It's just that the 1970s (early 1970s especially) cast a pall of ugliness over everything and everyone.

[surexit]

They seriously just look normal to me. The hair's not even that bad, tbh.

[kindkit]

You are kinder and more generous than I can manage to be about it.

[oursin]

Last year I went to an event at which someone spoke about being in the Brixton gay squats in the 70s, and how they held everything in common (it sounded like hell on earth to me, but that's me) - possibly one other agenda was getting past fetishing sexual attractiveness as conventionally constituted?

(Though, honestly, this pretty much looks normal for younger British men of the era.)

[kindkit]

It wouldn't entirely surprise me. I remember reading something about a gay men's commune (probably in the US) of the era in which there was supposed to be a sort of sexual communism, everybody having sex with everybody else. But quite unsurprisingly, people started to pair off in some cases, or in others to show a lot more interest in having sex with certain men than certain other men, and there were jealousies and hurt feelings and the whole thing collapsed. I think at some stage they may have attempted to make a sex rota to ensure no one got left out.

I was a young child in the early 1970s, so I don't have a context in which that kind of aesthetic is normal. Though I did date a man in college who would have fit right in to that photo (and this was in the late 1980s), so to the extent that I do have associations with the look, it's not "earnest young revolutionaries," it's "clueless middle-class boy telling me how much he wishes he were a lesbian."

[lilliburlero]

They look a lot like the hipsterish crowd here in Dublin... clothes and beards and all. I wonder if we're entering a period like the mid-19th or early 16th century where beards are a default male-grooming setting. I seem to see a lot of men with the straggly sort that results from needing quite a lot of length to obtain reasonable area coverage: it's an uncomfortable look, as if they'd be happier all round clean-shaven, but feel that they'd lose their counter-culture or intellectual credentials if they did.

[mergatrude]

If you watch movies from that era, or even the early eighties, the thing which strikes me is how everyone doesn't have perfectly white, perfectly even teeth. Or look at old music videos, or photos of 70s popstars. Women, at least, got to hide most flaws with makeup. *g*

I think our sense of aesthetics have been airbrushed and photoshopped to the point of ridiculousness.