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

[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."