THE HOWDY CLUB A lesbian bar on 3rd Street in the Village. Club was open from the 1930s-1940s. (Above picture - Howdy Club’s football team, circa 1940)
Mattachine Society Inc, of New York 1966 (Poster reads: Homosexuals are different…. but… we believe they have the right to be. We believe that the civil rights and human dignity of homosexuals are as precious as those of any other citizen… we believe that the homosexual has the right to live, work and participate in a free society. Mattachine defends the rights of homosexuals and tries to create a climate of understanding and acceptance.)
August 1942. "Inspecting thousands of drills each day, women employed by a large Midwest drill and tool company must learn to detect the tiniest flaw in these vital machine accessories. Republic Drill and Tool Co., Chicago." Medium format negative by Ann Rosener for the Office of War Information.
Rest assured, the Morris Minor is one of the world’s safest cars. 1954.
One, Inc. was the FIRST pro-gay publication in the United States. Started by members of the Mattachine Society, One, Inc. focused on gay men’s issues, health and political rights. The premier issue launched November 1952. (Above Picture: One, Inc.’s August 1958 issues (almost 11 years BEFORE Stonewall) claiming homosexual pride.)
Tags: 1920s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, advertising, automobiles, comics, Freaks and Geeks, gay bars, lesbians, Mattachine Society, pornography, underwear, WWII
Posted by Usable Past under public history
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Transgender Porn Love
Caroline “Tula” Cossey, the first transwoman to pose for Playboy.
(from bitches get shit done)
Radical Feminist Group The Redstockings
Ellen Willis’ daughter, Nona Willis Aronowitz, created a fantastic online archive of her mother’s work. Ellen Willis was one of the co-founders of the 1960s women’s liberation group The Redstockings and the first rock critic for the New Yorker. Aronowitz has archived a number of her mother’s writings on the topics of sex, religion, and rock criticism (among others) that are a fabulous view into the mind of Willis and other women in the 1960s and 1970s. From her humorous piece Classical and Baroque Sex in Everyday Life (The Village Voice, 1979):
There are two kinds of sex, classical and baroque. Classical sex is romantic, profound, serious, emotional, moral, mysterious, spontaneous, abandoned, focused on a particular person, and stereotypically feminine. Baroque sex is pop, playful, funny, experimental, conscious, deliberate, amoral, anonymous, focused on sensation for sensation’s sake, and stereotypically masculine. The classical mentality taken to an extreme is sentimental and finally puritanical; the baroque mentality taken to an extreme is pornographic and finally obscene. Ideally, a sexual relationship ought to create a satisfying tension between the two modes (a baroque idea, particularly if the tension is ironic) or else blend them so well that the distinction disappears (a classical aspiration). Lovemaking cannot be totally classical unless it is also totally baroque, since you can’t abandon all restraints without being willing to try anything. Similarly, it is impossible to be truly baroque without allowing oneself to abandon all restraints and so attain a classical intensity. In practice, however, most people are more inclined to one mode than to the other. A very classical person will be incompatible with a very baroque person unless each can bring out the other’s latent opposite side. Two people who are very one-sided in the same direction can be extremely compatible but risk missing a whole dimension of experience unless they get so deeply into one mode that it becomes the other.
Go read more here!
Sufferin’ Suffragists
Amazing National American Woman Suffrage Association postcards from 1910. Note how even the NAWSA depicts women as children in their illustrations. Amazing.
(from Ms. Magazine)
Tags: 1910s, 1960s, 1970s, advertising, American history, archives, feminism, music, pornography, Redstockings, rock criticism, suffrage, transwomen, women's voices