Do you think you could have led a happy adult life in the 1950s?

Oh, I would have loved living in the 50's. My people had endless opportunities and were highly respected.

Even if I were black, I think I would have made a good life for myself, especially in NYC. Charleston would have been awful.

You could have led a happy life right up to the moment you got busted on some bogus charge for being a pervert just because you were gay. Vice cops preyed on gays in those days just for fun and the enormous satisfaction of beating guys senseless, making sure they got a conviction and pretty much ruining their lives.

But the closet is HOT!

No. And no.

In a city like NY there was SO much sex in the 50s.

R3 "You could have led a happy life right up to the moment you got busted on some bogus charge for being a pervert just because you were gay. Vice cops preyed on gays in those days just for fun and the enormous satisfaction of beating guys senseless, making sure they got a conviction and pretty much ruining their lives."

That was actually quite quite rare.

R2 "Even if I were black, I think I would have made a good life for myself, especially in NYC. Charleston would have been awful."

Today a black person has a much greater chance of getting murdered. A much greater chance of spending time in jail.

Detroit, Newark, Camden.... the ghettos that you see today are much worse than they were back then.

Oh God no!

As a non-gender-conforming liberal who isn't keen on loyalty oaths and flag-waving, I would have landed on all sorts of blacklists. Sure, the cars and fashions were pretty back then, but the politics were butt-ugly.

Yawn. More mediocrity from the PMBT.

I would have had a great time. According to my Uncle who was there, he had a huge amount of sexual freedom. In the 60's and 70's people went public with their sexuality but in the 50's it was all private and HOT.

Gay guys had it so good in the fifties... Alan Turing was arrested, trialled and forced into medical castration, became very depressed and killed himself. This was the man, without whom Europe would probably be Nazi today, the man who paved the way for modern day's computers. -Would I be a gay man in the fifties? Hell no!

Back in the 50s, most jobs were not so collaborative as they are today, so it was easier to be a cipher on the job. In the cities, most people minded their own business unless you lived in an ethnic colony

So, yes.

Nope. I've gotten too used to being out of the closet, so I probably wouldn't last a day in the 1950s unless I spent most of my time going to Roadshows and Broadway musicals. I'd end up like all those other people who were shoehorned into closets and forced to live lies. Maybe I could have handled the 1970s, though; it was the last time the lowest common denominator was high enough for my tastes, and neither AIDS nor the obesity epidemic were things yet.

R12 here -- I meant for women. Gay men had a rough time in the 50s, and it is better for them now.

I assume you're a gay republican, OP? You must hate women and minorities in addition to yourself.

It would have been a good time to be an expats--travel to foreign places was expensive but Europe, Asia, etc. would have been very affordable.

Straight women are tiresome, though.

A fabulous eldersister once told us what it was like then:

"Only hippie women would give it up back then so there were lots of hot numbers aching for the 'oral relief' that the sisters were happy to give - there was a huge meat supply. Then in the 60s most fish started to give it up and the meat supply dried up"

Stonewall much R6? Remember that Stonewall began as yet another raid by the cops that was the final straw for a bunch of put upon drag queens. Vice raids were as common as dirt back then and many, many lives got ruined. Guys would have their names published in the newspapers, get fired, get evicted, get shunned by their families and put on sexual offender registries. It was anything but rare. Gays were a cheap, easy target and rounded up arrest quotas nicely.

If it meant i could be thin, then yes. If not, then no, because at least right now weight loss surgery is an option.

OP, go watch Far from Heaven, I think you are going to enjoy it.

That said, I love the fashion, music and cocktail culture if the 50s.

OP, you would have ended up a withered alcoholic, probably choking on your own vomit, alone in your studio apartment.

One of the stupidest OPs I've read and that's saying a lot!

Being a woman, i'd say no. Limited job opportunities, misogyny, pressure to get married. I'd have probably killed myself. But nice to no, for men it was okay, even if they were gay.... ;-)

There was one Hispanic guy in my Mom's high school back in the early 60's. He was going steady (as they called it back then) with a white girl. It was a big bad deal, and eventually their parents forced them to break up.

In that same school, there was one black girl. She didn't have any friends. Not one.

Everyone else was white.

And this is southern California I'm talking about.

I would probably have married r23 and we would have fabulous dinner parties, where I had prepared the food, set the table, cleaned our Manhattan appartment, while she was reading the newspaper I had ironed for her and wearing the slippers, I had preheated in the oven for when she got home.

okay, i wouldn't have killed myself. :-*

Yes, life in the 1950s was pretty good if you were a conservative straight white male, especially a college-educated one - or a middle-class white woman who could be a June Cleaver housewife without resorting to booze or pills. Everyone else had it pretty rough.

Of course, the Mr. and Mrs. Middle-Majorities who liked that sort of thing only had a few years to enjoy it, before the sixties hit...

Oh yes.

I wouldn't want to go back to the 50's for the simple reason that there was not internet, no cell phones.....and no DL.

Those are some of the main reasons I'd want to go back.

People knew how to have a conversation in the 1950s, even lower class people and kids.

No way. There was no porn! (Or at least not much, and not easily obtainable.)

But I coulda worn a cool fedora while Johnnie Ray sucked my cock!

Definitely! My Mamie Eisenhower 'do would've been the height of fashion!

No, as a woman my choices would have been few. As a lesbian - ugh, the butch/femme thing. I was born in 1957 and not many days have gone by in the last 40 years that I haven't counted my blessings for not being born any sooner.

Let's see - the red scare, McCarthyism drumming out gays out of the government, legal discrimination, possible forcibly admitted into a psych ward because being gay was a mental illness, shock treatments, castration, ostracism...

Oh my SIGN ME UP! What a bunch of bullshit. And the clothing fabrics were VERY uncomfortable.

Only if I were very rich. I love air conditioning and would have to be rich enough to afford it and trade.

[quote]Stonewall much [R6]? Remember that Stonewall began as yet another raid by the cops that was the final straw for a bunch of put upon drag queens

Cut it out and stop trying to re-write history. NO fucking drag queens at Stonewall.

I was born in 1949, and grew up In the 1950's.

There was really not much expressed affection between men. At most, a handshake. No one was hugging anyone. Not like today, where men hug everywhere, however superficially. That was not done then at all. And expressing emotions for men was taboo; there were no public displays like what we see everywhere today. Men were expected to be stoic, and not personal. The entire era depended on a whole interactive series of veneers. Going to the gym was not only not popular, but any man who went regularly was actually regarded as "peculiar."

Though, as an adolescent male, you were expected to have close male friends, including a "best friend," it was understood, and expected, that these friendships would be more or less discarded when you got married. And they were. A lyric from the song, "Go Home with Bonnie Jean," from the musical, "Brigadoon," went,

"I used to have a group of friends, But, now that I'm married, the friendship ends. They never come to call, Farewell to one and all. Farewell to all the lads I knew, I'll see you again when you're married, too. For soon across the green, I'll go home with bonnie Jean."

Though "Brigadoon" opened on Broadway in 1948, as I recall, the Gene Kelly movie came out in 1954, wherein one of the primary relationships is between Kelly and "best friend" Van Johnson, whom Kelly casually abandons at the end of the picture.

So, though friendships were supposed to be integral to growing up, abandoning them seemed to be integral to reaching adulthood, when a man was supposed to realize his true purpose: to court and marry a woman, and live with her happily ever after.

Regulations covered everything, and anyone who strayed from the rules was, not always subtly, ostracized from the social scene. I can remember jokes being made about one of my father's "pansy" cousins, whom I met once, at a family event, and who hugged me tightly, something I wasn't used to at all, though I noticed other male family members exchanging slight glances as he did.

After WWII, when gay men actually discovered each other existed, and they weren't totally alone, many left the small towns and migrated to the cities, where they could gradually meet and interact with each other. But, in many cases, self-hatred was the general mood, intensified by then-acceptable large amounts of alcohol, not to mention the fact that most everyone smoked cigarettes, and diets were extremely high-cholesterol, since consumption of daily amounts of butter and red meat was publicly encouraged.

Furthermore, gays in the media were regarded as sick perverts, whose only real recourse was suicide, or murder. The few so-called "courageous" films with gay characters usually had them end in this way. (To be sure, films with gay characters, outside of walk-on stereotypes, didn't actually appear until the early 60's, like "Advise and Consent," and "The Children's Hour," both 1962 as I recall, but both had characters who killed themselves when they realized they were gay and others knew it. "Suddenly Last Summer" around 1960, had an an already deceased gay character who was eaten alive for his perversions. Such wonderful role models.)

On the other hand, given the general male stoicism, there were also other, startling cultural indications of a casual homocentrism, bordering on homoeroticism. At the YMCA, for men only, men were allowed, even expected, to swim naked together. There was a lot more casual nudity when men were among themselves, which is not the case today. There were many, non-sexual, men-only clubs, where businessmen congregated, with, as far as I know, very little erotic interaction.

It took me a long, long time, to finally admit what I wanted in life, and finally come out. (Interestingly, back then, to "come out" meant simply to have sex with a man for the first time, which was kept secret, unlike nowadays, when "to come out" refers to a whole process of public social interaction.)

[quote]diets were extremely high-cholesterol, since consumption of daily amounts of butter and red meat was publicly encouraged.

The obesity epidemic started when this stopped.

[quote]"I used to have a group of friends, But, now that I'm married, the friendship ends. They never come to call, Farewell to one and all. Farewell to all the lads I knew, I'll see you again when you're married, too. For soon across the green, I'll go home with bonnie Jean."

Gore Vidal said in an essssay that it was always this way -- for society's safety, outside of the Army, teens had to be stopped from running in packs once they became young men, thus the pressure to marry.

At my job, the young men now married far earlier than the guys my age (regressive social mores of minorities and poor whites allowed to buy what now passes for education) but the pack behavior continues, and it is dangerous to society. They bully everyone for what they want.

"The world of heterosexual is a sick & boring life"!

If the OP were to be an adult in the 1950s, he would have been in an internment camp during the 1940s along with the rest of the Japanese in North America.

I can't imagine what it was like to be a middle-class woman back then.

As I pointed out on another thread, that was the first generation of middle-class women who were expected to keep up fancy houses, entertain, and raise children without servants. Minimum wage laws were in and an ordinary family could no longer hire a maid for the price of a bed in the attic and the spare change under the couch, except perhaps in the deep South. If those gals didn't dust and vacuum the entire fucking house every fucking day then they were considered the neighborhood sloven, no wonder they became closet drinkers.

I would have loved my sex life being exclusively serving alpha straight men.

No. I could not be happy in the 50s, I was happy in the 70s. Republicans have made me unhappy, most of my life. Now at the end of my life, a sick, disgusting, lowlife criminal in the White House is making the whole of America very unhappy and no one can stop him. Our futured lies in the hands of a right wing Supreme Court...we are lost.

OP still wears a suit to fly. Or at least fantasizes about doing so.

I'm with r30. Life worked better before cellphones and the internet. I wish going to record and book stores was still one of my major pastimes. I wouldn't have wanted to be an adult in the '50s, but I loved the '70s.

I’m a white man, so I think I probably could’ve lived a relatively happy life, provided I was in a major city like New York or San Francisco. Anywhere else would’ve been hell.

Of course, I probably would’ve died during the plague years.

As long as no Trump was in the White House, then it would be preferable to today.

Oh God, it would have been a life of quiet desperation for me!

Yes, a white man with a half-decent education had the world at his feet, for the price of soul-destroying conformity.

So it'd have been all work and an overwhelming terror of play for me, because I'd be so afraid of arrest or gay-bashing that my sex life would have been furtive and miserable. And I'd have to bow out of political discussions at work for fear of being labeled a "Commie" and blacklisted, dodged questions about my private life and wondering if I should marry some girl with a flat chest and glasses just to have someone to talk to (and about), and secretly envying the Beatniks. And when the sixties hit and I was too old to join in the fun, I'd realized that life had passed me by, and I'd sold my soul for a mess of gray flannel suits.

I do love the aesthetic and there may have certain minor aspects of life and society that would have been preferable for me. So I'm not going to say it was all bad. But overall...just no. Not worth it.

It would be fun to go back in time for a week just to drive around in those gorgeous cars and dress up. But society was much more harsh and cruel in general. You all mention the racism, sexism and homophobia. There was also wanton cruelty towards the earth in general—pollution, littering, not caring about animals. You had to be very wealthy and protected to not be affected by all these things. But I wish I could’ve been around for the Jazz and RnB. The underground seemed more interesting than it is today.

I would have been one of the Beatniks. They were gay-friendly and many were gay or bisexual. San Francisco or New York, though I would prefer San Francisco.

"In the cities, most people minded their own business unless you lived in an ethnic colony"

That must be why thousands of people were thrown out of government jobs for being gay

"I would have loved my sex life being exclusively serving alpha straight men."

Wow, a bottom AND a straight guy fetishist

Federal employees were persecuted if suspected of being gay

[quote] diets were extremely high-cholesterol, since consumption of daily amounts of butter and red meat was publicly encouraged.

Yet everyone was thin!

Throw in a weekend or two with Tab Hunter and I will time travel tomorrow, oppression or not. (He got through it all just fine).

Yes, R57, everyone was thin. But it was so common for men to die of heart attacks in their fifties or sixties, that it was thought of as normal. Just how things were.

But not, that's what happen when you smoke three packs a day, and think that a steak and three martinis are a normal lunch.

It was not true that "everyone" was thin

Except for whatever octogenarians might still be alive and frequenting the DL, every opinion here is based on either (a) historical views of activists and gay historians or (b) Hollywood. Since neither is an accurate, unbiased source, I assume that real life for most gays was somewhere between the arrest-a-minute hell painted by one group and the glamorous cocktail party view of the other. Life is never black and white. It's always a shade of gray, and most of one's happiness in life comes from within, not from external factors.

I, too, prefer the styles, fashions and mores of the '50s and early '60s to those of today. I would happier in a world of greater formality, where people still observed certain conventions and rituals that made life easier for introverted people like me, who find structure comforting in social interactions. I'm a private, discreet person by nature so keeping my private life private would be no problem for me.

Taking a vacation in that era would be fantastic. I wouldn't choose New York. I'd go to LA. Two weeks in 1960 Los Angeles would be the dream vacation of a lifetime for me.

All that said, no. I would rather live in the '50s. I would miss the variety and immediacy of entertainment options we have today. I don't necessarily think such overabundance is good for society, but I would miss it personally. Most of all, as someone in, shall we say, late middle age, I am not willing to give up 21st century medicine. Life in 1960 could have been great in many ways, until you developed hypertension, diabetes or heart disease.

R61, keeping your private life private is not the same thing as living a lie. People back then were pressured to live a lie and pretend to be straight.

^^^"All that said, no, I WOULDN'T rather live in the '50s."

Damn the lack of an edit feature!

R62, it depends on where you were, who you were and how old you were. A 25-year-old man in a small town was certainly under great pressure. A 50-year-old "confirmed bachelor" in a big city, less so, especially if he worked in certain more tolerant or eccentric fields, like the arts or academia.

But, sure, of course it was harder.

It's one thing to be a rich person in the 50s living the Mad Men lifestyle....I'm not so sure being an average person in the 50s would have been as glamorous as some people here want to believe

"People back then were pressured to live a lie and pretend to be straight. "

Well that's the thing, middle-class and working-class men were pressured to marry, and ambitious middle-class men married because they knew it was good for their career. Married men were thought to be more reliable and socially acceptable, and outside of the arts-related fields, a man who didn't marry was considered suspected of being a queer or immoral or a commie. So if you were gay man who held some regular job, you'd find yourself on the wrong side of the company culture and the prime career tracks, if you didn't find a beard and fake it.

Women who didn't marry, of course, were considered to be sluts if they were attractive, or non-persons if they weren't.

Yes, because I’m a white guy, and polyester wasn’t yet widely used.

R65, it wouldn't have been, but then life today isn't very glamorous for people who don't have money.

If I was suddenly sent back in time to the 1950s, I think I would be very angry about having to quickly adapt to such a restrictive and closeted lifestyle.

But if I had been born in those times, not knowing of anything more modern and opened, then I simply would've lived my gay life as enjoyably as I possibly could. Many gays did just that.

Very tricky to answer because I'd want to be conscious of the nicer aspects that life in the 1950s offered. I'm from a rust belt city (Buffalo) so I'd enjoy seeing its downtown bustling and full of nightlife, not as it's presently constituted with empty storefronts and wig shops. But this isn't a time travel post.

When I was a gayling in the 1970s there were still a lot of older men around who told me that Buffalo had a vibrant gay scene back then because it had good theaters that hosted touring companies, nightclubs, bars on every corner, and tons of "fancy" restaurants, A lot of these guys were WWII veterans too. I always liked talking to them, so I have an inkling that I could have gotten along. I'm also white so I would have had it much easier than many, as well as coming from a good home with a stable family life. The fact that the world was just going to keep getting shittier of the next 50-70 years would happily be off my radar.

I probably would have gotten married and had kids, but also I'd have had an active sex life, fucking and sucking my way through the glory holes at the YMCA, the local parks, the local beaches, the local libraries, the local hotels, the local rest stops…. and maybe even join the local community theater for even more available dick.

R69, exactly right and a sensible response. You can't miss what you've never had and have no concept of. Your only frame of reference is the past, and for pretty much everyone in 1960 the present was better than the past. People had hope for the future. Where is our hope now? Only for something to make things less bad, not to make them actually better.

Life for gay men was oppressive 60 years ago, but they knew nothing else. Those old enough to remember the world before WWII would most likely have felt themselves lucky to live in a time when all cities had extensive underground and twilight gay scenes, which barely existed before the social upheaval and dislocation caused by the war.

Paraphrasing what I said above, people mostly make their own happiness. I don't notice a surfeit of happiness in the world today, so I'm unconvinced that people - even non-white, non-male, and/or non-heterosexual people - were really all that much less happy back then.

R72, yes, I'm sure black people were much happier in the Jim Crow era. I'm sure gay men loved living a lie.

R73, I'd bet that in the 1950s plenty of black people were happy... that they didn't live in the South!

And if they were lucky, they could get a good union job with benefits and a pension, even if they had to spend their paycheck on a house in unofficially segregated neighborhoods. Gone are the days.

R73 and R74, and I'm sure they were happy they weren't being lynched every other day, as had been true 50 years earlier. And probably happy, too, that things were changing rapidly by the late '50s and they could hope for a better world for their children. They had only their past for comparison, not our knowledge of conditions today, and, like almost all Americans, black people were better off in 1960 than they ever had been before. How many can say that today except the richest 10% or so?

People fifty years from now will wonder how we were happy during our time. If there’s a world left by then!

I'd have moved to Paris or Morocco ....

The 2015 thread bumper is a self-hating bottom.

I would go to a 1950s buffet supper party.

Fuck no - the idea having to be back in the closet, no way. Not to mention the way other minorities got treated (blacks, women etc). And the environment as someone pointed out upthread. There is a lot to be said for most of modern life.

That said, there were a few positive aspects to life back then - major cities in the West were not open air lunatic asylums like many are now, and addicts were not as obvious a presence as they are now. Institutions for the mentally ill (and addicts in some cases) may not have benefitted those in them but the did benefit society without a doubt. And crime was not as much of an issue for the average person

I do like the cars, and some of the music, and it would have been nice to travel to Europe back then when it was at its peak.

It certainly would have been nice to travel to Europe when the dollar was almighty compared to the European currencies!

So if I had a TARDIS I'd take a few months to a year to travel the Continent in the 1950s, perhaps thrown in a cruise down the Nile before the politics of the region became problematic for tourists. And then I'd go someplace a gay man could be himself.

R80, it's not just asylums and crime. Economically, we were healthier country and a healthier society. There was good, steady work that paid a decent wage for working class people. For the middle class, a college degree all but guaranteed lifetime employment, often with the same company, with retirement accompanied by a pension.

One income was enough to support a family in most income brackets (granted that expectations were lower back then as well).

Housing costs were lower, even relative to lower wages. For city people, there were un-gentrified parts of Manhattan where you didn't have to be a millionaire to live. Apartments in Los Angeles were actually quite cheap because there was a constant building boom throughout the '50s and '60s. For suburbanites, there were neighborhoods - decent neighborhoods with good schools - full of small starter houses.

Socially, we are freer and more sensitive today, but life is harder, especially for younger people.

I probably would get stuck with a man like Don Draper and he would make my life miserable.

That's because we were much closer to democratic socialism (Euro style) in the 50s than we are today.

Very high tax rates on the rich, strong unions, all that.

The fact that the rest of the world was still recovering from WW2 for most of the decade--literally still clearing the rubble away in many cases--helped the US a lot too

I've often wondered what daily life was like for gay or otherwise non conforming people during the 50s and 70s. On one hand it was a vibrant time culturally and the music and film output seemed far superior to what we have today. But there seemed to be an extreme maliciousness towards people who didn't fit in the right boxes.

Think of all that closeted cock that was available!

Edit : 50s through 70s

R86, see r71

[quote]That's because we were much closer to democratic socialism (Euro style) in the 50s than we are today.

Yes, agreed. The late '50s through the mid-60s were kind of the high tide of American liberalism. Never since then have we attained the same level of faith in government and what it can do. You see that today even with "liberal" Democratic governors, none of whom advocated the kind of muscular government intervention that any self-respecting governor, Repub or Dem, would likely have implemented had such a panic-inducing epidemic occurred in 1960.