What made this era puritanical was simply the man-date not to talk about sex publicly. In private life, the sky was the limit.
As for our America, we have an equally false conception.
We believe that the 1950s were a time of repression.
In public, there was no sex education, no women’s liberation, no gay movements. Both movies and television were forbidden from touching on the subject.
The shows we watched were apolitical comedies that portrayed the idyllic life of heterosexual marriage.
According to this traditional view, the sexual liberation movements would only emerge in the 1960s.
Their origins are often attributed to the influence of other political movements, such as the civil rights struggle and the opposition to the Vietnam War.
This, again, is false: the 1950s, in terms of sexuality, were one of the most radical eras.
On television, for example, we saw great expressions of liberation, but we didn’t know it because the message was unconscious. This unconsciousness was not Freud’s, who looked inside our heads, but Lacan’s, which is outside of them, in our sociocultural production.
Let’s think about shows like Bewitched or I Dream of Jeannie or even I Love Lucy. Although they appeared to depict life in middle-class American suburbs, unconsciously, they were telling us something else.
Samantha or Jeannie or Lucy were not submissive 56
women, they didn’t enjoy doing household chores, and they found ways to escape them. The prohibition on exercising Samantha or Jeannie’s special powers wasn’t difficult to associate with the situation of American women after the war. First, they were called to work in the arms industry and enjoyed freedom of movement and financial independence, but once the war was over, they were asked to return to their homes.
The reason: to leave their jobs to men. Although our protagonists didn’t express it publicly, they were constantly fighting to maintain their secret power.
The famous series The Monsters and The Adams Family were no less provocative. Once again, we have female protagonists who are more powerful than the men, or than the “traditional” and “feminine” women like niece Marilyn. For those of us who belonged to minorities, whose families were unconventional, with strong accents, strange mannerisms, or slightly crazy relatives who didn’t fit the expectations, there was a message of liberation: we could be different and charming. Moreover, in a time when psychiatrists sent all nonconformists to hospitals, it was a revolutionary message: the disabled and the insane (like Thing and Uncle Fester) should be in our homes.
But there was no series more radical than Mr. Ed.
Take away the horse, keep the masculine voice, and we have a simulated gay relationship between two men. Wilbur, dedicated to architecture (a profession not considered masculine in the 1950s), married to a 57
woman with whom he doesn’t have a deep connection, maintains the most intense communication with Ed, who advises him, saves him, helps him, gets jealous, and loves him. This love must be kept secret, even from his own wife, who suspects but never verbalizes it. A portrait of the closeted gay life of that era.
The normalization of these forbidden relationships, both for gay people and women, was the seed that would sow the ideas that one could be different and not die because of it.
This is where the liberation of the 1960s began: with the first gay horse.
Was I aware of this message? I can’t say I was fully aware, but I can’t believe the opposite either. I had to close my eyes, listen to Mr. Ed speak as a lover to Wilbur and thought they were a couple. If I hadn’t received this message from Mr. Ed and from the other shows, I wouldn’t have become later, overnight, an activist for gay rights.