Oops. You misspelt the quack’s name at the opening:
the legacy of Dr. Harold Shyrock
Thinking perhaps, hmm, of “Shylock”? Why not-lock? Lock lips, lock limbs, lock ’em up and throw away the key.
It was a grim time, those Cold War 1950s, and my own answer to the persecution was to apply vanishing creme, absquatulate, ditch the Republic and “head west young man”.
Lethal homophobia was so deeply ingrained in the mighty psyches of Lana the Free and Homer the Brave, right up to and including the [ahem] intelligentsia, medical “profession” (ooga-booga) and society in general that I never imagined it could budge. Or crack. So it was off to East Asia for yours truly, where liking guys was considered a curiosity at best, at best to be politely ignored.
Quack quack Shryack.
Him and his fellow queer-basher Edmund Bergler, an Austrian Jew fleeing from the Nazis only to ironically set up his own Nazi / Abrahamic psychoanalytical empire in New York. Wiki observes solemnly “He was the most important theorist of homosexuality in the 1950s” which says plenty about life and mores in the big bad banana republic, el coloso del norte. Their kind did much to discredit psychoanalysis, which today gathers dust along with phrenology and divination of entrails (although unlike those other disciplines it continues to pull in the big dough).
You go on, sir, with “… and then encourage Dad to show the little ferry…”
As majestic a queen as some of these motorized barges plowing the waves might be, I suspect you were in fact referring to the term that was slung about at the time. “Fairy” was a smear for an effeminate male dates at least from 1895. Don’t hear it so much these days — maybe that’s why you got it wrong. “Rock Hudson a fairy?” has a sort of three-dollar-bill sound about it.
Reading through your exposition I was reminded of a poignant episode in the late William Manchester’s magnificent “Goodbye, Darkness” where he describes a fellow Marine, wounded in battle in the Pacific theater, recovering while being prosecuted for a homosexual act — potentially incurring a life sentence in a military prison (no humorous asides please about prison sex). Manchester found it puzzling that a war hero would be thus treated.
By the way I really enjoyed taking a gander at your collection of paperback cover art. That’s worth a whole aesthetic study of its own. Hubba hubba. Lezbe pals (hey it was all gals too — nobody wanted to read about guys-on-guys, apparently).