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Burma Shave: Covert Gay Verses by the Side of the Road in the 50s & 60s
Too young to remember? This might be cooler than you think!
You, dear reader, are likely much too young to remember the little strings of Burma Shave signs that proliferated along US highways from the 1920s to the 1960s. The signs presented verses in successive lines of 2 to 3 words, often in couplets, usually rhyming.
Wikipedia reminds us that “Burma-Shave was an American brand of brushless shaving cream, famous for its advertising gimmick of posting humorous verses on small sequential roadside signs.”
If you are interested only in the covert gay verses, then you can skip down to the very end of this story.
Of course, there is nothing at all gay in most of the verses, some were just jingles on the subject of shaving:
Within this vale Of toil and sin
Your head grows bald
But not your chin
Burma Shave
Sometimes the verses offered small tips on driver safety advice:
Don’t stick Your elbow
Out so far
It might go home
In another car
Burma-Shave
She sailed along At 80 per
They hauled away
What had Ben Hur
Burma Shave
In the 1950s and 60s, the signs would never have ventured into the political realm as did this more recent and scurrilous copycat version of the technique:
But as the popularity of the signs grew over time, gender and sexual innuendo became far more common.
There was rarely anything explicitly gay in any of these verses, but, they were, in a number of respects, highly gendered. Burma Shave was a man’s product, often bought by the wives. Not surprisingly, many of the sign sequences were sexually suggestive though most were fairly subtle or at least nothing that would shock families out for a Sunday afternoon spin in the car.
