Potoooooooo
Contributor
http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/kevin-...3814.html?utm_hp_ref=gay-voices&ir=Gay Voices
I have a new guy in my life. His name is Joseph, but his friends and family called him Joe so I will too.
I met Joe a few months ago through Don Stewart, the proprietor of MacLeod's Books where I was in browsing one Saturday morning when Don suggested I take a look at a shoebox full of papers and photos that he thought might interest me.
The contents of the box proved to be memorabilia of the life of one Joseph R. Selsey, late of Vancouver's West End. The reason that Don thought I might want to see these discards, retrieved by a savvy binner from where they'd been dropped next to a dumpster, was that several pieces of this collection indicated that Joe was a gay man living in our neighbourhood in the 1940s, '50s, and '60s; decades for which we have few records of our community's existence.
Don's first clue might have been the paperback copy of Richard Amory's Song of the Loon, an interracial and intergenerational gay love story from the early '60s, before either of those loaded terms had been coined.
Or the flyers from Trojan Book Service offering such titles as America's Homosexual Underground by Antony James (quote: "The good-looking boy with lily-white skin was husky but the man sensed a kind of effeminacy as he watched the boy leaning against the stair steps with his crotch bulging.").
Or the handbill from International Nudist Sun, boasting "frontal nude photographs" of hunky young "body builders."
Certainly the Tom of Finland-style greeting card with three studs, naked except for toques and scarves and boots, carolling in the snow, was a clear giveaway.
Yeah, Joe was a friend of Dorothy's, and I quickly scooped up the remains of his days for a closer look, and perhaps some clues to the lives of that generation of gay men who lived their youth in the years before Stonewall.
I have a new guy in my life. His name is Joseph, but his friends and family called him Joe so I will too.
I met Joe a few months ago through Don Stewart, the proprietor of MacLeod's Books where I was in browsing one Saturday morning when Don suggested I take a look at a shoebox full of papers and photos that he thought might interest me.
The contents of the box proved to be memorabilia of the life of one Joseph R. Selsey, late of Vancouver's West End. The reason that Don thought I might want to see these discards, retrieved by a savvy binner from where they'd been dropped next to a dumpster, was that several pieces of this collection indicated that Joe was a gay man living in our neighbourhood in the 1940s, '50s, and '60s; decades for which we have few records of our community's existence.
Don's first clue might have been the paperback copy of Richard Amory's Song of the Loon, an interracial and intergenerational gay love story from the early '60s, before either of those loaded terms had been coined.
Or the flyers from Trojan Book Service offering such titles as America's Homosexual Underground by Antony James (quote: "The good-looking boy with lily-white skin was husky but the man sensed a kind of effeminacy as he watched the boy leaning against the stair steps with his crotch bulging.").
Or the handbill from International Nudist Sun, boasting "frontal nude photographs" of hunky young "body builders."
Certainly the Tom of Finland-style greeting card with three studs, naked except for toques and scarves and boots, carolling in the snow, was a clear giveaway.
Yeah, Joe was a friend of Dorothy's, and I quickly scooped up the remains of his days for a closer look, and perhaps some clues to the lives of that generation of gay men who lived their youth in the years before Stonewall.
