He concludes, “The past is a very queer place, indeed.”Ī visitor to the Southeast would have found the following restaurants in the 1965 Guild Guide. “Whether it’s queer history, or Black history or women’s history, it happened in all of the spaces around us: It just looked different.” “We, whoever the ‘we’ is, have always been everywhere,” Watkins says. Still, Watkins urges his students to reflect on the unseen. And most of those left no trace on the physical landscape, despite the impression they made on men isolated by a ruthlessly homophobic society. Yet only a few of them are labeled “R,” for restaurant. There are dozens of such places listed in the guide’s 1965 edition. (Black men could scan the Guild Guide for venues marked with a “C,” defined as “Colored predominantly, but not exclusively,” while women could look for “L,” meaning “Lesbian, not always strictly, but predominantly,” but the book was otherwise compiled with white men in mind.) “They were certainly not marked by rainbow flags.” It would have led them to places “where you could meet other people who were like you,” says Jay Watkins, author of Queering the Redneck Riviera. mail, it’s certain that white men traveling in the segregated South consulted the text before deciding where to eat in Roanoke or drink in New Orleans. Virginia residents Julian Glass and Lee Taylor on vacation in 1955Ĭollection of the Museum of the Shenandoah Valley, Wood-Glass Family Papersīut in an era when homosexual behavior was criminalized and policed so intensely that Glass wrote “1, 2, 3” instead of “I love you” in letters sent though the U.S. “Unfortunately, we don’t know to what extent might have used this copy of the Guild Guide to plan their trips,” writes curator Nick Powers in a blog post. A staffer at the Museum of the Shenandoah Valley-a Winchester, Virginia, history museum housed in a stately estate once shared by same-sex couple Julian Glass and Lee Taylor-sent along a digital copy of the 1965 International Guild Guide, suggesting it could be mined for culinary history. But it stands to reason that the guide was also passed between friends.
Gay men gay sex porn code#
Two-thirds of the 1965 edition, though, were devoted to the U.S., with entries coded to indicate if visitors should anticipate dancing (“D”), a drag show (“S”) or dress code (“E,” for elegant.) “AYOR” stood for “at your own risk,” meaning “you might like the people there, but it is highly questionable they will like you.” True to its name, the book included reader-supplied recommendations for clubs and baths in countries such as South Africa, Yugoslavia and Panama. Sensing his audience’s enthusiasm for travel, Womack issued his first annual International Guild Guide in 1964. (He appealed the case to the United States Supreme Court, winning a ruling that erotica marketed to gay men wasn’t automatically obscene.)
In addition to printing menus and programs for the United Daughters of the Confederacy, Guild Press published a line of physique magazines, leading to Womack’s arrest on obscenity charges in 1960. He ended up transferring to George Washington University in Washington, D.C., where in the 1950s he purchased a pair of printing houses. Womack started school at the University of Mississippi but struggled to pay his tuition.
As one of his friends complained to the Washington Post in 1978, while the mainstream press insisted on depicting Womack as a “fat, gay, albino” pornographer, he was a “charming, dynamic, thought-provoking man.” Lynn Womack, the son of Hazelhurst, Mississippi, tenant farmers. Such promotions would have been unthinkable as recently as the 1960s, when bars and restaurants were so unhospitable to people who presented as anything but straight that choosing the “wrong” place could end in a beating or arrest.Ī man’s torso was faintly visible on the cover of the International Guild Guide.Īmong the few safeguards available were crowdsourced guidebooks highlighting venues that welcomed gay guests: The Address Book and The Lavender Baedeker are two of the pre-Stonewall titles now commonly described as “gay Green Books,” in reference to The Negro Motorist Guidebook, which helped Black travelers avoid physical harm and discrimination.īut unlike those California-based publications, the International Guild Guide originated in the South. Īs big restaurant groups jostle for queer dollars, Pride Month has emerged as a major occasion for LGBTQ limited time offers (LTOs), which is the acronymic way of saying that Dunkin’ has offered rainbow-sprinkled doughnuts and Shake Shack has served Pride Shakes in June. This article is republished from The Food Section.