The Gay Image of the Late 1960's

But what sort of image did gays project in these years immediately preceding the birth of gay liberation? Influenced no doubt by the legal situation, it was the gay men who took the lion's share of the attention, or rather male homo-sexuals. The word 'gay' was not the current idiom; the word 'camp' had some limited currency; the word 'homo-sexual', carefully pronounced, was both studied and staid enough to meet the mood of the moment.

Anonymity was the order of the day. Differences of sexual orientation were deliberately, if a little self-consciously, left beneath the surface in a common cause. Few identified themselves publically as homosexuals, as the discreetly silhouetted profiles of those interviewed on TV's Compass programme bore witness. It was, of course, encouraging to find an unexpectedly wide measure of support in society at large, but the homosexual rarely came out into the open but rather stood in the shadows.