‘He’s well adjusted, I suppose; he doesn’t care if the whole world knows. He goes cruising every night, wearing pants that are too damn tight …’
‘Homer the Happy Little Homo’ by Byrd E. Bath1
At the beginning of the 1960s, the American men’s magazine Adam lent its name to a series of stag party albums; records designed to be played at bawdy, boozy all-male gatherings. Issued by the Fax Record Company, dozens of these discs, by mostly anonymous performers, appeared, containing ribald songs interspersed with slices of blue humour. One of these albums, Sex Is My Business, was, according to the sleeve notes, ‘the result of actual interviews with prostitutes, homosexuals, pimps and “Johns” in which we hear them tell the fascinating and almost unbelievable story of their lives; their experiences, how they work, what they do and why, the money they receive and the money they pay; their fears, anxieties, hopes and strange loves … all in their own words in a frank, graphic and revealing description of a way of life few of us know or understand.’2 Another, Nights of Love on Lesbos, claimed to be a ‘frankly intimate description of a sensuous young girl’s lesbian desires’:3 in reality it was a recital of parts of French poet Pierre Louÿs’ Songs of Bilitis, but in an attempt at achieving some mark of respectability its sleeve notes were penned by Frederick van Pelt Bryan, the US District Court judge who was instrumental in allowing the publication of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Sold under the counter in specialist shops or, more usually, through adverts in men’s magazines, these albums spawned several imitators, with other companies eager to tap into the titillation. It’s here, in the land of slightly risqué mail order, that the Camp label was born.
Although in the strictest sense the modern-day use of the word camp derives from the French se camper (to pose in an exaggerated fashion), in gay circles since at least the early years of the twentieth century the word has meant one thing only: effeminate. In places where people spoke Polari, this flighty, limp-wristed aesthetic got its name from the acronym KAMP, an effeminate man who was Known As a Male Prostitute. The actor and comedian Kenneth Williams wrote that ‘To some it means that which is fundamentally frivolous, to others the baroque as opposed to the puritanical and to others – a load of poofs’4 and he should have known: the closeted Williams and his out companion in comedy Hugh Paddick (who spent the last 30 years of his life with his partner, Francis) made a bona little living, thank you very much, as the über-camp Julian and Sandy, stalwarts of the hit Brit radio show Round the Horne. It’s very clear from listening to the material where the little-known Camp Records label got its name.
Originating from a company called Different Products Unlimited in Hollywood, California, Camp Records (run by the elusive E. Richman) specialised in producing gay-themed novelty records which they advertised, under the banner ‘racy … ribald … madly gay … way out!’ in the back pages of publications such as Drum: Sex in Perspective (a revolutionary magazine from the Janus Society with a national circulation of around 15,000), One and Vagabond, a mid-’60s catalogue aimed exclusively at gay men. Mail order businesses that specialised in gay and lesbian books, such as Washington DC’s Guild Book Service (run by gay publishing pioneer H. Lynn Womack), San Francisco’s Dorian Book Service and Philadelphia’s Lark Publications also carried stock of the discs. The releases were, naturally, ‘shipped postage paid, in sealed plain package’.
Described by their own press releases as ‘wilder, madder (and) gayer than a Beatle’s hairdo,’ Camp Records issued ten 45s. None are dated, but according to correspondence on the company’s headed notepaper, the first two releases (the single ‘Leather Jacket Lovers’ and album The Queen Is In The Closet) seem to have been issued around July 1964 and the third, the 45 release ‘Ballad of the Camping Woodcutter’/‘Scotch Mist’, was released at the end of November. The only ads that have surfaced for the label were published in 1964 and 1965. No new releases appeared after late 1965. The material typically consisted of parodies of well-known songs with their lyrics rewritten to reflect a camp sensibility: ‘I’m So Wet (the Shower Song)’ is a rewrite of the French folk song ‘Alouette’; ‘London Derriere’ is a rewrite of ‘Danny Boy’ (aka Londonderry Air …), and ‘Scotch Mist’ is ‘The Bonnie Banks o’ Loch Lomond’ (better known perhaps as ‘You Take The High Road’) with new lyrics. Some of the discs featured new songs in various styles including rock ’n’ roll (‘I’d Rather Fight Than Swish’ and ‘Leather Jacket Lovers’), Sinatra-style crooner-pop and Latin jazz.
The lyrics comically portrayed the homosexual subculture in America at the time, using broad stereotypes, gay slang and double entendres. Where artists are credited, their names are badly executed puns: Byrd E. Bath and the Gay Blades, Sandy Beech, The Gentle-Men. The name Rodney Dangerfield crops up on several releases and he’s even credited as performing the tap dancing solo on ‘Homer The Happy Little Homo’ (‘a daring, madcap romp right from the pansy patch,’ went the advertising blurb for that particular oddity), but the name is a pseudonym, one that had been in popular use for at least three decades prior to its appearance in the Camp catalogue; Jack Benny had used it for a character on his popular 1940s radio show. The Rodney Dangerfield that recorded for Camp Records is not the late Jewish comedian who found mainstream fame in frat house flicks in the 1980s. It’s no surprise that the performers and producers of these discs were happy to go about their work uncredited. In fact, it was important that the entire operation was kept as anonymous as possible in order to avoid trouble: the company was operating in a time when the production and distribution of recordings like this could lead to arrest for possession and distribution of obscene material. Different Products were only contactable via a PO Box number: Richman kept an office on Hazeltine Avenue, Van Nuys, but no address or telephone number appeared on the company’s letterhead.
Depending on how you view these things, these records are charming period pieces, badly dated Carry On-style comic cuts or complete anachronisms of a thankfully bygone age. Lispy, wispy and fey, and about as sophisticated as a hammer blow to the head, the humour, such as it is, is broader than the side of a barn. More mainstream record companies would echo that same broad humour throughout the 1960s. Record producer (and former Republican governor) Mike Curb issued These Are The Hits, You Silly Savage by Teddy & Darrel (in fact the documentary maker Theodore ‘Teddy’ Charach and his friend Darrell Dee, who both appeared with Curb on the soundtrack to the 1967 movie Mondo Hollywood), featuring camped-up covers of recent hits, and a string of camp 45s appeared on both sides of the pond, The Butch Brothers’ ‘Kay, Why?’ (on Thrust Records), singer Steve Elgins’ ‘Don’t Leave Your Lover Lying Around’ (a silly song about bed-hopping issued in 1974 on Dawn Records), Yin & Yan’s ‘Butch Soap’ (on the giant EMI), and ‘The Ballad of Ben Gay’ by Ben Gay and the Silly Savages (seemingly unconnected to the Teddy & Darrel record) among them. Many camp actors and comedians issued records: in the UK alone, Kenneth Williams, Frankie Howerd, John Inman and Larry Grayson all put out novelty songs that pandered to their camp but closeted persona and that were meant to appeal to either children or grandparents, two demographics unlikely to blush at the tired single-entendres in a song like Inman’s ‘Are You Being Served Sir?’ (‘I’m sorry that this fitting room is dark and rather chilly, just try these on and mind that zip in case you catch your …’). What made records like ‘Butch Soap’ or ‘Kay, Why’ different is that they were advertised – like the Camp Records output – exclusively to the LGBT community through the pages of papers such as Gay News. In 1975 Oscar, a Manchester-based five-piece band working out of 10cc’s Strawberry Studios in Stockport, issued a cover of Noël Coward’s ‘Mad About the Boy’ on Buk records through the major Decca Records company. The song seemed an odd choice for five straight lads from Manchester and it was not included on their debut album, even though that album’s cover featured a band member on the front in white tie and tails, sporting one of Wilde’s green carnations. Oscar, who claimed that they wanted their style of presentation to ‘create an aura of Victorian elegance, splendour and chivalry,’5 soon left Buk to join Elton John at DJM, but their camp/rock aesthetic failed to ignite the record-buying public. Shortly after, the band reverted to its earlier name, The Royal Variety Show, and returned to the northern pub and club circuit, their dreams of major stardom sadly unfulfilled.
Camp Records released two full-length LPs: The Queen Is In The Closet, which consisted of ten songs culled from the singles, and Mad About The Boy, a collection of ten popular torch songs which would usually be sung by a woman but recorded instead by a male vocalist without changing the lyric’s genders, similar to the cross-vocals of the 1920s and 1930s. This produced what the album’s sleeve notes called ‘a wonderful potpourri of love songs done in a most unique way’ and, unlike the rest of the releases on the label, this album eschewed the campness for a much more direct approach.
Two years before Mad About The Boy was issued, a similar album, Love Is A Drag, had appeared on the Lace Records label, featuring 12 songs including ‘The Boy Next Door’, ‘Can’t Help Lovin’ That Man’ and, of course, ‘Mad About The Boy’. Neither album dared to credit the vocalist, musicians, producers, arrangers or engineers. To this day we still do not know who sang any of the Camp Records output, although the sleeve notes – and flyers issued by the company – allude to some pretty big names being involved in what, for them, would have had to have been a covert project. However the cool, sophisticated torch song singer on Love Is A Drag (subtitled For Adult Listeners Only: Sultry Stylings By A Most Unusual Vocalist) was finally revealed (by LGBT archivist JD Doyle) as Gene Howard (born Howard Eugene Johnson in Nashville, Tennessee), a straight, married professional singer who had worked with a number of big jazz names including Gene Krupa and Stan Kenton.6 The idea for the album came from Jack Ames, founder of Edison International Records, who created the Lace Records imprint specifically for this one-off release. The album, long out of print, was reissued by Modern Harmonic in November 2016.
‘The primary reason for doing this album,’ wrote the anonymous author of the sleeve notes to Mad About The Boy ‘was to prove that good songs could and should be sung by everyone. Gender should not be the determining factor as to who should sing what.’ Similarly, the uncredited sleeve notes on Love Is A Drag boasted that ‘at long last a male vocalist with great talent has decided to take the big step – that is, to perform these classics using their original lyrics, In doing so, he has broken the barrier which has confronted so many other great singers who, for lack of courage, have not attempted.’ The covers of both albums echo classic torch song collections: Love Is A Drag, with its moody, out-of-focus late-night jazz feel could house any similar album on a major label. Mad About The Boy features illustrations from another Different Products item, a desk calendar called Roy’s Boys: E. Richman and his co-conspirators seem to have felt that using these images would made the album appeal to an audience already familiar with Julie London’s 1956 album Calendar Girl. Very few copies of these records were pressed: even fewer have survived the past half-century.
Gay porn star Edward Earle Marsh, better known as Zebedy Colt, began his career as a child actor in Hollywood before moving into stage work. After a number of small roles in musicals and reviews – and an appearance (as Edward Earle) on the 1967 LP Noël Coward Revisted – he recorded his 1969 album I’ll Sing for You, (later reissued as Zebedy Sings For You) with the London Philharmonic Orchestra. Like the earlier Love Is A Drag and Mad About the Boy, the album consisted of songs originally sung by women (‘The Man I Love’, ‘I’m In Love With A Wonderful Guy’, Billy Strayhorn’s ‘Lush Life’ and so on) along with a few original, gay-themed songs written by Earle himself: ‘at last some guy had the balls to stand up and sing “The Man I Love” and mean it,’ the promotional blurb ran. By 1975 he was starring in straight porn (under the Zebedy Colt pseudonym) while still appearing on stage and off-Broadway as Edward Earle. He died in 2004, aged 75.
Born in 1909, Sir Robert Helpmann was an Australian dancer who became an international ballet star and choreographer as well as a noted actor and director. Openly gay (he lived with his partner, Old Vic producer Michael Benthall for 36 years) and with a ostentatious sense of theatricality, Robert had been on stage since the age of eight. ‘When he was a little chap,’ his mother, Mattie Helpman, once revealed, ‘he used to take away my stockings and use them for tights. He would tie feathers round his head, too, and go roaming round the streets until I’m sure people thought I had a lunatic in the family.’7
Named ‘Australian of the Year’ in 1965 and knighted in 1968, during the 1930s and 1940s Helpmann was one of British ballet’s premier male dancers. Noted as ‘a dancer who could act and an actor who could dance,’ his personality and talent played a vital part in helping to establish ballet in Britain. After studying briefly with Anna Pavlova in Melbourne (arranged by his rather dour father), Helpmann went to London in 1933 to study and perform with the Sadler’s Wells Ballet, now known as the Royal Ballet. He was the leading male star with that company from 1934 until his resignation in 1950, frequently appearing with his long-time dancing partner Dame Margot Fonteyn. In the 1937-38 season, he beat Laurence Olivier for the part of Oberon in A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Old Vic, playing opposite Vivien Leigh. He later repeated that role opposite Moira Shearer at the Metropolitan Opera House and on a US tour in 1954.
During his years with Sadler’s Wells, Helpmann took occasional leaves of absence to act, most notably in the classic Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger film The Red Shoes, a stylish, highly influential movie about backstage life and backstabbing in the ballet. Years later, when an interviewer asked him whether the high-pitched portrayal of the events and lives of the dancers were exaggerated, he replied, ‘Oh, no, dear boy, it was quite understated’. Other film credits included multiple roles in the Tales of Hoffmann, the Bishop of Ely in Olivier’s Henry V and the terrifying Child Catcher in the classic Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. In 1995, Marilyn Manson paid tribute, of sorts, via the EP Smells Like Children, with Manson dressed as the Child Catcher on the sleeve.
During his career he starred in Puccini’s La Boheme and Rimsky-Korsakov’s Coq d’Or for the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden and T. S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral for the Old Vic and directed the musical Camelot on stage. In 1955, he co-starred with Katharine Hepburn, touring in three Shakespearean plays in Australia, and from 1965 to 1975 he was co-director of the Australian Ballet. The public did not seem to mind about Robert and Michael’s relationship: in 1958 an article in the Australian Women’s Weekly reported on the pair’s domestic status in such a matter-of-fact way that barely a head was turned. However even the Aussies balked at the sight of ‘homosexuals, lesbians and babies being born on stage’ when Helpmann became director of the 1970 Adelaide Festival of Arts8 and commissioned a performance of Thomas Keneally’s apocalyptic melodrama Upstairs.
But here’s one thing you’ll struggle to find a mention of in his official biography: in 1963 Helpmann recorded four surf-themed tracks for HMV in Australia. Seriously. Someone at HMV thought the camp, 54-year-old Helpmann could pass as a teen idol and ride on the coat tails of the Beach Boys, Jan and Dean and the like in to the charts. Two cuts from the session were issued as a 45 the following year (the year he was appointed CBE) – ‘Surfer Doll’ and ‘I Still Could Care’ – with the second pair – ‘Surf Dance’ and ‘Let-A-Go Your Heart’ – issued the following year. Helpmann appeared on an Australian teen entertainment show miming to ‘Surfer Doll’, shoeless and with his hair dyed blond dancing an approximation of the twist while riding an invisible surf board: the man was certainly game for a laugh. The first 45 was also issued in the US, on Blue Pacific Records, and all four tracks were collected on the Raven EP Sir Robert Helpmann Goes Surfing in 1982. ‘I definitely will not record any more,’ Helpmann said in 1966. ‘I am sick of that bit now. I did it all for fun, but it is only fun when it surprises people.’9
Helpmann died in Sydney on 28 September 1986, just two months after his last stage appearance, after a long battle with emphysema caused, it seems, by a lifetime of heavy smoking. He was 77 years old. Prime Minister Bob Hawke said, ‘He was a true achiever in his field and a fine ambassador for Australia who helped to demonstrate to the world the diversity of our talents and our capabilities as a nation’.10 A grieving nation organised a state funeral for the ‘distinguished Australian dancer, actor, producer, director and choreographer,’11 and hundreds of people, including state and federal politicians, filled St Andrews Cathedral, Sydney on 2 October to send him off in style.
‘I was decadent when it wasn’t permissible,’ Australian singer and songwriter Peter Allen (born Peter Woolnough in 1944) once claimed. ‘I have a feeling that it’s more decadent to be normal now’.12 Peter came to international prominence when, during a tour with his act The Allen Brothers in 1964, he met Judy Garland and her then-husband Mark Herron. Three years later, Peter married Judy’s daughter, Liza Minnelli. On the night of their wedding Liza found Allen in bed with another man. Herron and Allen had a sexual relationship throughout their respective marriages: Garland divorced Herron in 1967, although Minnelli stayed married to Allen until 1974. In 1996 Liza told Judy Wieder, editor of The Advocate, that she ‘married Peter and he didn’t tell me he was gay. Everyone knew but me. And I found out … well, let me put it this way: I’ll never surprise anybody coming home as long as I live. I call first!’13 According to contemporary press reports, within hours of their divorce Allen was in the audience of New York’s Grand Finale cabaret bar cheering on Daphne Davis, a Liza Minnelli impersonator.14 The star act at the Grand Finale was Gotham, an openly gay comedy troupe and vocal trio who issued several disco records (including ‘I’m Your AC/DC Man’) and who played sell-out shows at Carnegie Hall and the Kennedy Centre in Washington DC.
In the 1970s, Allen – whose father, a grocer, committed suicide when Allen was just 13 years old – became a cabaret star, as big in Australia as Liberace was in the States: ‘I was out on stage before anyone else,’ he would later claim.15 In 1973, he met the former model Gregory Connell, and the two became lovers. Although he did not make it as a recording artist, he co-wrote a number of big songs, ‘I Honestly Love You’, an international hit for Olivia Newton-John, ‘Don’t Cry Out Loud’ (a UK hit for Elkie Brooks) and others, and appeared in the ill-fated musical version of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. His 1976 album, Taught by Experts, went to Number One in the Australian charts as did its accompanying single, ‘I Go To Rio’. Yet although his performances were well-received at home, he had a harder time trying to make it in the States. ‘I tried to work a little on the gay circuit around the country and I bombed terribly,’ he explained. ‘No one came. No one liked me. The only bad reviews I got were from the gay press. They get nasty and insinuate in ways I never get from the straight press.’16 Still, he persevered and by 1979 was packing them in on The Gay White Way. In 1980 he wrote ‘I Still Call Australia Home’, regarded by some as the country’s real national anthem and followed that up with a co-author credit for the Oscar-winning song ‘Arthur’s Theme (Best That You Can Do)’. Allen gave his last performance in January 1992 in Sydney and died in San Diego, California, on 18 June 1992 from an AIDS-related throat cancer, eight years after Connell, his partner for more than a decade, had also succumbed to AIDS. Allen’s life was the subject of the 1998 musical The Boy from Oz which, in 2003, became the first Australian musical ever to be performed on Broadway. ‘There was something courageous in the way Allen gave Australia the permission to be camp,’ says Brisbane-based writer Peter Taggart. ‘He dragged us out of a dim, buttoned-up Englishness and took us on a permanent summer holiday, with maracas, leopard print and Bob Fosse by way of Rio.’17
Jackie Shane
But the most outrageously camp – and openly gay – performer of the period was probably the Toronto-based Jackie Shane. Born in Nashville in the early 1940s, Jackie was a talented singer who sang like James Brown or Otis Redding but whose look would put both Little Richard and Esquerita to shame. Around 1960 he joined saxophone player Frank Motley’s touring band before moving north of the border. A regular performer at Toronto’s Saphire Tavern, part of the city’s infamous Yonge Street strip, Shane made no bones about his sexuality and he would always look meticulous on stage, in full make-up, sequins and very ‘girly’ hair. He covered the William Bell song ‘Any Other Way’, and when he sang the line ‘tell her that I’m happy, tell her that I’m gay/Tell her that I wouldn’t have it any other way’, the inference was clear. Although ‘Any Other Way’ was a massive local hit, reaching Number Two on Toronto’s radio charts in early 1963, Shane recorded just six 45s and one album (taped live at the Saphire and released in October 1967)18 before he left the city for good. Unusually, the sleeve notes to Jackie Shane Live made knowing reference to his homosexuality: ‘the only problem is when Jackie suggests “let’s go out and get some chicken after the show”, you can’t be sure what he has in mind’; ‘people who deserve your friendship will accept you for yourself’.
One television appearance still exists: grainy 1965 footage of Shane with Frank Motley and his band performing ‘Walking the Dog’ on a late-night Nashville chat show. He looks amazing, his hair piled high in a pompadour that emulates Little Richard, with full eye make-up, earrings, a sequinned top and a feminine collarless jacket. He looked like no one else making records at the time, yet for some unknown reason he did not record again after 1969. Leaving his showbiz life behind him, he moved back to Nashville. Rumours circulated that he had committed suicide or had been murdered but neither was true: he shared a home with his aunt and lived openly, albeit reclusively, as a woman.19 When last heard of, he was still there.