Take Pride in Who You Love
Hours after the horrific news broke of the shooting at the gay nightclub in Orlando, the gunman’s father suggested to the media that the sight of 2 men kissing may have prompted his son to go on a killing rampage.
A kiss.
Now more than ever, it’s time to end the shame of being attracted to partners who fall outside the range of who our society tells us we should love.
Love is Love.
Vintage Ad Colgate 1951
The selling of who we may love may finally have reached its expiration date.
In a country that long prided itself on endless choices of toothpaste, breakfast cereal and shampoos, for far too long there really was only one choice when it came to who you could love.
You stuck with the brand you knew and trusted.
Heterosexual – It’s the right brand. Time tested…dependable…AMA approved…loved by millions. Don’t accept substitutes.
Don’t Box Me In
Vintage Romance Comics
Today there is a cultural shift as we slowly begin to shrug off the need for definitions and labels in how we conceive gender or who our society has told us we should be sexually attracted to.
The choices are widening, encouraging those who are uncomfortable being slotted into a gender binary.
The Normal Heart…Love Honor and Obey
Vintage Romance Comics
With the media obsessed with defining and exaggerating gender codes of masculinity and femininity, never was the insistence that everyone fit into a heterosexual cisgender model stronger than in mid-century America.
Images of happy heterosexuals as the norm permeated popular culture, scattering its potent assumptions of family, marriage and who we should love deep into our collective psyches.
Girls Romance
In the late 1940s and early 1950s romance comics were aimed at teenagers and young women in their 20s but they appealed to a younger market ranging from 10 to 17.
When it came learning about love, teen girls turned to romance comics, ground zero of mid-century hetero-normative love.
With names such as Young Romance, Girls Love and Secret Hearts , the colorful, pulpy pages were filled with heart throbbing stories about the rocky road to love in the quest for Mr. Right.
Interestingly enough romance comics were written and drawn primarily by men. Even the advice columns with bylines attributed to women were written by men
The formulaic stories were instructive, telling the readers how to find a man, how to keep him, how to be beautiful for him and most important how to get him to put a ring on your finger.
Skating on Thin Ice
There was only one path to true happiness and anyone who veered from that was headed for trouble. Fast girls who got pregnant got the shame they deserved but could be redeemed, but a girl who wasn’t boy crazy?
Unthinkable!
Vintage Romance Comic Books 1960’s
No one wanted to be thought of as being “That Kind of Girl!”
Let’s follow the instructive story of “Liz” the not too subtly named Tomboy who queerly enough shows no interest in boys. Despite the taunts, leering comments and shaming pointed her way our hero… er …heroine stands firm.
That is until… she meets the Right boy, in a story entitled “That Strange Girl!”
That Strange Girl
Vintage Romance Comics
Failure to conform to these confining roles meant there was a whole lot of shaming going on.
The Key to Femininity
Vintage Romance Comics
Vintage Romance Comics
Vintage Romance Comics
Vintage Romance Comics
She Doesn’t Go For Boys!
Vintage Romance Comics
Vintage Romance Comics
Vintage Romance Comics
What Do You Think I Was…?
Vintage Romance Comics
Vintage Romance Comics
This story appeared in a romance comic from the early 1970’s. Still grounded in the morality of the 1950s’s, the Love Comics genre could never adjust to the new changing morality despite trying to deal with contemporary themes, eventually dealing a death knell for romance comics.
Today’s changing morality has likewise signaled a death knell to limitations on love.
Take pride in who you love!
(©) 20016 Sally Edelstein All Rights Reserved
Envisioning The American Dream 
Indeed Sally! Love is love. It knows no ethnicity, no national borders, no amount of money, no time, no genders, no animal genders either! It is the highest reason to exist. In ancient Greece their love took on six different forms — Philia, Ludus, Pragma, Eros, Agape, Philautia — and NONE OF THEM had anything to do with gender nor were restricted IN THE LEAST by gender! Mmmm, what it must have been like to live in such an OPEN loving society as Greece! ❤
In Western cultures such as ours, since the fall of Alexander the Great's empire, I'm afraid there is ONE primary cause (with 2 offshoots) for our recent and modern segration, the hate, the ignorance, the discrimination, and lethal brutality which nurtures and leads to a human psychological aggressive pathology and behaviour — the Abrahamic religions. Many hyper-Conservative or Fundamental Evangelical Christians (basically any zealots in the 3 religions too) consistently tell me “We love the person, but we hate the sin.” And they know several of the specific Scriptural passages to ‘support’ their social-reform-directive. And for them, if it’s clearly in the Torah, Holy Bible, or Quran, then it is to be hated and changed. How that change is to be exacted is up for neverending debate among Abrahamic followers.
The point is if there did not exist those “Holy Scriptures” claimed to be God’s direct Words/Commands, then I’d imagine pragmatic reasonable intelligent people would embrace what actual Nature and Science have proven and compellingly shown: that truly Love has no limits, no boundaries, and is as diverse as every single molecule and particle, known and unknown, possibly imaginable! We humans are ruled by Nature (our DNA) as well as this vast Multiverse/Universe… not the other way around. Period.
As usual, wonderful post Sally! ❤
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Thank you as always for your invaluable insights
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Whenever I read your blog, I think of all the people who would enjoy your blog. This post is painfully true and fascinating too.
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I am so glad you enjoy the blog, and please feel free to share! Although we have seemingly moved as a society towards greater acceptance towards diversity of relationships and whom we may love, old fears and shame and hatred sadly still linger
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