Mid-century scandal rag Hush-Hush gets all riled up in this September 1961 issue featuring cover star Elizabeth Taylor. Inside, readers are treated to exposés of Taylor, Eddie Fisher, Brigitte Bardot, Sonny Liston, and Beverly Aadland, as well as shocking tales about goings-on in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and Baumholder, Germany, but it’s in the article on bodybuilding magazines that Hush-Hush truly gets out the knives. Because erotic publications openly catering to gay males would have caused a legal firestorm in the early 1960s, various enterprising capitalists published gay content in the guise of bodybuilding magazines, using health and fitness as a cover for imagery designed to sexually titillate. Hush-Hush journo Sidney Reed jumps all over this practice in his article, informing readers about the existence of these magazines in terms so abusive we’ve never seen their equivalent in print anywhere. He uses phrases like “sex sick creepsters” and “lunatic depravity”, and there are many more insults, so colorful, so vicious, and piled so high that it begins to feel like satire. But Reed is 100% serious, perhaps even obsessed. He finds, in one of the magazines he located, an ad for nude photographs of a fourteen-year-old boy, then tars all gay men with that brush, while of course sparing heterosexuals from the same treatment even though the trade in pre-pubescent girls was well-established and well-documented by that time. It’s worth pointing out once again that Hush-Hush wasn’t a fringe publication—it sold millions of copies a month. And so you get a sense of some very prevalent attitudes about homosexuality in the early ’60s. We have many scans below, and more issues of Hush-Hush coming later. 

Above is a Hush-Hush from March 1960 with a spotlight on Errol Flynn’s “perverse fling with his Lolita.” They’re talking about fifteen-year old Beverly Aadland, left, who we’ve mentioned before. The article is the beginning of a long tradition of journalists writing the truth—or at least their version of it—about Flynn. Since his death he’s been tagged as a bisexual, a fascist, and a Nazi spy. As recently as 1988 Aadland offered her truth about Flynn in a People interview, and a 1990 book by biographer Tony Thomas rejected the fascist claims, pointing out instead that Flynn had left-leaning politics, though he had made racist comments in letters and conversation. But Thomas claimed Flynn’s true feelings were evidenced by his support for the Loyalists during the Spanish Civil War, and his friendship with Fidel Castro. Flynn has also been depicted with assorted personality quirks in films such as 1996’s The Australian, with guy Pearce, and 2004’s The Aviator, with Leonardo DiCaprio. So, suffice it to say that he’s never gone out of style. But as far as whose story to believe concerning who Flynn was, we can’t say. We doubt the conflicting accounts will ever truly be settled—with the passing of Beverly Aadland just last month, all the people who knew Flynn personally are dead.