 Hush-Hush shares its views on homosexuality. 
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.                    
 Another smalltown beauty meets ruin in Hollywood. 
She was born Ellen Louise Stowe in Little Rock, Arkansas, but she called herself Star because of her fascination with the sky. She even got a big blue star tattooed below her bikini line. She moved to Los Angeles with ambitions to become a dancer and caught the eye of a Playboy scout while performing at a strip bar. From that point forward she met lots of celebrities and made connections. She was acquainted with Kiss bassist Gene Simmons, dated him, and posed for a Kiss picture disc. Offered an opportunity to be a Playmate of the Month, she accepted and was featured in the magazine’s February 1977 issue.
The relationship with Simmons eventually fizzled and her dancing career never took off. But while she didn’t become famous, she did eventually meet a man, who she married and had a son with. But the union ended in divorce and Stowe moved to Fort Lauderdale in 1986, where she returned to stripping. Former centerfolds typically make good money on the dance circuit and, though little is known about Stowe’s life in Florida, it’s safe to assume that she did okay at first. But she liked to party, and drug problems eventually forced her into prostitution to survive.
On March 16, 1997 she was found strangled and dumped behind an Eckerd pharmacy. Another area prostitute named Sandra Kay Walters had been strangled in the same manner weeks earlier, leading police  to believe both women had been victims of the same assailant. But leads were scarce. Later in 1997 another woman named Tammy Strunk was found dead in a shopping center trash bin in the city of Plantation, Florida. Before the year ended a woman named Theresa Kettner was found dead in Coral Springs. By then police had to admit they probably had a serial killer on their hands. When two more strangled women turned up in 1999, what had been a strong theory became an ironclad certainty. But then the crimes stopped. Since 1999 there haven't been any new killings fitting the modus operandi of the previous strangulations, and today the cases are unsolved. Of all the former Playmates who died before their time, Stowe’s story is among the most tragic. Her nickname was meant to tell the world of her poetic spirit, but when she fell so far, and burned out so fast, it also provided a metaphor for her life.
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The headlines that mattered yesteryear.
1914—RMS Empress Sinks
Canadian Pacific Steamships' 570 foot ocean liner Empress of Ireland is struck amidships by a Norwegian coal freighter and sinks in the Gulf of St. Lawrence with the loss of 1,024 lives. Submerged in 130 feet of water, the ship is so easily accessible to treasure hunters who removed valuables and bodies from the wreck that the Canadian government finally passes a law in 1998 restricting access. 1937—Chamberlain Becomes Prime Minister
Arthur Neville Chamberlain, who is known today mainly for his signing of the Munich Agreement in 1938 which conceded the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia to Nazi Germany and was supposed to appease Adolf Hitler's imperial ambitions, becomes prime minister of Great Britain. At the time Chamberlain is the second oldest man, at age sixty-eight, to ascend to the office. Three years later he would give way to Winston Churchill. 1930—Chrysler Building Opens
In New York City, after a mere eighteen months of construction, the Chrysler Building opens to the public. At 1,046 feet, 319 meters, it is the tallest building in the world at the time, but more significantly, William Van Alen's design is a landmark in art deco that is celebrated to this day as an example of skyscraper architecture at its most elegant. 1969—Jeffrey Hunter Dies
American actor Jeffrey Hunter dies of a cerebral hemorrhage after falling down a flight of stairs and sustaining a skull fracture, a mishap precipitated by his suffering a stroke seconds earlier. Hunter played many roles, including Jesus in the 1961 film King of Kings, but is perhaps best known for portraying Captain Christopher Pike in the original Star Trek pilot episode "The Cage".
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