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  • A Suitcase Full of Vaseline, or Travels in the 1970s Gay World
  • Lucas Hilderbrand (bio)

A photo of a soft-sided suitcase, unzipped to reveal that it has been packed with nothing but small tubes of Vaseline, illustrated a summer 1969 feature article on travel tips for gay men in a new lifestyle magazine (fig. 1). The image appeared without a caption, suggesting the self-evidence of the visual joke that sex rather than sightseeing would be the activity on holiday. The writer advised: "It's a wise gay guy who takes a supply of antibiotics along for sudden viruses and other 'diseases of the throat.'" Also on the list of things to pack: "douche, needle and thread, scissors, Vaseline, K-Y, Vaseline, K-Y, Vaseline, etc."1 Written prior to but published contemporaneously with the pivotal Stonewall riots, this article suggests a gay male readership hip to the innuendo of the image and the implications of the repetition on the packing checklist. But as an advice feature, it also suggested that there was still much for readers to learn about the gay lifestyle and about navigating the world of same-sex action.

This travel article appeared in Queen's Quarterly (soon to be renamed QQ), a glossy gay men's magazine that debuted in the spring of 1969 and continued publication for a decade. QQ explored the concept of a gay lifestyle, scripting a way of life for gay men that might be seen as both homogenizing and reflecting the range of interests and issues that such a lifestyle might entail. With the cover slogan, "For Gay Guys Who Have No Hangups," the magazine's articles spanned sex advice, health, hygiene and grooming, food, fashion, travel, and fiction. What was largely missing from its coverage were explicit claims toward political activism or news in [End Page 373]


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Figure 1.

A suitcase full of Vaseline illustrates a gay travel advice column in Queen's Quarterly, summer 1969. Courtesy of the ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives.

line with better-remembered gay liberation periodicals of the time. QQ's success helped launch two spin-off publications from the same publisher: Body (1972-80), a gay erotic magazine, and Ciao! (1973-80), a gay travel magazine. The point of gay travel, as introduced in QQ and expanded in [End Page 374] Ciao!, was less about sightseeing than it was about the potential for nonstop erotic adventure. Ciao!, the primary case study for this essay, fleshed out what it termed "the world of gay travel" during the 1970s.

My interest in these 1970s magazines is primarily historical, though my discovery of them was inadvertent. During a visit to the ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives in Los Angeles to research the history of gay bars in the United States, a volunteer suggested that I start by browsing Ciao!, of which I'd never heard, as a resource to compile the names of specific venues for further investigation elsewhere. Ciao! proved fascinating in its own right, however, for the ways it charted the emergence of recurring sites for gay male sex and socialization across the country and around the world while also foregrounding that the period was very much one of transition for gay enclaves that reflected the broader political and economic crises of the time. Through in-depth guides, Ciao! treated each city as locally specific, and changes within cities during the decade were updated in follow-up articles. Thus, the magazine provided an exhaustive survey of local gay scenes and sites over several years and now stands as an unusually rich if untapped guide to the recent gay past. The magazine's presumption of interracial desire in its prose and its conspicuous objectification of an array of ethnic bodies in photographs suggest both an unapologetic focus on sex and ambivalent politics; in this way, Ciao! documents precisely the practices of racialized desire that queer studies has at times been reticent to offer.2

The magazine was so slickly produced and continued publication for long enough to suggest some kind of mainstream status in its own moment, but it now seems all but written out of...

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