I'm much more pleased to proceed with a year of Gil Elvgren's marvelous pin-up girls from the middle of the last century. All paintings in this series originate from between 1944 - 1968. This week's painting is Gay Nymph, from 1946.
I feel better now.
She doesn't seem gay to me, but I don't suppose one can tell at a glance. (Little joke there - nearly.) She does look like a nympho though. What an artist Gil Elvgren was, eh?
ReplyDeleteIncidentally (on an unrelated note), some of my detractors sometimes follow me over to other blogs and leave negative comments about me ('Ignore him, he's a troll'), or contact the blogger via email with the same sort of nonsense. Let me know if you get any of that sh*t, eh?
We're still in the "Gay Paree" popular usage of Gay, as you well know, Mr. the Kid. (Wait - that was a different movie...)
ReplyDeleteBut, for younger readers, though the word gay was used as early as the late 19th century as a reference to homosexuals, it was a more covert cultural term. It didn't really gain wide usage by the general public in the USA until the 1970s.
Hmm...
Have i bothered to write about cultural context when digging through the past? Damn archive is growing big enough that it's getting to be hard to check.
Well, you learn something new every day. I thought it was first adopted in the '70s - didn't realize it had been in (covert) use before then, at the same time as its more generally-known innocent meaning.
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