American Family of the 1930's Paper Dolls by Tom Tierney
The Hidden Queer History of Paper Dolls
Infinitely adaptable and easy to conceal, these toys were surprisingly appealing to gay men in the 1950s.
The post-obit is an excerpt from the latest episode of Slate's Decoder Ring podcast. Listen to the full episode using theaudio player below, or via Apple Podcasts , Clouded , Spotify , Stitcher , or Google Play .
Newspaper dolls, a vital function of children's lives and way civilisation for generations, have e'er been meant to be instructive: to teach young women and girls how to await and comport. But, from the start, they accept been used in unexpected ways, by people they weren't necessarily intended for.
The start mass-produced paper doll was published in London in 1810 and called The History of Little Fanny. It was a morality play told in verse, near Fanny, a vain, well-to-do girl who has a tantrum when she isn't immune to wearable her favorite dress and then sneaks away from dwelling house. She'southward robbed of her dress, and thus of her status, and becomes a beggar—the prepare came with a beggar outfit. She makes her mode back up the social ladder, one newspaper costume at a time, until she is reunited with her family. The lesson of the book was supposed to be well-nigh the dangers of caring too much about clothes, most how obedience is the only affair standing betwixt a woman and total ruin. But playing with Fanny must have demonstrated the exact opposite of that. It showed the fun of manner and storytelling, the fun of newspaper dolls. This tension—between what paper dolls are meant to teach and the artistic, playful, norm-breaking lessons they tin can teach instead—followed paper dolls into the xxth century.
By the early 1900s, millions of sets of newspaper dolls were beingness sold each twelvemonth past dozens of different publishers. You could buy them for a few cents at the 5 and dime, or cut them out of newspapers, comic books, magazines, and advertisements. There were newspaper dolls of—amidst other things—little girls, similar the incredibly pop Betsy McCall, a perfect avatar of centre-course Eisenhower-era values; brand mascots like Minnie Mouse; and classic flick stars like Judy Garland, Elizabeth Taylor, and Carmen Miranda.
Because paper dolls were flat and printable, they were incredibly adaptable to all sorts of formats. At that place was even a vinyl record made for kids, where the sleeve featured newspaper dolls y'all could cut out and dress. I of the songs on the record, "The Paper Family," past Anne Lloyd and Michael Stewart, has lyrics that describe how an American family ought to carry—as innocently and obediently equally paper dolls.
The conformity represented by paper dolls was easy to subvert, because it was and then piece of cake to ignore. The virtue of simple toys is that it's unproblematic to apply them any style you delight. Newspaper dolls came with a lot of outfits—often viii to 10 per figure—and if you wanted more than, yous could just draw one yourself or cut them out of an old itemize. With all these choices, you could mix everything up, you could pair a gown with a bandana, you could pair a nursing outfit with dungarees. In this way, paper dolls were kind of like a Lego kit, a modular toy that was infinitely adaptable. You could even experiment with cross-dressing your doll. Anything you lot wanted to do, you could do. And this playfulness, this freedom, this is what many queer people loved nearly paper dolls.
In the world of newspaper doll publishing, the most famous gay player was Tom Tierney, who almost unmarried-handedly kept paper dolls alive in the 1970s and '80s—a low point for the popularity of the course. He created more than 400 paper doll books, including one of Pope John Paul II, and even some adult offerings, featuring elevate queens, leather-clad bikers, and other atypical paper doll fare. But references to newspaper dolls show upward all over gay culture.
The about fascinating connectedness we came across while researching this episode of Decoder Ring is also the most mysterious. San Francisco had a gay bar—or, at least, a proto-gay bar—called the Newspaper Doll, sometimes known as the Paper Doll Guild, which was in operation by 1945, perchance fifty-fifty earlier than that, which was incredibly early for an openly gay space. We don't know for sure where the proper noun came from, merely we take a theory, and it has to do with another newspaper doll with a queer connection: In the early 1940s, there was a hugely pop vocal called "Paper Doll," written by Johnny Due south. Black and performed by the Mills Brothers. It's about totally forgotten now, but it sold more than than 11 one thousand thousand copies in its mean solar day. (That's about equally many copies as the "Macarena," the Village People'southward "Y.M.C.A.," or Britney Spears' "…Baby I More than Time.")
The song peaked at No. 1 on the Billboard singles chart in 1943 into 1944, so it would have been everywhere around the time the Paper Doll was opening. It seems probable that the vocal, at least in part, inspired the name of the club—because it has some pretty obvious queer subtext. Too the oddness of a group of men singing most wanting a paper doll, ane line refers to "flirty, flirty guys, with their flirty eyes."
More than generally, the fragility of the paper doll makes them a ready metaphor for gay people in the 1950s and '60s—and notwithstanding for some people even today—whose existence was precarious, who were constantly in danger of being plant out, losing their jobs and families, and having everything ripped away from them. But paper dolls also propose something more hopeful—the possibility of transformation.
And that transformation ways that they are as well a potent symbol for lawmaking-switching, of how changing outfits can change how you lot are perceived and human action in unlike groups and situations. Out in the real earth, you might article of clothing the clothes of a lawyer or a sailor, but so when you're around other gay people, say at the Paper Doll in San Francisco, you can shed that outfit and don something more authentically yourself.
To learn more about paper dolls and their hidden gay history, heed to Episode five of Decoder Band , "The Newspaper Doll Club."
Source: https://slate.com/culture/2018/08/the-hidden-gay-history-of-paper-dolls.html
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