In 1960, a Beverly Hills vinyl emporium known as Record Center, located at the corner of Wilshire and La Cienega, kept running out of an album that moral arbiters of the day would have judged obscene. Many of the buyers came from the restaurant diagonally across the street, Dolores Drive-In, which employed a mostly gay team of carhops.
They and their friends headed to the store’s “Adult” bin, which held albums by the likes of the garish drag queen Rae Bourbon and Belle Barth, the whiskey-voiced, potty-mouthed doyenne of lewd nightclub humor. Filed there was an LP whose jacket bore a moody photo of a young man in profile, exhaling a plume of cigarette smoke; behind him was a blond, blurred-out figure of indeterminate gender. Love Is a Drag, read the title. (In those shadowy years, “drag” was a keyword for gay.) No artist was listed. Instead, the cover warned: FOR ADULT LISTENERS ONLY—SULTRY STYLINGS BY A MOST UNUSUAL VOICE.
The disc boasted a crooner with a burnished baritone in the Dick Haymes tradition. Backed by a jazz quartet, he sang “Lover Man,” “Mad About the Boy,” “He’s My Guy,” and other standards meant for women, and delivered them straightforwardly, without a hint of camp. The liner notes observed that, until this brave singer came along, male vocalists had shunned those tunes. “Why? Were they not written by men? And haven’t they been played by the best men musicians of our time? Think what would happen if orchestrations of these great songs could be performed only by girl musicians!”
Richard Lamparski, who profiled hundreds of bygone celebrities in his book series, recalls how much that album had startled him. “It was one of a kind,” he says. “At that time, almost anything that mentioned homosexuality was so rare.” Decades later, jarred the, while you accept those lines from a woman.”
