
The 1960s saw greater acceptance for diverse lifestyles, and this led to an outpouring of interest in gay culture in cities across the U.S. TIME’s cover story in 1969, coming on the heels of New York’s Stonewall Riots, examined new attitudes toward homosexuality. It was an effort to clear up some of the fears, particularly crucial at a time when all but one state had antisodomy laws on the books. While the story was supportive of the movement and called for tolerance, it still maintained a questioning tone about the culture:
Discrimination aside, what about the more indirect propagation of homosexual points of view? Homosexual taste can fall into a particular kind of self-indulgence as the homosexual revenges himself on a hostile world by writing grotesque exaggerations of straight customs, concentrates on superficial stylistic furbelows or develops a “campy” fetish for old movies. Somerset Maugham once said of the homosexual artist that “with his keen insight and quick sensibility, he can pierce the depths, but in his innate frivolity he fetches up from them not a priceless jewel but a tinsel ornament.”