So you're Courier Six...

FALLOUT | THE TRAP

requested by: anon

request: 1950s pajama styles

LUCILLE BALL as MAY DALY

This film is about the power struggle between a wealthy aristocrat and his servant. The person who submitted this film says "based on a queer novella, the queerness is more implied than explicit in the film:"

at the beginning of the decade, a lot of black people still straightened their hair to some degree, and black women wore wigs as wigs were very popular across the board for all races during this time.

natural hair came into fashion during the mid to latter half of the 60s as it coincided with the black power movement. clothing should be pretty easy to research since we still tended to wear the things that were popular, BUT just as the natural hair movement gained traction, it wasn’t unusual at all to see black people wearing dashikis and african inspired prints toward the last half of the decade.

several black magazines like jet and essence are free to read on google, i would recommend looking at the covers for that decade. i always look to @vintagewoc, @blackinperiodfilms and @waheedpix for specific decades. black archives is an amazing resource but you have to really dig, since i don’t believe they sort by decade on their instagram. you can also look through my 60s tag!

9 months later and i finally finished designing my bougie outer worlds captain, cosette haile 🪐

no gif this time, a lot of detail would get lost unfortunately 💔 you can read her short bio here!

Location Sketches

Concept art for Fallout 3

Mojave Express Logo

Asset for Fallout: New Vegas

This took hours but it was worth it. Very proud.

Under the cut for better look at the sign

my sense as somebody who watches and reads way too much old stuff is that a lot of stuff that reads to us as gay was not considered so at the time—like Wings, which was a hit at the time and (that I know of) caught no homophobic backlash, reads to modern eyes as being an extremely queer, and open about it, movie. Standards of intimacy, affection, relationships, etc. have shifted over time—you can see people in old books and movies interacting with their same-sex friends with huge amounts of physical and verbal affection, in ways that today read as romantic, and to my knowledge that was so normalized as a friend thing no one considered a queer reading into it. It’s a tragic slip of history that as queerness came more into the open, the heterosexual fear of being perceived as gay resulted in a lot of the “no homo” type behaviors and the expectations for what platonic relationships could look like shifted to the more distant version we have today.

WITH THAT SAID. There are gay characters in old movies who are clearly coded as gay! The “pansy craze” in the 30s, spotlighting gay drag culture from Greenwich Village, shows up bright as day in a Clara Bow picture. Here’s a clearly gay tailor measuring Jimmy Cagney in The Public Enemy. In Wings itself, there is a sequence showing various stages of a romantic relationship—and it includes a lesbian couple. The Hays Code in the 30s, and more broadly the great sweep of conservatism that hit the US in the 50s, killed a bunch of clear queer representation, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t showing up wherever it could, however it could.