The Crooked Man by Charles Beaumont (1955)

 The Crooked Man by Charles Beaumont (1955)

Bonus: 

No, not that one.

Summary: In the future, the gays will oppress the straights!

Commentary: After the hamfisted "the racial minorities will oppress the Whites!" from last night, I remember the infamous story of the Playboy story about a gay society oppressing straight people. I looked it up, and I'm going to kick off this blog with it. I feel like the fact that it exists is a classic piece of trivia, but the story itself doesn't get a ton of recognition. It's also not really that good, existing only to serve the moral, and even then not doing a great job.

It opens with the "men lusting for men" verse from Romans. I wonder (not sure you could get away with it in 1955) if it would be better with a flipped version of the verse, suggesting the Bible had been altered to support the new homosexual order. I do like that "queer" is not a slur for straight people, good flup there. 

The gay world is, of course, represented by an orgy bar. This is probably the most accurate/offensive part of the story. On the other hand, in the just regular offensive category, the one woman is stupid and hysterical. She probably needs a vaginal massage.

Probably the most interesting part is the fact that the world appears to be entirely segregated by sex. Women and men are represented by different senators, and everyone lives in single gender dorms. It seems like they're even in different cities or neighborhoods (whatever a Unit is). No more fag hags I guess.

Overall, it's not a great story. The writing is passable, but there's not real character or anything. Just a couple people delivering exposition and being cliche. I can see why this is more famous for existing that the actual writing. 

Other fun trivia: There's a lot of cross over of writers (and even stories) between Playboy and The Twilight Zone of all things. Beaumont wrote about a half a dozen Twilight Zone episodes, and around a dozen stories for Playboy. I had a student tell me he wanted to read Playboy in class once. I think I pulled out one of the Richard Matheson ones, but I'm not sure. It's been awhile.