The Bicentennial Mandate
Critics of nationalism have long objected to the ways in which national birthday commemorations in general, and U.S. national birthday celebrations in particular, can turn into narcissistic rituals of self-congratulation in which outsiders are othered, insiders are homogenized, hierarchies are reinforced, and borders are policed. All of these criticisms were made about the U.S. bicentennial, but some of the most in-depth and sustained attacks on the “buy-centennial” focused on commercial corruption, corporate influence, and financial conflicts of interest. “Philadelphia Freedom,” a January 1977 fashion feature by Mandate, illustrates some of the forms that bicentennial commercialization took in the 1970s.
Philadelphia Freedom
Mandate’s article used for its headline the title of Elton John’s hit song “Philadelphia Freedom,” which was released in 1975 but written the year before. The song reportedly was an expression of affection for Billie Jean King, the tennis champion who played for the Philadelphia Freedoms, a professional tennis team.[1] Neither John nor King were “out” as gay in this period, but rumors circulated about both. “I live and breathe this Philadelphia freedom,” declared the lyrics written by John’s long-time collaborator Bernie Taupin. “From the day that I was born I’ve waved the flag.” As British subjects, Taupin and John presumably waved the Union Jack, not the Stars and Stripes, but the song was widely interpreted as a patriotic homage to the United States during its bicentennial era.
The lyrics of “Philadelphia Freedom” also were sexually suggestive, especially for those who knew or suspected that John was gay. One stanza stated, “I used to be a heart beating for someone / But the times have changed / The less I say the more my work gets done.” Another declared, “Philadelphia freedom took me knee-high to a man / Yeah gave me peace of mind my daddy never had.” Still another concluded, “If you choose to you can live your life alone / Some people choose the city / Some others choose the good old family home / I like living easy without family ties / Till the whippoorwill of freedom zapped me / Right between the eyes.”
Ambiguous enough for mass market success, the lyrics appealed to the many LGBTQ+ listeners who enjoyed the coded meanings, even if the final words called freedom’s benefits into question. There was the gender-neutral reference to a heart beating for “someone”; the allusion to secrecy and silence; the erotically charged image of kneeling in front of a man; the campy invocation of the gay-coded term “daddy”; the reference to choosing between city and family home; and the preference for living without family ties. “Philadelphia Freedom,” performed by a gay superstar in a decade that witnessed the mass mobilization of LGBTQ+ movements, made a case for including gender and sexual liberation in the bicentennial’s broader celebration of freedom.
Fashioning Freedom
Compared to the song, the Mandate fashion spread was openly gay and explicitly sexual, but it, too, was coded in meaningful ways, beginning with its title, which implicitly linked the bicentennial to gay freedom and sexual freedom. Founded in 1975, Mandate was owned by George Mavety, a Canadian-born man who apparently was straight, fathered a large number of children with his three wives and other women, and came to believe in the profitable potential of gay porn after U.S. courts began easing restrictions on full frontal male nudity. Gay porn magazines grew tremendously in the 1970s, a fact that can be attributed to post-Stonewall gay visibility, the gay and straight sexual revolutions, the growth of gay consumer culture, and changes in the legal regulation of obscenity. Mandate was one of the most successful.[2]
Mandate’s “Philadelphia Freedom” may have been inspired by the July 1976 special “pull out” supplement of DiMension, a short-lived Philadelphia-based publication that described itself as “the national entertainment newspaper for men who like things manly.” The supplement featured a map and guide to Philadelphia gay bars, bathhouses, hotels, restaurants, tearooms, and other sites, along with a campy photo essay, tourist album, and fashion spread. Mandate’s much slicker feature borrowed ideas, images, and at least one photographer from DiMension’s.[3]
Henri David, a long-time gay impresario in Philadelphia, talked about being approached by Mandate in a 1996 interview: “They came to me as we were opening Second Story [a gay club that opened at Walnut and 12th Streets in December 1976]…. They didn't find me because of Second Story; they found me because of my parties. They knew of my parties and contacted me and the photographer came down. And they had me set the whole thing up.” Calling it "Philadelphia Freedom," he noted, was “their idea.” Asked how he was able to arrange for the photo shoots, David replied, “I've done that my whole life…. My first posters for Halloween and other parties used to always be photos. Over the years they'd be montages and then they became drawings and they're different every year. But they always used to be photos, usually of myself and a lot of friends. And one of the absolute first ones I did was on the steps of the old library down here on South Broad Street, the Old Ridgeway, which is now going to become the School for Performing Arts. And it wasn't planned. I had a huge party at my house the night before and most of these people stayed all night. And it was dawn and we were all still partying and having a blast. And I said, ‘You know what? You all look great. Let's go.’ And I grabbed a bunch of costumes and about thirty friends. We went down there and stood on the steps of the library and took this amazing photo of just every kind of person you can imagine.” According to David, he arranged for local men to model for the Mandate feature: “I've always had a stable of gorgeous men. They just find me. And I give them what they want. I mean long before muscle men were happening, long before go-go boys were happening, I always just sort of knew the most beautiful people around. And I just said, ‘Oh thank you very much and I'd keep their name and use them.”[4]
Mandate’s three-part feature on Philadelphia, produced and photographed by Ron Larson with David identified as the Philadelphia coordinator of the first and the author of the third, began with a photograph of a male model standing in front of Old City’s Library Hall, originally built in 1789-90, torn down in the 1880s, and reconstructed in the 1950s. Below the photograph a caption declared, “Early patriots fought for it. The Founding Fathers declared it. Elton John sang about it. Freedom has been the major theme in a Bicentennial year, and Mandate traveled to the Bicentennial City, Philadelphia, for location shooting of winter fashions. Here, under the ever watchful eye of Benjamin Franklin, model Frank Zimmerman wears a cream zip-front, all-wool sweater by Adolfo. $95.”[5]
Larson and David’s fashion feature inserted gay men and male homoeroticism, almost exclusively white, into dominant narratives of U.S. history and consumer capitalism. It simultaneously positioned sexualized male bodies in and on historic structures and placed them in and out of fashionable clothing. “Philadelphia Freedom” evoked freedom from tyranny, freedom of expression, and freedom to buy. For Mandate’s presumptively gay audience, the article presented gay men as key actors in U.S. history, attractive figures in the urban landscape, and trend-setting leaders in the culture of bourgeois consumption, leisure, and pleasure.
The article’s second page presented another model positioned in front of another architecturally significant site. As the text explained, “On historic Head House Square, one of America’s oldest reconstructed market places, Michael O’Donnell…wears camel-colored gabardine trousers topped by a pale cream cardigan by Adolfo.” Michael, the text noted, would be appearing nude in an upcoming issue of Mandate, but for now he was shown holding “a Philadelphia specialty, a chocolate-covered banana.” The phallic treat was courtesy of “The Fruit Lady,” a local shop featured in the background.[6] For the titillation of Mandate’s readers, male models were presented as transgressive in sexual terms, but also in the ways they inspired gay men to imagine themselves as part of a reconstructed history, landscape, and market. Encouraging its readers to see things that only other gay men were thought to see, Mandate worked to establish a consumption-oriented community based on shared erotic spectatorship and the humor that could be generated through the homoeroticization of everyday life.
The opposing page featured model John Esposito, “who finds Independence Hall the ideal place for reflecting today’s free and easy lifestyle. He’s wearing a strikingly cut grey all-wool pullover by Bagatelle. $75.” Celebrated as the Old City location where the Declaration of Independence was adopted in 1776, Independence Hall was presented here as an evocative symbol of sexual freedom and bourgeois consumption.[7] Decades later, Johnnie Walker Red Label whiskey would run an advertisement in gay magazines that insisted, “For the last time, it’s not a lifestyle. It’s a life.”[8] Notwithstanding the advertisement’s important distinction, the boundaries between “life” and “lifestyle” were not clear cut in the 1970s, and in many respects Mandate was more honest in calling it for what it was.
If much of gay life was a lifestyle in the 1970s, part of that lifestyle was an approach to history that embraced urban renewal and narrative renovation. As Mandate explained on the fourth and fifth pages of its fashion feature, “One of Philadelphia’s many Bicentennial projects was the restoration of the Chestnut Street Transitway…, now a charming pedestrian mall with strategically placed maps for history-hungry tourists.”[9] For gay visitors, Mandate’s article itself was a strategically placed map and its contents provided readers with signs and symbols of Philadelphia’s racial geography as well. The photograph of the Transitway featured the article’s only visibly African American model, John Swygert, who was described as “dashing in a dark blue wool gabardine trenchcoat by DeCarlo. $250.” Swygert’s accessories included “a formidable Doberman pinscher,” who was described as the “mascot” of the store that sold the coat.
On the one hand, this image gestured toward racial inclusion; presented a positive image of a well-dressed black man; and reversed the iconic images of police dogs attacking African American activists in the heyday of the civil rights movement. On the other hand, the fashion feature’s only visibly nonwhite model, arguably presented as a mascot for urban diversity, was partnered with a dog; canines were commonly trained by store owners to practice racial profiling; and Swygert’s downward and deferential gaze was in striking contrast to the forceful and forward stares of the two adjacent white models. Behind the bespectacled Swygert were two well-dressed African American men, who looked like they just happened to be walking by when the model was being photographed. This image may have helped the fashion feature avoid accusations of white exclusivity, but its tokenized representation of racial diversity and its fantastical figuration of a color-blind Center City commercial landscape (gay and straight) obscured ongoing problems of structural racism and economic inequality.
Mandate’s feature also mapped a series of relationships between campy effeminacy and cloned masculinity. In juxtaposing the butch appearance of the models with the wry sensibility of the captions, the fashion-consciousness of the clothing, and the artsiness of the locations, “Philadelphia Freedom” offered readers multiple entry points and trajectories for vectors of identification and desire. The text on the fifth page explained, “As aesthetically pleasing as the collection inside the Art Museum behind him…is Mark Manning…in a double-breasted simulated seal coat. $225. Bruce Rainier…regally sheathes his weightlifter’s build in a suede coat trimmed with fur. From Ericson of Sweden. $375. Pausing before the Museum, Bill Fairfield…sports a wrap coat of brown wool tweed by Rafael of Italy. $275.”
Mandate also mapped relationships between historical tourism and gay cruising. Moving through spaces in the local geography where the two converged, “Philadelphia Freedom” featured shots of men at the Art Museum, Rittenhouse Square, and Fairmount Park, before turning to more intimate sites and sights. Philadelphia’s tourist attractions for gay men included the implied possibilities of liaisons with other sightseers and the men of Philadelphia themselves. As the text on page six noted, “On Philadelphia’s famous Rittenhouse Square, Artie Catania….matches his own natural symmetry with that of a whimsical landmark sculpture. He’s stiff competition, even viewed from behind, in a striking denim jumpsuit by Rafael. $165.” (The 1947 sculpture is the Evelyn Taylor Price Memorial Sundial by Beatrice Fenton, the longtime intimate partner of Marjorie Martinet.[10]) The next page featured a model ascending the stairs at one of Philadelphia’s historic houses: “At the Lemon Hill Mansion in historic Fairmount Park…, John Esposito takes things one step at a time, in a beige and rust corduroy jacket with matching rust slacks.”
Penn’s Men and the Philadelphia Story
The next section of Mandate’s feature, subtitled “Penn’s Men,” began by noting that “what William Penn originally called his ‘greene towne’ has since been dubbed City of Brotherly Love. For more than one reason. Exemplifying the friendliness, hospitality and startling good looks of the men of Philadelphia is Doug Anthony…. An upcoming Mandate will uncover more of this handsome discovery, but, for now, his face alone says, ‘Welcome to Philadelphia,’ where, we suspect, freedom rings and reigns.”
Moving from outdoor fashion shots to indoor nudes, Mandate next offered four local attractions, including Bill Fairfield and Mark Manning, who were “just two of the many manly reasons why the City of Brotherly Love is enjoying a real renaissance.” Next up was Chuck Woodbury, described as “the Philadelphia nude ascending a staircase.” For readers familiar with Marcel Duchamp’s painting “Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2,” Mandate offered the added pleasures of an insider’s joke. For those who knew that Duchamp’s painting had been donated to the Philadelphia Art Museum in 1954, the joke was even better.
The following page featured a nude photograph of “Bangkok-born John Esposito.” Esposito was not visibly Thai in ethnic terms, so the reference to his birthplace may have been a joke about his potentially banging cock, semi-erect, which pointed in the direction of Woodbury’s nude ass on the opposing page. He, too, was presented as “a glorious cause for visiting the Bicentennial city.”
Mandate next offered Henri David’s tour of the local gay scene, which was cleverly titled “The Philadelphia Story” after the 1940 film by gay director George Cukor (starring Cary Grant, Katherine Hepburn, and James Stewart).[11] David’s article began by invoking and then rejecting the famous Philadelphia put-down: “‘The first prize,’ went the old Vaudeville routine, ‘is a week in Philadelphia. The second prize is two weeks.” The article continued, “After years of being maligned, our city has at last come into her own well deserved position of importance as America’s fourth largest metropolis.” Living in a city that many did not realize was among the nation’s largest, David simultaneously adopted the defensive pose of the urban booster and the proud posture of the size queen.
Henri next described Philadelphia’s “good points,” which included its cultural institutions, public parks, local neighborhoods, and historical sites, though ironically he began his list by referring to the city’s proximity to Washington, New York, Fire Island, Atlantic City, and Provincetown. He then turned to his city’s “great” points: “We have one of America’s largest gay populations, and the City of Brotherly Love is out to prove it’s just that, with plenty of sisterly love thrown in for good measure.” After describing twenty-five gay bars, clubs, restaurants, baths, and other sites in the commercial landscape, David declared, “We more than hold our own as a gay capital” and “shopping while in Center City is also a pleasure.” One of the photographs featured in this section explained that “Mandate Men enjoy the New Market at Head House Square, a sparkling complex of boutiques and restaurants constructed in period style for the nation’s 200th birthday.” David concluded by speculating about the founding father of Pennsylvania and Philadelphia: “If William Penn were to [be] reborn today and gaze down on what had once been a tiny Quaker hamlet, he would be astonished at how we’ve grown. As things turn out, the joke isn’t on Philadelphia after all. It’s on those Vaudeville comedians. One visit and you’ll be convinced we really are the City of Brotherly Love.”
Queering the Buy-Centennial
Deploying dominant discourses of nationalism, consumerism, and tourism, Mandate’s “Philadelphia Freedom” participated in and contributed to what critics referred to as the “buy-centennial.” And Mandate was not alone. Using Kinsey statistics and tourism estimates, for example, Philadelphia Gay News predicted in February 1976 that 1.5-2 million gay people would be visiting Philadelphia for the bicentennial.[12] Many LGBTQ+ people engaged with the bicentennial as business owners. In 1974, for example, the Philadelphia Bicentennial Antique and Decorative Crafts Center at 211 S. 13th St. began advertising in the Gay Alternative, which was published in Philadelphia. In February 1976, the Club Baths chain, with locations in Baltimore, Boston, Camden, East Hartford, Newark, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C., began an advertising campaign titled “Get the Spirit of 7’n6.” The ads featured an image of the Statue of Liberty holding a U.S. flag; the text explained that the chain was offering “seven clubs and six visits for only $15.00”; the price was presented in lettering featuring stars and stripes. In May 1976, the Penrose Club, a gay-oriented business at 1415 Locust St., advertised “Bicentennial Sunday’s” in Philadelphia Gay News. In a June 1976 advertisement in The Weekly Philadelphia Gayzette, the Adult Book Barn and Movie Theatre, with locations in Center City and Collingswood, New Jersey, announced expanded hours and special discounts “for the Bicentennial Year.” In July, Cleveland’s House of Pennsport, a modeling agency that offered an escort service and go-go dancers, saluted the bicentennial with Philadelphia Gay News advertisements featuring nude men holding U.S. flags.[13]
Supporting the effort to promote LGBTQ+ bicentennial tourism to Philadelphia were a set of promotional articles and guides published in nearby cities. An early example appeared in the D.C.-based Gay Blade in October 1975.[14] In June 1976, New York’s sexually explicit QQ Magazine (originally Queen’s Quarterly) published “Gay Philadelphia ’76,” a guide for gay men. In addition to listing more than thirty gay bars, clubs, restaurants, bathhouses, bookstores, and cruising sites, the article estimated that “two million gays will visit Philadelphia” from May to September, making it “the cruisiest city in America this summer.” Having offered this wildly exaggerated figure, the article urged its readers to “join the nation in having the time of your life.”[15] In July, DiMENsion, “the national entertainment newspaper for men who like things manly,” published a “pullout” supplement that included a Philadelphia guide. Its cover featured a photograph of a man’s naked butt with what looked like a tattoo based on the city bicentennial agency’s Liberty Bell logo.[16] Philadelphia Gay News and its sibling publications in Pittsburgh and Cleveland-Akron also published bicentennial “pullout” sections in July; “A Gay Guide to Philly’s Center City” listed nearly 155 sites of general interest and more than thirty LGBTQ-oriented businesses. “We are combining Bicentennial points of interest with those of particular relevance to gays,” it explained, and “unless you’re planning to concentrate on overthrowing the present government, you’ll probably want to spend some time in line behind the other tourists and locals.”[17]
From business standpoints, the results were not always as good as was hoped. Years later, Pat Hill, one of the owners of Giovanni’s Room (the city’s main gay and lesbian bookstore) in the 1970s, told me during an oral history interview, “Lots of people in Philadelphia were expecting a real windfall, although not being a mainstream business I didn't think millions of gay people were going to come. But all of South Street was really sort of geared up for a great influx of tourists. And it was all going to be wonderful and it would give Giovanni's Room a lot of income maybe. But it was just a terrible disappointment to everybody…. [Mayor] Frank Rizzo helped scare everybody away.”[18]
Henri David also experienced business woes. In an interview conducted in the 1990s, he recalled that several investors approached him about starting a nightclub in the lead-up to the Bicentennial: “I had a nightclub of my own which was my downfall…. That was the end of me. It was called Heaven. It was the largest club in the state of Pennsylvania, square footage wise. It was wonderful and wild, of course. It was at 20th and Sansom…. Up to that point I just gave parties and made jewelry and was a very happy little person getting along doing my thing. This opportunity came along. Prior to this, a number of bars around town had hired me, paid me very well, to design them, to design dance floors, to design light shows…. And then there were clubs that would pay me to just be there, to just show up with my entourage. And then there were clubs that would pay me to turn the place gay. I'd come in and I'd say, ‘O.K. you're gay now.’ And we'd all come in and make it fabulous. So I had a lot of bar experience of different kinds, but I didn't want a bar; I wanted a club. I wanted a show bar. I wanted live performances and a dance floor. And I wanted to incorporate all of the things that I knew how to do. So they came to me, they presented this to me, and I said yes. And it took every nickel I had in the world…. It was in '75, so obviously we were doing it for the Bicentennial. This was gonna' be it, have this amazing place that was gonna' be totally cool for certain people to come to because of the shows, because of drag shows…. We wanted to get on our feet in '75 so that when the Bicentennial came, which we thought was going to be this big deal, the tourists would flock, because as has been proven through history, drag clubs make a lot of money with tourists. They eat it up. And I had a whole chorus line that were also waiters. And some worked in drag, some didn't. And then there were women that looked like drag queens. And they all had to be able to sing and they all had to be able to dance. It was a very talented group of kids. And we had a blast. It was great. For seven months, eight months…. And it wasn't clicking as fast as the original backers wanted it to and they closed me down, just threw me out. I lost everything.”[19]
Returning to Mandate: for some readers, “Philadelphia Freedom” provided a useful guide to a place they might visit. For others, the feature functioned as fantasy: a sexual fantasy of liaisons with attractive models, a bourgeois fantasy of conspicuous consumption, an urban fantasy of a homoeroticized city, and a historical fantasy of queer pasts. In an era in which de-industrialization, suburbanization, and white flight raised the specter of cities more literally becoming history, the promoters of historical tourism, including its gay variants, hoped that their new “industry” might help solve the problems of U.S. cities. The likelihood of that happening was about as high as was the likelihood that Mandate’s readers would have sex with its models. “Philadelphia Freedom” nevertheless illustrates some of the ways that bicentennial consumerism, nationalism, and tourism worked together to manufacture the consent of the governed.
[1] See Elizabeth J. Rosenthal, His Song: The Musical Journey of Elton John (Watson-Guptill, 2001), 100–102, 112, 367; Selena Roberts, A Necessary Spectacle: Billie Jean King, Bobby Riggs, and the Tennis Match That Leveled the Game (Crown, 2005), 139–51; David Buckley, Elton: The Biography (Andre Deutsch, 2007), 194; Susan Ware, Billie Jean King and the Revolution in Women’s Sports (University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 101; “Billie Jean King Talks About ‘Philadelphia Freedom,’” eltonjohn.com, 10 Sept. 2018, https://www.eltonjohn.com/stories/billie-jean-king-talks-about-philadelphia-freedom; Elton John, Me (Holt, 2019), 121; Billie Jean King, All In: An Autobiography (Knopf, 2021), 269, 275–78.
[2] See the paid death notice for George W. Mavety, NYT, 23 Aug. 2000; McDonald v. Estate of George Mavety, Superior Court of New Jersey, Appellate Division, 23 Feb. 2006; “George W. Mavety,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_W._Mavety; “Mandate (magazine),” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandate_(magazine).
[3] “Bicentennial Pullout Section,” DiMENsion, July 1976.
[4] Marc Stein interview with Henri David, 2 May 1996.
[5] “Philadelphia Freedom,” Mandate, Jan. 1977, 11. See also “Penn’s Men,” Mandate, Jan. 1977; Henri David, “The Philadelphia Story,” Mandate, Jan. 1977. On Library Hall, located at 105 South Fifth St., see the American Philosophical Society’s description at https://libraryhall.amphilsoc.org/.
[6] Head House Square, located on Second Street in Society Hill, featured a set of buildings originally constructed in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; it underwent major renovations in the 1960s and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places as a historic district in 1972. See the NRHP nomination form for Head House Square, submitted by the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission: https://s3.amazonaws.com/NARAprodstorage/lz/electronic-records/rg-079/NPS_PA/72001158.pdf. For related submissions, see https://npgallery.nps.gov/GetAsset/5fe4a938-36ac-41aa-974c-9ff0d3a91176 and https://npgallery.nps.gov/GetAsset/27d188f0-619f-4cfa-8829-478acbd032c6.
[7] On Independence Hall, see Constance M. Greiff, Independence: The Creation of a National Park (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987), 189–255; Charlene Mires, Independence Hall in American Memory (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002).
[8] See Alfred Verhoeven, “Marketing the Rainbow,” 8 Oct. 2020, https://marketingtherainbow.info/case%20studies/forbidden%20fruits.html.
[9] On the transitway, which featured restricted traffic on a commercial stretch of Chestnut Street from 6th to 18th Streets, see Harvey M. Rubenstein, Pedestrian Malls, Streetscapes and Urban Spaces (Hoboken: Wiley, 1992), 205-208; Stein, Bicentennial, 87-89, 135, 163-64, 313.
[10] See the Association for Public Art’s description at https://www.associationforpublicart.org/artwork/evelyn-taylor-price-memorial-sundial/.
[11] George Cukor, dir., The Philadelphia Story, 1940. On Cukor’s homosexuality, see Patrick McGilligan, George Cukor: A Double Life (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991).
[12] “2 Million Gay Visitors in 1976,” Philadelphia Gay News, 7 Feb. 1976, A5.
[13] Gay Alternative, no. 8 (1974), 22; Philadelphia Gay News, 7 Feb. 1976, A20, and 6 Mar. 1976, A20; Philadelphia Gay News, May 1976, A9; Weekly Philadelphia Gayzette, 11 June 1976, 2; Philadelphia Gay News, July 1976, X1, X4, X5.
[14] Michael Chapman, “Philadelphia!,” Gay Blade, Oct. 1975, 8.
[15] Ralph W. David, “Gay Philadelphia ’76,” QQ, June 1976, 25.
[16] “Bicentennial Pullout Section,” DiMENsion, July 1976.
[17] Joseph Bowden, “A Gay Guide to Philly’s Center City,” Philadelphia Gay News, July 1976, B15 (emphasis in original).
[18] Marc Stein interview with Pat Hill, 16 Nov. 1993.
[19] Marc Stein interview with Henri David, 2 May 1996.