Millions of kids from Brooklyn to Beverly Hills ran home from school every weekday to watch them dance, imitate their styles and fantasize about their lives. They were the squeaky-clean Kardashians of their era, and “Bandstand” could easily claim the title as the first reality show.
Angel Chevresttįive-foot-two, brown-eyed, brown-haired Arlene and handsome Kenny, a year younger, were among the TV music show’s elite, its stars, the vaunted “regulars” along with another couple often on camera - pert, blond Justine Carrelli and suave Bob Clayton. Arlene Sullivan and Kenny Rossi on the cover of Teen magazine in 1959. The big teenybopper magazines of the era - Sixteen and Teen - plastered “Bandstand” dancers on their covers and wrote glowing, gossipy stories about their lives in Philadelphia, where Dick Clark produced the show. They joined Arlene’s and Kenny’s fan clubs. The bathhouses are still around and societal attitudes have come a long way since 1981.When cute young teenagers Arlene Sullivan and Kenny Rossi slow danced together on “American Bandstand” back in the late ’50s and early ’60s, kids across the country swooned. Hence the attractiveness of anonymous, emotionless sex. To me, it was a sad place, the result of people forced to hide a key part of who they were - their sexuality - from the world, for fear of being discovered and shamed. What I learned from our brief foray into the bathhouse world was that they weren’t places of monstrous depravity - unless you believe homosexuality itself is depraved - nor were they “celebrations” of the “gay” lifestyle. I wasn’t - which hurt my delicate, 29-year-old ego, even though I would have been terrified had it happened. Quiet conversations, everyone there by choice.Īs I recall, John got propositioned twice.
John and I also spent time in the actual bathhouse part of the bathhouse - in a hot tub - and it was the same. The biggest surprise to me was how quiet it was, considering the number of people having sex. Occasionally, when a couple hooked up, the half-open door would close and that was that. Men were either in the rooms with the doors half-open, lying on single beds and offering themselves for sex, or walking the hallways looking for sex with the men in the rooms.
The bathhouse consisted of a series of winding hallways, marked every few feet by doorways into small rooms with a bed. What would I say if I was propositioned? Would there be orgies? If I saw someone underage being compelled into sexual acts, wouldn’t I have a moral obligation to intervene? The fact you had to check-in and be admitted through a secured door after paying your entry fee and receiving a towel didn’t help. On the night of our own Operation Soap, I was nervous lining up to get into the Romans II bathhouse on Bay St., mainly because I didn’t know what to expect. The police raids - Operation Soap as they were ironically called - were big news, and we both wanted in on the story. Our editors debated sending us, worried that should we be recognized as reporters, we might be assaulted, given the tense relations between the Sun and the city’s gay community at the time. I know, because subsequent to the raids on the four bathhouses in which 300 men were arrested for being found-ins or operators of a bawdy house, I was assigned by the Sun to spend the night in one with fellow reporter John Paton. 5, 1981 that marked the beginning of the Pride movement in Toronto were much ado about little.
Looking back on it now, the gay bathhouses police raided on the night of Feb.