Read an Excerpt
INTRODUCTION
by Ron Hogan
When the TruLoveStories website went live, the first section I started exploring was "A Century of Love," which features True Love and True Romance stories from the 1920s up through the last decade. When I got to the 1970s section, and the story "My Mother's Lover Is My Husband," I knew I was in for a wild ride, but the cover to the May 1970 issue of True Love promised even crazier stories: "My Best Friend Stole My Baby," "Every Week My Doctor Drugs Me," and the "shocker of the year," a partner-swapping tale called "You Give Me Your Husband and I'll Give You Mine."
I joked on Twitter that the folks at TruLoveStories should turn me loose in the archives so I could come up with a whole anthology's worth of crazy love stories from the 1970s. It turns out they were paying attention—and here we are!
A few years back, I wrote a book about Hollywood in the 1970s called The Stewardess Is Flying the Plane! In it, I talked about the ways in which the films of that decade show us how the "countercultural" trends of the late 1960s became increasingly mainstream, presenting subjects that were previously taboo to larger and larger audiences. American society was in flux: Watergate and Vietnam had caused many people to lose faith in the government and other authority figures; the sexual revolution threatened the stability of marriage; the feminist movement shifted the balance of power between men and women. And each week, new films would come out that reflected these tensions, wrapping them in stories that (ideally) engaged their audiences.
It wasn't just about the movie theaters, though.
I don't want to oversell this idea too much as far as these stories are concerned. The fact is, if you look at an issue of True Love or True Romance from the early 1970s, chances are the contents will ultimately reinforce the status quo. Marriage is good; marriage with a kid, or one on the way, is even better. The hedonistic pursuit of pleasure comes with consequences, but if you're lucky you can clean up your act and start making a better life for yourself.
Some of the ways in which these stories deal with the counterculture are predictable. Dirty hippies using drugs and sex to lead innocent, if mildly rebellious, girls astray is like the '70s equivalent of a melodrama cad twirling his mustache. Sexual experimentation inevitably leads to shame and regret—the heroine who let another woman's husband into her bed may have had mind-blowing orgasms, but she'd feel dirty about it for a long, long time.
The more time you spend really digging into these stories, though, the more surprises you'll find. I was lucky enough to find a story in which the hippies living out on the commune aren't portrayed as sex-crazed monsters. Often, when gay and lesbian characters appear, the narrators refuse to condemn their behavior. (Granted, being held up as objects of pity isn't much better, but it's a start.) And though some of the women in these stories meekly accept the blame for all the hardships they suffer, other women can be seen taking charge of their lives, refusing a relationship with a man unless they can have it on equal terms.
There are also a few stories here that are just so far out there, with such crazy plots, I absolutely knew I had to have them in this collection. As you read these stories, though, don't think of them as just wacky pop culture artifacts from the past. Sure, some of this stuff comes off a bit silly now, but beyond the entertainment and nostalgia value, you'll get a glimpse at a pivotal moment in American cultural history.
I'm something of a late bloomer when it comes romance fandom, and my points of entry into the genre were basically Regency historicals, which tend to deal with aristocratic characters, and the "chick lit" of the early 2000s, which was often about middle class women in large cities striving for both personal and professional success.
The stories from early '70s True Love and True Romance come from a much different place. Characters tend to come from small towns; if they wind up in a big city, it's quite likely something bad will happen to them there. If the women are old enough, they're usually housewives; women who do work are often stuck at the secretarial level—and, in any case, they're probably only working until they get married.
For the most part, these are working class stories, with strong aspirational qualities. (There are some stories with middle class settings here, but they can feel a bit staged—fantasies of what life might be like for white-collar workers living in apartment buildings in big cities.) The men are doing their best to provide a stable home for their loved ones, and the women are doing their best to be supportive of their men. Their financial security is by no means guaranteed—and those money problems can be a powerful source of conflict.
These stories are like a snapshot of what was on America's mind in the early 1970s, and as I continue to explore the TruLoveStories archives, I'm going to be very interested in how the stories changed over time, to see what their creators portrayed as the biggest threats to "true love" and happy marriages. I've already found more great '70s stories than I could fit into this one collection, and I'm about to plunge into the 1980s next...
