The announcement that an untitled Scotty Bowers project is in the works at Fox Searchlight has generated new interest in a series of posts I did on Bowers’ “Full Service” in 2012.
I’ll add a couple of observations from various gay forums challenging Scotty’s claims:
–The sex is never less than fabulous. Never.
–Nobody ever has any erectile dysfunction problems. Never.
–Nobody ever gets STDs. Never.
To which I’ll add:
–You may think that the LAPD was corrupt and compromised in the 1940s, but let me tell you, the department may have had some bad cops, but nobody was going to look the other way when it came to gay prostitution. And if Scotty had actually been running an operation like this, the Hollywood vice cops would have learned about it and shut him down.
–Finally. Sex workers generally don’t discuss their clients by name with a lot of details unless they are warning one another to watch out for a certain person who is violent or abusive or tries to get out of paying. It just isn’t done.
Again. My objections to Scotty Bowers’ claims aren’t that someone was or wasn’t gay. My objections are that at some point in the future, someone is going to try to do a legitimate LGBTQ history of L.A. and find that Scotty has dumped his nonsense all over it. Kind of like Kenneth Anger’s “Hollywood Babylon,” which has given genuine historians more gray hair than any other book.
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Here’s the Index :
Fact-Checking “Full Service”: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | Part 16 | Part 17 | Part 18 | Part 19 | Part 20 | Part 21 | Part 22 | Part 23 | Part 24 | Part 25 | Part 26
ladailymirror.com 
Your “Scotty” series was excellent and I am in complete agreement with you on what was the legitimate LGBTQ history of Hollywood and the problem of trying to root out the lies that Bowers has dropped into the mix. It is so obvious that he (and his ghost writer) was an unabashed liar and had no regard for the truth or the reputations of the people that he libeled (and/or slandered in that “documentary”) Your facts in the series showed him up to be the liar that he was but I am worried about the damage he has done to the legacy of Old Hollywood. Many people quote him, too many. I blame Gore Vidal because he was an important literary man and he supposedly assured everyone that all Scotty’s stories are true but, did he really? I have read that Cecil Beaton mentioned Scotty Bowers in one of his diaries but when I tried to look it up (on the internet archives) I found no mention of Scotty Bowers, per se, I found a person named Scotty who sounded nothing like Scotty Bowers.
I hope that if Fox is making a picture of this that it won’t be an endorsement of his nasty tales.
I will leave you with this observation concerning Bowers claim that he had sexual relations with Cary Grant and Randolph Scott. Why would two such beautiful men require the hookup services of someone as creepy and low class as Bowers? And Katharine Hepburn? She would not have even spoke to the likes of him.
Ah, well. The truth is out there. And it is NOT in Full Service.
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Agreed.
Trouble is, we plebeians love reading about the rich & famous and their naughty parts.
Always have, always will.
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Thank you for being on top of this. I’ve already seen these tall tales starting to circulate as “truth” among young movie buffs.
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It took me a minute to remember who this guy was. Ugh… the world doesn’t need another variation of Hollywood Babylon. Why is it when people want to hate Los Angeles they always cite that? There are more then enough real reasons to not like the city, why make stuff up? I say this everytime the classic Walt Disney was antisemitic argument comes up and I’m sure this project will create many more arguments of that nature.
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