TOW #2 1950-1960's Graffiti

This graffiti is from the 1950s to 1960s, a time when being gay in America was, pretty much, illegal. In the early 1950s, president Eisenhower passed a bill that said that anyone who found one of their employees to be a “pervert” could legally fire them for being gay, or could refuse service to someone who was gay. The reason for this graffiti was the way that the illegal gay bars were operated. The mafia ran several gay bars in the cities where gay people would go, but were cheated out of their money with overpriced service. Then with the money that they had made, the mafia would pay off the police to keep quiet about their illegal operation. The creator of this not only made a profound public statement, but also used some rhetoric in the process. The first rhetorical device to address is the creator’s diction; whoever this person is specifically used the word “prohibition” for a reason. There are many words that one can use that mean discrimination and oppression, which is what the gay people of that time were facing, but they chose to use the word “prohibition”. Prohibition means to forbid something by law, which is what was happening to them, but this also speaks directly to his or her audience, the people of America. 20 years earlier, America had gone through a period when alcohol was illegal, a time called the Prohibition, which was a bad time for America especially because it came right after the Great Depression. This is saying that Prohibition, this awful time in American history, still lives on, but in a different form; it gives the people of America an idea of how hard this is for the gay community by giving it something to compare it to. The creator of this also choses to say, “feeds the mafia”, the word “feeds” puts a picture into the observers head that the mafia is this monster that is feeding off of the American society and that they are turning the cops against the people. This imagery is to make people see just how bad this situation is, not only for the gays, for everyone in America.