Topical Guide 667
Mark Dorset
Public Morality: Perceived Threats to: Motels
What a Piece of Work I Am, Chapter 10:
“I knew there would be quite a scene when I announced that I was going to be working at the Seagull’s Perch or the Bayview Resort Motel—or whatever they were going to call it. […] I knew that my father was sure to think that no matter what they called the place, Sunrise Cove or Moonlight Bay, it was a motel. And as far as he was concerned a motel was the functional equivalent of a whorehouse.”
Lyell Henry, “Exposing the ‘Motel Menace’” in Society for Commercial Archeology:
The pulp magazines blasted away at the alleged menace along the highways throughout the 1950s and even into the 1960s, including in their ranks representatives from two more pulp genres—“confidential-secrets” and “real-man” magazines.3 The obsessive focus of attention in articles was the illicit sex (mostly the “couples trade” of unmarried lovers’ trysts, but also prostitution) allegedly befouling the roadside in so-called “hot pillow” operations. Although these articles (unlike those by Hoover and the earlier pulp writers) usually conceded that most motels were legitimate businesses run by honest operators, the illegitimate ones apparently still remained a social problem of immense magnitude. Some titles of articles and places of publication give the flavor of this latest chapter of the great crusade: “Motel Confessions,” Man to Man: The Stag Magazine, April 1953; “The Sheriff and Waco’s ‘Motel Girls,’” Male, June 1953; “The Motel Menace,” Whisper, September 1953; “My Night in a Motel,” My Confession, December 1953; “Sex a la Motel,” Official Police Cases, October 1955; “Roadside Short-Order Sin: Motels,” Front Page Confidential, March 1960; “Caught in a Cheap Motel,” My Confession, August 1960; “Motel Mates: The Secret I Could Not Bury,” True Romance, April 1963; and “Tourist Camps—Roadside Prostitution,” Off the Record Secrets, May 1964.4
In the 1950s, the crusade by pulp publications against the “motel menace” was joined by pocket-sized paperback novels sold in drug stores and news stands. In truth, these books were soft-core porn, but perhaps that simply indicated that the “motel menace” was morphing into something more alluring, and therefore far more insidious, than the earlier tourist camps had been. Novelistic treatments presumably were better suited than brief articles to exposing the new guises of immorality that lay behind the glamorous facade of that latest roadside phenomenon called the motel. However, some of the earliest of these novels exhibited the confusion that was still widespread about what was a motel. A novel exploiting the word “motel” in its title might still stage all its action in what had always been known as a tourist camp or cabin camp—in other words, nothing was changed but the name. Too, the immoral goings-on described in these early novels could fall far short of reflecting any new kind or new level of sophistication connected with the advent of motels. In their pages, unglamorous people behaved in low-class ways in a familiar sleazy roadside setting.
[to be continued]
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide. The Substack serialization of Little Follies begins here; Herb ’n’ Lorna begins here; Reservations Recommended begins here; Where Do You Stop? begins here; What a Piece of Work I Am begins here.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed. The Substack podcast reading of Little Follies begins here; Herb ’n’ Lorna begins here; Reservations Recommended begins here; Where Do You Stop? begins here; What a Piece of Work I Am begins here.
You can listen to “My Mother Takes a Tumble” and “Do Clams Bite?” complete and uninterrupted as audiobooks through YouTube.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of Little Follies, Herb ’n’ Lorna, Reservations Recommended, and Where Do You Stop?
You’ll find overviews of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy (a pdf document), The Origin Story (here on substack), Between the Lines (a video, here on Substack), and at Encyclopedia.com.