Rosenberg wanted Gay Bob to normalize the coming out process, while also acting as a fun accessory for those who were already out and proud. The New Yorker used $10,000 of his own money to launch the doll and had it made in Hong Kong after American manufacturers refused to make Bob’s groin anatomically correct. An original ad for the Gay Bob doll.ĭesigned to look like a combination of Paul Newman and Robert Redford and packed into his own cardboard closet, Gay Bob was the brainchild of former advertising executive Harvey Rosenberg.
And while Milk was urging his friends and community to come out of the closet, the “World’s First Gay Doll” was doing the exact same thing. It was the same year that Harvey Milk became the first openly gay man elected to public office in California. By the late 1960s, coming out was treated with the utmost importance within the gay rights movement. In 1914, Magnus Hirschfeld wrote of the revolutionary potential of respected gay women and men coming out en masse. In 1860s Germany, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs urged other gay people to publicly reveal their sexual orientation.
