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Dec 13, 2018Nursebob rated this title 3.5 out of 5 stars
Pushing ninety-one, in failing health, and living like a packrat in a series of cluttered bungalows with his aged wife, Scotty Bowers is hardly the picture of a sexual revolutionary, but in post WWII Los Angeles he was at the epicentre of Hollywood’s big gay closet. Shortly after leaving the Marine Corp in 1945, a young and handsome Scotty began working at a downtown L.A. gas station when a chance encounter—and subsequent tryst—with movie star Walter Pidgeon led to a lucrative career providing male and female sex partners (and oftentimes himself) to Tinseltown’s closeted gay and bisexual elite from Cary Grant and Rock Hudson to Katherine Hepburn and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. Supplemented with talking heads including former hustlers turned pensioners, biographers, and retired industry insiders, as well as ironic clips from old movies and grainy orgy footage, Scotty emerges as an unapologetic renegade from a time when a slight indiscretion could end a career and land you in jail. He did wait until all the big names involved were dead before publishing his tell-all memoir entitled "Full Service" thereby avoiding embarrassments—and perhaps a lawsuit or three—however one can’t help but wonder about the motives behind his shenanigans. Was he fixing people with dates out of compassion in an age of puritanism as he maintains? Was he compensating for something in his own life? Or was he simply an audacious horndog who swung every which way? All of the above perhaps.