Footballer

Hello sailor!

J C Leyendecker, who was gay, created some very homoerotic pictures. Ah, the innocence of earlier times.

The Golden Age of Denial

I once knew somebody who knew somebody who worked for South Africa's censorship board, which reviewed films and books to see if they were suitable for hoi polloi and wouldn't corrupt said multitudes or lead them to think liberal.  The story was that at interval at a Censor Board screening of The Killing of Sister George, the more, shall we say, innocent of the Censors admitted that it appeared harmless.  They had no idea it was a lesbian film.  Once they were informed it was, it was immediately banned*.

So it was with homoerotic images in the great days of the closet.  Hoi polloi had no idea that there was a subtext.  Advocate has just published a great series of images--military posters and advertisements all startlingly homoerotic to our eyes.   The ads were clearly directed at men who wanted to be with men.  Heterosexual but homosocial, perhaps.  Or just plain gay-shaded.  But fairly explicit to our less sheltered and less innocent eyes.  Like my unknowing passion for Superman in his speedos and tights, muscled and square-jawed and so manly.

These days we are so afraid of male sexuality we prefer men to wear baggy swimsuits instead of speedos and loose pants instead of skin-tight jeans (the new skinny jeans look is politely called 'metrosexual' rather than 'gay')  I remember ogling Superman, and the guys in their rugby shorts, and not understanding why or what I was feeling until I fell in love with a bloke much later.

In a way, the loss of innocence is a little sad.  Even if it is an inevitable part of growing up.  Bad enough for us, but the poor anti-gay troglodytes must be in constant torment, knowing that all around them there may just be homoerotic subtext they're missing.  Unless of course they're all in denial themselves.

[To see more images, go here]


*their greatest triumph was in banning the book Black Beauty, a decision quietly rescinded after much mockery.

Still More on J C Leyendecker

I've mentioned Elisa Rolle's blog before. It's an excellent place to see all about new gay-shaded books, authors, artists and films. I hope one day she'll be able to review one of my books (so far I've only had short stories in anthologies)

She's also done a post on J C Leyendecker, and borrowed some of my pictures to do it. So I thought I'd borrow some back, while pointing you to her blog post on Leyendecker and also to her blog which coincidentally has just done a review on Black Wade, which is a book I've been contemplating buying. The art of Black Wade and Leyendecker is very different, is it not?

More on Leyendecker

I was doing some more Google searching for a picture of J C Leyendecker's husband in his combinations (the one in the other blog was a bit small -- I've reproduced it a bit larger below) and came across this post, with some beautiful pictures of beautiful men.

Charles Beach, Leyendecker's husband.

(Charles Beach appears to be sexless. Can't show your doings in a family magazine, now can you? Sexless he may be, but he seems infinitely sexy.)

I've reproduced two from Mr Peacock's blog here.

Gay Artists

In a comment on my Leyendecker post, someone suggested the name of Henry Scott Tuke as a painter of beautiful men. And so he was. I looked him up in Wikipedia. And I've given you some of his pictures. A very different style from Leyendecker, not so? He was most probably gay, being friends with Oscar Wilde and other gay luminaries.

In my research I also discovered the painter Thomas Eakins, who wasn't gay but who obviously was very unconventional and was prepared to defy at great personal cost the strait-laced conventions of society.

Enjoy the images. Beautiful they are.

These are two of Eakins' paintings:

The Wrestlers

Swimming

And here are three of Tuke's:

The Bather

Under a Tree, Jamaica

Noonday Heat

J C Leyendecker

I'd never heard of him until a day or two ago. But this blog by a member of a gay writers' group I belong to had a piece on him. He was gay, and lived with his guy for nearly 50 years -- and the Christian-Fascists say we can't get married! -- and died 50 years ago. His drawings and paintings are very realistic, against the trend in intellectual arty circles at the time, because of course there wasn't photography, and magazines and advertisers needed images for their publications. Yet in some way I prefer drawings and paintings to photographs because the artist can emphasize what interests them. Cartoons are an extreme form of this, but any painting or drawing is a creation, not just a representation of a static reality. It was something I learned when I took up painting. Your painting, no matter how "realistic" is not in fact an unchanged reduplication of real life. Every picture is subtly distorted, to highlight some things and reduce the importance of others.

Beaut men interested J C Leyendecker. Look at this painting. Lovely. Anyway, I strongly recommend the longer article in the blog which gives you a fascinating glimpse into the life of someone famous and gay, only the public didn't know about his gay side or his husband. But his life, his gift, and his gayness should be celebrated and widely known. The more gay-shaded people hoi polloi know about, the more they'll accept us.