Westernised Gay men of my generation have seen a lot of pornography. At first, when first exposed to it, any porn will do – the mere fact that here are images of real men doing real sexual things to one another is a turn-on, and a turn-on is what’s required. Soon, though, one starts to get more picky. It’s not just the meat, it’s the motion – and the motion picture.
Porn was still illegal when I first encountered it, so part of the thrill was that of the officially forbidden, but that thrill soon wanes (even before it became legal and we got a flood of it) and one starts to get more specific in one’s voyeuristic desires. I, for one, got tired of overly muscled American men robotically chanting things like ”Suck that fat dick, yeah” while they went through the motions. Although there is some camp joy in this kind of nakedly idiotic repartee, and there are certainly great American porn stars, one does begin to want porn that is a bit less stylised by the conventions of the genre. It was a relief for me to discover the Bel Ami series (Lucky Lukas etc), in which most of what is said is in Czech or whatever anyway, so it doesn’t matter.
Apart from the desire for variation, one’s aesthetic sense begins to impinge on one’s need for a quick turn-on; it would be nice to believe that the gay aesthetic sense is somehow inbuilt and that’s why our pornography seems to be more interesting than that of the heterosexuals, but it’s not really a tenable assumption. At any rate, I think we do demand slightly higher standards than most straight pornophiles; we do, at least, want to see both sexual partners, if there are only two, and not just be reduced as viewers to the point-of-view of some guy who’s there only to be the ”active” partner, which seems to preclude his being the object of desire. I suppose in straight porn he’s not supposed to be the object of desire, so that makes sense, but to a gay eye it seems to short-change the viewer (and, incidentally, to reinforce the straight-porn dominance of the male as ”actor” and the straight male point of view). Somehow gay porn is forced – by the lauded market? – to be more democratic as well as more aesthetically interesting.
But even the thrill of well-made gay porn diminishes, though of course it never dies away entirely. We do, most of us, go through stages of wanting more, wanting fresh filmed meat, on a regular basis, stages which seem to alternate with stages of decreased interest in the whole idea. Yet the desire for such porn is in part replaced, or at least augmented, I think, for any gay man with a computer and access to the internet, by those eminently stealable pictures of what are called ”amateurs” showing off their dangly or not-so-dangly bits. There’s something especially piquant about these non-porn-stars displaying themselves via their webcams or digital cameras. There’s a charm in the abrupt crops or strangely angled frames; the home-made quality adds something to the appeal of such images. The exhibitionism entailed is less contrived than that of the porn stars, and the kick is correspondingly more direct. Of course many, even most, of such pictures are styled by media-literate gay men, even or especially as self-portraits, in accordance with the generic conventions and the artistic innovations they can most effectively adapt. But the tension between the posed and the accidental is more alive in them than in commercial products, and a few achieve a combination of the two that any Greg Gorman or Bruce Weber would envy.
How odd, then, and how interesting, for a porn-saturated imagination to encounter the images in Janssen’s new publication Homosexual Men in Action 1890-1930, the eighth in this German (but SA-based) publisher’s series of Erotic Art Photography. I’m not sure if ”erotic art photography” is the exact way to describe these particular pictures, though: I don’t think the photographers or the models (if one may use the glamorising porn industry term as well as invoking the artist’s studio), were thinking much about ”art” while they were taken. These images were made, surely, to satisfy a crude market demand – such images, though ”pornography” is a relatively recent term, have been around for millennia. But these are not ”art photography” like the roughly contemporaneous images by Baron von Gloeden, for instance, or those of Herbert List from the 1920s and 1930s. Except for two images within the book, one rather Gloedenesque (check out that bit of an olive tree) and the other featuring classically opposed martial bodies, there are no references to the classical world, to the retrospective imaginative utopia that legitimated images of naked men as well as providing an aesthetic template for them. There is no attention beyond the most basic and practical to such issues as lighting and composition (and, of course, time has flattened the images further; it has also roughened them with a patina of authenticity). Erotic, yes, these pictures are that; but let’s not beat about the bush. These are pornographic images, made as such, for which there must have been a commercial demand, even if it was underground, and the emphasis is on the meetings of genitals with genitals and genitals with mouths. The marvellous back cover photo is the only other picture that that seems to have higher aspirations, though it may be an accidental effect. It shows two hunky young men half-wrestling and half-leaping, genitalia occluded without apparent artifice: it is a perfect Bruce Weber, avant la lettre.
The cover image is jokey. It shows two men in sailor suits, the one holding a banana up for the other to hold in his mouth: a case of ”Let’s see your blowjob technique, sailor”? The first photo in the book shows two men of what seems the late 1920s or early 1930s, posed fully dressed for the camera. They seem affectionately linked, but there is nothing pornographic about this rather jaunty image, except perhaps in that this may be the establishing shot, as it were, of the dramatis personae of a later sequence. Not that I could find a sequence that identifiably features these two men, for all my scrutiny of background details and the like. Its inclusion, thus, seems strange: yes, these may be ”homosexual men in action”, but it’s not the action we came for. (A more wide-ranging project looking at all aspects of gay life in particular historical periods is another thing.) Next up is the Gloedenish thing with olive branch and Persian carpet, a quasi-orientalist two-shot, and following that the pair of muscled men in a stylised antagonistic pose that presumably carries a deliberate echo of the kouroi of the Greek gymnasia. After that is when it starts to get really interesting.
Two images show transvestite boys playing with each other’s cocks, and the way these pictures ruffle our expectations is pleasing, though such an effect may again have been more accidental than planned. These boys are dressed in women’s clothing, and they have big hair, so the whole feel is feminine; and yet, extruding from their ladies’ petticoats are two nearly-hard penises. In the first of the two photos, the molly-boys are standing, looking into each other’s faces, the one intently, as if about to ask or having just asked a burning question, the other smiling sweetly beneath the flowers in his hair. The one on the left is reaching over and touching the other just above the line of his corset, tweaking his nipple, perhaps, or just adjusting the garment. Who knows? But the photo opens such questions and implies a narrative; a potential story is generated by the ambiguous nature of the photo, which makes it very interesting indeed. There seems to be a whole Our Lady of the Flowers tale suggested here, if only we could access it.
The second of the transvestite photos is even more fascinating. It seems more carefully posed, though its impact is more bizarre than that of the first. Here our two young moffies (prostitutes, presumably, taking us back to the original, specific meaning of the word ”pornography” – that is, writing or image-making relating to whores) are sitting on some low ottoman-type piece of furniture. They have their arms around each other in a casual embrace; they have cigarettes drooping from their mouths. They are looking down at each other’s groins, where, once again, from the women’s clothing (though the petticoats are now gone) emerge a pair of erect cocks, held proudly on display by their owners. The atmosphere of this image is complex: the tension between the studied and the casual, the affection or just habituation on show, the confusion of gender signals. Not to mention the black knee-stockings.
The environments, the mise-en-scène, of many of the photographs is immediately absorbing. These mysterious backgrounds and settings increase the mystery of the pictures: there is not much to wonder at in the anonymous hotel rooms or even the lush poolsides of today’s gay porn. It is a generic fairyland. In this book, by contrast, one can’t help letting one’s attention stray from the genital junction to the patterned cloths hung as backdrops, to a bit of moulding along a wall, some art nouveau panelling, or … And are they doing that on a table?
As one moves through the book, the backgrounds help one establish groups of photographs. One can work out which of them seem to have been taken in the same studio or the ones that are clearly a series. In the latter part of the book there is a long sequence that was clearly made at one sitting, as it were; same men, same space, a careful variation of sexual postures that, like the pornography that can be made in a medium like film or video, introduces the structural possibilities of sequentiality. This is not quite the live capture of men fucking men on film, but the series of photographs traces a movement through a repertoire of erotic gestures and actions, a kind of gay Kama Sutra. Having become images, these postures become signs, and they speak to and shadow our visual and physical experience of sexuality today. Against those variations, the setting provides continuity. Those two (is it Regency-style?) chairs are there, used or unused, throughout, like sentinels. This is a different kind of narrative; instead of, or as well as, the narrative implied by details in the transvestite photos, which are so rich as individual images, this is a narrative looped over a series of images that takes us through some of the possiblilities open to two men having sex in a room furnished with two high-backed chairs.
These and other photographs remind one of Roland Barthes’s famous distinction (in Camera Obscura) between two types of foci offered to the viewer by photographs. The first is the focal point that seems intended by the photograph, the way the composition of a photograph appears to structure itself around a particular area that, as it were, tops the visual hierarchy of the visible text. This might, in a way, be seen as the conscious focus of the picture, its intentional centre, though it may not literally occupy the centre of the frame. The other type of focal point is its unconscious focus, a passage that almost inadvertently draws the eye away from the intended structure of the picture and toward a detail, say, that is not meant to be important, but in some way offers a kind of bonus dose of visual interest. These two foci, and the tension between them, help characterise the nature of photographs as both intentional constructions, contrived and arranged with an eye to their final form as records or artistic images, and as magical or technological thefts, as it were, from reality. Their verismilitude is attested to by the intrusion of that bonus, that little extra bit of reality the photographer hadn’t quite bargained on, or had perhaps indeed hoped would simply turn up unannounced. Some of the greatest and most achieved fine art, particularly that of a Romantic/expressionist tendency, depends on the artist’s being able to make space for the divine accident to happen, and some of the greatest photographs rely heavily on this fortuitous element: it is the guiding principle in the works of Cartier-Bresson, for instance, and informs all ”documentary” photographs, where the reality effect must not be trumped by aesthetic formality. In portraits such as those of Cecil Beaton, by comparison, the adventitious irruption of reality (by which one means that over which the artist is not in full control) is kept to a minimum. Fast forward to the late 20th and early 21st century, and the deliberately slipshod images of a Wolfgang Tielmans, for instance, increase their charge by bringing into the fabricated art image the apparently accidental charm of the informal snapshot.
And here is the real joy of the photographs in Homosexual Men in Action 1890-1930. I have mentioned the settings, and the narratives that can be imagined into images such as those of the transvestite boys. But what pulls and captures the eye again and again in these pictures, once one has absorbed the by-now-clichéd conjunction of genitals, mouths, etc, the more-or-less (usually less) elegant arrangement of limbs, are passages that speak of the accidental, of Barthes’s subconscious focal point. Some are highly amusing to a modern eye: the twirled moustache on the face of a man languidly positioned for the fucking, for instance. These are the things that let life into the pictures, that overpower their straightforwardly pornographic construction. Mostly, it’s the faces, and their expressions. In an age when pornography was not so available or so commercialised, there was less concern for the models to reproduce conventional gestures or expressions. This is no ”Suck that fat dick, yeah” scenario, though fat dicks are indeed getting sucked. It has the surface disturbance of many of the internet’s amateur auto-images.
One boy is shown thoughtfully inserting his penis into the backside of another, who bends before him, but what one remembers most of the picture is the way he places his hands on the other’s back: delicately, with poise, as though he were about to begin playing a piano sonata. In another photo, a boy in sailor suit is sitting on chair and being fellated by another boy in a sailor suit: the way he’s looking down at the other’s head, the expression of calm enjoyment on his face, is worth more than the central cocksucking focus. In yet another, one of a sequence, an older and not particularly attractive man leans over his bending partner; the latter has a grin on his face that expresses both a kind of exhibitionistic pride and a simple pleasure, but it is the posture and expression of the former that touches one. The way he lays his head on the other’s back, as if listening to the throbbings of some internal organ, while a half-smile plays on his face, is entrancing.
Unfortunately, this collection of photographs is not provided with much in the way of contextual and historical information. There is a brief introduction, telling us that seven photos belong to a private collector , the rest to the ”archive of the publisher”, but no more; it is also written in an odd Teutonic brand of English. It would have been wonderful to have more to add more historical texture to the narratives these photographs throw up, these traces of past lives and actions that so closely echo our own while appearing, at times, to be from another planet entirely.