Band of Thebes

The War & Peace of Vintage Military Men Cavorting Nude Photobooks

Jump in. Retailers are already selling next month's best gay photobook, My Buddy: World War II Laid Bare, in which still more vintage military meat is seen engaging in "innocent" homoerotic horseplay, often nude. It's from Taschen's Dian Hanson, the free-spirited editrix who brought you the definitive art books on Tom of Finland, big dicks, and Bob Mizer. For size-minded readers: this one is twice as long as Evan Bachner's Men of World War II: Fighting Men at Ease.

Born July 8: F. Holland Day, Arthur Evans

Although F. Holland Day is remembered (some say imitated after this) as an early pioneer of art photography, he was also an influential book publisher whose 100+ titles included works by Aubrey Beardsley and Oscar Wilde. The sole inheritor of a fortune from his father, a Boston merchant, Day was able to indulge his artistic pursuits with abandon. He amassed a large collection of ephemera connected to John Keats and he built a summer camp in Little Good Harbor, Five Islands, Maine where he hosted other artists and youths who modeled for him. The lads were usually from Boston’s immigrant slums where Day often tutored poor children in reading. One of his young models was Kahlil Gibran, a Lebanese immigrant, whom Day encouraged in his literary ambitions and achieved fame with his book of poetic essays, The Prophet, published in more than twenty languages. (Gibran is the source, often paraphrased, for everything from Beatles’ lyrics to Kennedy’s “Ask not...”) Day also photographed adults, notably himself as Christ, as well as prominent artists and gay leaders such as Edward Carpenter. A fire in 1904 destroyed Day’s studio and most of his negatives. He later lost interest in photography and died in 1933 at sixty-nine. Read Patricia Fanning's Through an Uncommon Lens: The Life and Photography of F. Holland Day for many revelations about turn of the century Boston.

British archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans (far left) did not begin his famous excavations at Knossos until 1900 when he was forty-nine. In 1878 someone had discovered a small portion of the ruins but it was only after Crete became an independent state free of Turkey that Evans was able to purchase the site and organize a dig on a necessarily massive scale. The "palace" is a series of 1,000 interlocking rooms. Luckily, Evans lived another forty-one years, plenty of time to unveil the structures he decided were source of the mythic King Minos and his fabled Minotaur; hence Evans' coining the term Minoan civilization from the 27th to 15th centuries BC. One aspect of real life there was bull dancing, a tradition in which youths cavorted with angry steers to great honor and, usually within three months, certain death. Mary Renault brings the practice alive in her novel The King Must Die about Theseus's Cretan adventures. (Below, my picture of bull dancing from Knossos and Henry Cavill as Theseus in Tarsem Singh's ancient Greek hotfest The Immortals.) Evans was Keeper of Oxford's Ashmolean Museum from 1894-1908 and many, many of the treasures he found at Knossos ended up in its collection. He is degayed in most accounts of his life but not in Cathy Gere's intriguing Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism.

   

ONE Archivist Glimpses Some 1950s Pride

                  

Kyle Morgan, an archivist at the must-visit ONE Archives in Los Angeles, posts photos from 1953 on TIME's Lightbox page. He writes:

"The image is part of the ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at the University of Southern California Libraries – the largest repository of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer materials in the world. The picture was once owned by the young man on the right-hand side of the image above, Joseph John Bertrund Belanger. Belanger, for most of his life, was a devoted collector of LGBT history. Born in Edmonton, Canada, in 1925, he served in the Royal Canadian Air Force and was a member of the Mattachine Society – an early instance of what today would be called an LGBT organization — in the early 1950s. It is thanks to his passion and foresight that the image survives today."

The ever-growing bibliography of books of archival gay photos includes, most recently, The Invisibles: Vintage Portraits of Love and Pride. Gay Couples in the Early Twentieth Century, as well as James Gardiner's Who's a Pretty Boy, Then?: 150 Years of Gay Life in Pictures, Russell Bush's Affectionate Men: A Photographic History of a Century of Male Couples, 1850-1950, John Ibson's Picturing Men: A Century of Male Relationships in Everyday American Photography, David Deitcher's Dear Friends: American Photographs of Men Together, 1840-1918, Montague Glover's private photos of gay Brits 1914-1950 in A Class Apart, and Jonathan Ned Katz's Love Stories: Sex between Men before Homosexuality. 

Born June 17: Carl Van Vechten

Decades ahead of his time, "Harlem's most famous 'Honorary Negro'" was also, despite two wives, fairly open about his many gay relationships -- big leaps for a white Iowan born in 1880. Now, Carl Van Vechten is celebrated primarily as a photographer, but he also was a famously controversial novelist, Gertrude Stein's literary executor, and one of the early 20th century's greatest cultural kingmakers. Yet he has been without a full-scale biography since before Stonewall. This year FSG published London critic Edward White's debut, The Tastemaker: Carl Van Vechten and the Birth of Modern America [Kindle] which covers his queer life in detail, thanks to troves of private papers that have been unsealed since the last biography. White's book arrives with starred reviews from three pre-pub journals including Booklist which calls it "a marvelously written, masterful portrait of an exceptionally complex person." In the New Yorker, Kelefa Sanneh praised the book's "startling breadth" and agreed with White's assessment of Van Vechten as a "prophet of a new cultural sensibility that promoted the primacy of the individual, sexual freedom, and racial tolerance and dared put the blues on a par with Beethoven." Library Journal selected it as one of their Four Essential Nonfiction Picks for February.

Author of Dreadful: The Short Life and Gay Times of John Horne Burns, David Margolick blurbs, "Journalist, novelist, critic, photographer, iconoclast, visionary. Dandy and groupie, hedonist and dissembler, provocateur and self-promoter. Champion of Paul Robeson and Langston Hughes, drinking buddy of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, "honorary Negro" to some, racist exploiter to others. Denizen of the black and gay demimondes, flouter of racial and sexual divides and taboos. Carl Van Vechten was all of these things, and much more besides, in his brilliant and gaudy life. It would burst an ordinary biography at the seams, but Edward White manages to do to Van Vechten in death what no one ever accomplished in life: tame him. With wit, style, and skepticism, The Tastemaker both cuts Van Vechten down to size and restores to him the lofty stature he deserves."

Two years ago, Yale published Emily Bernard's much-praised Carl Van Vechten and the Harlem Renaissance: A Portrait in Black and White [Kindle] which does incorporate Van Vechten's gay affairs, including his interracial, intergenerational relationship with the closeted young novelist Wallace Thurman, author of The Blacker the Berry, but Bernard's book is not a full biography.

The thorny issue of white patronage of black artists is the heart of one of Kevin Killian's favorite books last year, Miss Anne in Harlem: The White Women of the Black Renaissance [Kindle only $2.99].

Van Vechten's photo work can be seen The Homoerotic Photography of Carl Van Vechten: Public Face, Private Thoughts, as well as in Portraits and Passionate Observer and Extravagant Crowd.

Born June 3: Wilfred Thesiger

A leading figure of the golden age of exploration, it's appropriate that Sir Wilfred Thesiger was awarded the Lawrence Medal and the Burton Medal, not least because they were all gay. Born in 1910 to a British diplomat in Abssynia, Thesiger was educated at Eton and Oxford where his only happy times were vacations (and beating Cambridge as captain of the boxing team). On his first college break he worked for his passage on a steamer to Constantinople. Returning, he found a personal invitation from Haile Selassie to attend his coronation as Emperor. On his second summer break, he worked a fishing trawler off Iceland. At 23 he went back to Africa, became assistant district commissioner in the Sudan, and learned to fast ride camels with the local men, adopting their clothes and diet. Said to call any invention more modern than the steam engine "an abomination," he hated the first world's intrusion on remote wilderness and peoples. In WWII, he fought with the Sudan defense force against Mussolini's Italians and with the Syrians against the Vichy French. A job with what became the United Nation's anti-locust program took him to the Arabia's famed Empty Quarter prompting his best work, Arabian Sands (now with an introduction by Rory Stewart), which the Guardian recently called "probably the finest book ever written about Arabia and a tribute to a world now lost forever." Thesiger's other masterpiece, The Marsh Arabs [and Kindle] (introduced by Jon Lee Anderson), covers the seven years he lived off and on with the people of southern Iraq. His travels in Asia with the Hindu Kush, the Karakorams and the Pamirs, are recounted in Among the Mountains. Chances are his autobiography Life Of My Choice avoids his homosexuality, but his gay side is somewhat integrated in Alexander Maitland's Wilfred Thesiger: The Life of the Great Explorer. Thesiger died at 93 in 2003, leaving 23,000 negatives of his photographs to the Pitt Rivers Museum at Oxford. See fifty-nine of his images here and one below.

Recapturing Radical Queer: Mausoleum of Lovers

Triple threat Stephen Motika, author of Western Practice, program director of Poets House, and publisher of Nightboat Books, invited me to Thursday's exhilarating, overflow double launch (above) at Callicoon Fine Arts of dead novelist Hervé Guibert's photo exhibition (below) and reading from his just published, really amazing, arty and sexy Mausoleum of Lovers: Journals 1976-1991. Douglas Martin was there! Wayne Koestenbaum gives the book a super rave review -- "magnitude itself" -- in the upcoming Bookforum. I pecked through the episodic passages here and there and was transported. Guibert died of aids at 36, leaving behind, among other work, To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life and Ghost Image.

Fleet Week Image of the Day #9

 

The sailors pulled out yesterday. David LaChapelle above. Bruce Weber below.

Lost Early LGBT Photos Seen Anew in The Invisibles

After winning the Cesar for best documentary, Sebastien Lifshitz finally gets a US release this week for the companion volume The Invisibles: Vintage Portraits of Love and Pride. Gay Couples in the Early Twentieth Century. Lifshitz collected the snapshots over twenty years of trawling flea markets, junk shops, and ebay in France, Germany, Portugal, and the United States. He says, "With each discovery I was stunned, for these images didn’t match the official history of homosexuality as it has been conveyed to us. As a teenager, when I dreamed of my adult life, if I stuck to the literature or the few films that existed on the subject, the future promised to be dark. To be gay or lesbian meant belonging to a genealogy of suffering, to have a dramatic, if not a tragic, destiny. Despite the many battles and certain victories that ensued, the homosexual remained a victim in the collective consciousness; a hidden man. Yet, these images, which I've found through the years, were telling another story -- one about a homosexuality without inhibitions, gentle and playful." 

Fleet Week Image of the Day #7

Vintage scrub day. The ad on the left promises, "our men are battle-hot and swamp-dirty."

 

Armed Forces Day

Soldier or sailor? Take your pick—or do both—with Evan Bachner's kind of amazing troves of archival army and navy photos from 1939-45. He has plucked the finest of the fittest for At Ease: Navy Men of World War II and Men of World War II: Fighting Men at Ease. (He also published Making WAVES: Navy Women of World War II.) More after the jump.

   

Today's Dose of Keatsian Porn Is a Joy Forever

It's not every porn movie that pulls its name from a line of Keats, uses classical music in its trailer, and generally looks like a poor man's Miramax doing an all-gay sex romp -- Il Postino with three-ways by the sea. (Watch the sundrenched R rated trailer, nothing X.) Partners of fifteen years, Jake Jaxson and RJ Sebastian, released the movie last year (above) and now have published an explicit photobook (below), also called A Thing of Beauty, which confusingly is not necessarily outtakes from their film of the same name. Dudes just love their Keats.

Four other brand-new gay photobooks scratch your changing moods. Scruffy: Raunch. Pretty: Anticipation by Joe Mozdzen, with a preface by Greg Gorman. Fratty: Fond Memories by Mark Lynch. Brazily: Rio Men by Leo Castro. You won't confuse any of these with the high art of Peter Hujar: Love & Lust.

In another class altogether, finally coming later this month is Sebastien Lifshitz's collection The Invisibles: Vintage Portraits of Love and Pride. Gay Couples in the Early Twentieth Century, the companion volume to his Cesar-winning gay documentary.

Born April 12: Slava Mogutin

Former enfant terrible Slava Mogutin, 40, still lives to provoke. Born in Siberia (and, according to Wikipedia, “the first openly gay personality in the Russian media”) now a New Yorker (after Amnesty International and American PEN helped get him political asylum), the writer and photographer is permanently at war with the establishment. A constant critic of Moscow’s leaders, Mogutin has written seven books in Russian, winning the Andrei Bely Prize in 2000. He aims for a similar shock value in his hatred of establishment gays, and he loves to antagonize his audience, once describing himself as a "cave-based, homo terrorist, pinko commie fag, and propagandist of brutal violence, psychic pathology and sexual perversions." Happily, he brings all that angry energy to his photography, which appears regularly in art, fashion, alt, and porn magazines. His best photo books are Lost Boys and NYC Go-Go. Last month he released his first book in English, Food Chain.

Eleven

Turns out, the traditional eleventh anniversary gift is steel. (Now what to do with those eleven pipers piping I bought?) Can't wait for the next eleven, to 2025 and beyond. Very happily yours.

50 Years Queer: Drag Snapshots from 1960s Kansas City

 

The Paris Review links to this trove of snapshots capturing a whole lot of drag in Kansas City in the 1960s. Is it amazing that the queens pose on the street? Or, in the wake of Some Like It Hot and Milton Berle and a million frat boy revues or military theater nights (like the one in Bitter Eden), would straight onlookers have seen nothing more than nutty hijinks?

Click to enlarge.

   

Born March 29: Bruce Weber

 

Although Bruce Weber, 68, is married to Nan Bush, for four decades his primary subject has been the eroticizing of men's bodies and the sexualizing of male camaraderie. (One of his many books is a collaboration with Reynolds Price, Bear Pond, capturing naked young men at play in the Adirondacks. A similar collection of romps has text by William S Burroughs.) Weber's ubiquitous softcore campaigns for Abercrombie and Calvin Klein have, for better or worse, reshaped gay culture, then youth culture, then American culture. This has been true at least since 1982 when he got Brazilian pole vaulter Tom Hintnaus to wear only white briefs and recline against a white rock. That iconic ad and billboard in Times Square was named one of "ten photos that changed America," by the industry bible American Photographer. Weber's work is in the permanent collections of major museums and, beyond his handful of music videos, he's directed four feature films. His first, a boxing doc called Broken Noses, premiered at Cannes, and his second, Let's Get Lost, about Chet Baker, was nominated for an Oscar.

He really really likes twins. Four pairs after the jump.

Ten years ago he launched Weberbilt, a bathing suit and t-shirt company with the motto "eat, swim, sex, sleep," and three years ago he tried again with an underwear line marketed "for guys who don't

Slava Mogutin's New Food Chain, Old Photo Diary of Crimea

Who else would combine a lace doily with a half-stripped, bound and gagged tough - the obviousness being another slap to the viewer? Favorite anti-bougie angry gay artist Slava Mogutin is known here for his arresting photography but in Russia, prior to exile, he published seven books of fiction, poetry, and essays, winning the Andrei Bely Prize. Culled from his whole writing life, from teenhood to now, his English debut is a "part memoir, part political satire, part magic realism" mashup called Food Chain, out yesterday from novelist Christopher Stoddard's brand new ITNA Press. 

(ITNA is dedicated to releasing "literature deemed too provocative for the mainstream." Its other two titles are La JohnJoseph's farcical orgy/apocalypse fantasy Everything Must Go and Stoddard's own second novel Limiters [Kindle], about Kyle Mason, seen first as a lost 16 year-old raver then as a 26 year-old "sexually compulsive copywriter living in New York City, hyperactively riding the crests of a narcissistic and self-destructive personality.")

Slava has posted a brief text with his photos of Crimea from 2004, when he returned to find a more rundown resort that had, in his youth on visits from Siberia, seemed a Soviet Paradise. His strongest work is Lost Boys and NYC Go-Go.

Hustlers

Got all your accessories for tonight's last Black Party at Roseland? Boots? Harness? Hustlers? Finally back in stock, Philip-Lorca diCorcia's career-making series -- twenty-five of these images formed his first solo show, at MoMA -- is still a book that keeps on giving. Made possible in part by an NEA grant that became a flashpoint in the war on arts funding, each narrative photo is titled with the hustler's name, age, hometown, and what he charged. It's among Thebes' readers all-time most popular books.

"In Our Culture It Falls to Gays and Blacks To Make Something Interesting"

With the thirty-year assimilation frenzy is this concept of gay artists being preferred as double outsiders still true? Or was it always only the victim fantasy of a deluded straight artist?

"In art politics, to be homosexual is, a priori, more correct than to be heterosexual. Because to be an artist is to be an outsider, and to be a gay artist is to be a double outsider. That's the correct condition. If you're a straight artist, it's not clear that your outsiderness is legitimate. I know this is totally absurd. But the fact is that in our culture it does fall primarily to gays and blacks to make something interesting. Almost everything from straight white culture is less interesting, and has been for a long time."

--painter David Salle from 1992 in Janet Malcolm's new collection Forty-one False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers [Kindle]. The wonderfully provoking book includes a 76-page profile of lesbian editor Ingrid Sischy, as well as shorter takes on Edith Wharton's misogyny,Allen Shawn's phobias, Irving Penn's nudes, Thomas Struth shooting the Queen, Julia Margaret Cameron, J.D. Salinger, Joseph Mitchell, Diane Arbus, Edward Weston, the Bloomsbury group, and the author of the Gossip Girl novels, among others.

I Am Here, Not Here

 

Earlier today. Expect briefer posts for two weeks. 

The Tastemaker: Carl Van Vechten and the Birth of Modern America

Decades ahead of his time, "Harlem's most famous 'Honorary Negro'" was also, despite two wives, fairly open about his many gay relationships -- big leaps for a white Iowan born in 1880. Now, Carl Van Vechten is celebrated primarily as a photographer, but he also was a famously controversial novelist, Gertrude Stein's literary executor, and one of the early 20th century's greatest cultural kingmakers. Yet he has been without a full-scale biography since before Stonewall. Today FSG publishes London critic Edward White's debut, The Tastemaker: Carl Van Vechten and the Birth of Modern America [Kindle] which covers his queer life in detail, thanks to troves of private papers that have been unsealed since the last biography. White's book arrives with starred reviews from three pre-pub journals including Booklist which calls it "a marvelously written, masterful portrait of an exceptionally complex person." In the New Yorker, Kelefa Sanneh praised the book's "startling breadth" and agreed with White's assessment of Van Vechten as a "prophet of a new cultural sensibility that promoted the primacy of the individual, sexual freedom, and racial tolerance and dared put the blues on a par with Beethoven." Library Journal selected it as one of their Four Essential Nonfiction Picks for February.

I already admire the book for being a rigorous 300-odd pages, unlike so many lazy biographies of mammoth bloat.

Author of Dreadful: The Short Life and Gay Times of John Horne Burns, David Margolick blurbs, "Journalist, novelist, critic, photographer, iconoclast, visionary. Dandy and groupie, hedonist and dissembler, provocateur and self-promoter. Champion of Paul Robeson and Langston Hughes, drinking buddy of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, "honorary Negro" to some, racist exploiter to others. Denizen of the black and gay demimondes, flouter of racial and sexual divides and taboos. Carl Van Vechten was all of these things, and much more besides, in his brilliant and gaudy life. It would burst an ordinary biography at the seams, but Edward White manages to do to Van Vechten in death what no one ever accomplished in life: tame him. With wit, style, and skepticism, The Tastemaker both cuts Van Vechten down to size and restores to him the lofty stature he deserves."

Two years ago, Yale published Emily Bernard's much-praised Carl Van Vechten and the Harlem Renaissance: A Portrait in Black and White [Kindle] which does incorporate Van Vechten's gay affairs, including his interracial, intergenerational relationship with the closeted young novelist Wallace Thurman, author of The Blacker the Berry, but Bernard's book is not a full biography.

The thorny issue of white patronage of black artists is the heart of one of Kevin Killian's favorite books last year, Miss Anne in Harlem: The White Women of the Black Renaissance [Kindle only $2.99].

Van Vechten's photo work can be seen The Homoerotic Photography of Carl Van Vechten: Public Face, Private Thoughts, as well as in Portraits and Passionate Observer and Extravagant Crowd.