Photography by Liz Wells;

Author:Liz Wells;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781000390643
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
Published: 2021-05-10T00:00:00+00:00

Conservatives tended to idealise an earlier America, of the 1950s, believing that images appealing to supposedly deviant desires were a more recent phenomenon. While it is true that in the 1950s gay men and lesbians had little access to images or media representations which represented homosexuality, and those which were available usually portrayed it in a negative light, some writers have argued that homoerotic desire was addressed, but in highly coded ways to avoid censorship. The art historian Emmanuel Cooper explains how the American ‘physique’ magazines of the 1950s, which were primarily photographic magazines depicting toned and muscular male bodies for a male readership, legitimated their male readership’s interest through the use of visual references to classical antiquity (Cooper 1990: 100–101). These classical references work in a dual way: legitimating the images by emphasising their aesthetic (rather than erotic) nature; and simultaneously working as coded references for the readership, drawing on the homoerotic associations of ancient Greek art and culture. However, Gavin Butt argues that the repressive culture of 1950s America meant that readings were fragile, based in connotations and associations dependent on the viewer’s own homoerotic desire. The heavily coded nature of the image is evidence of the illegitimate and unspoken nature of such desire at the time, rather than of a thriving ‘gay’ identity (Butt 1998: 280).

EMMANUEL COOPER (1990) Fully Exposed: The Male Nude in Photography, London: Unwin Hyman.

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