Men without Maps by John Ibson

Author:John Ibson [Ibson, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780226656113
Google: ncirDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2019-01-15T05:15:05+00:00

Figure 2.2. Bois Burk, at eighteen in 1924 (left); at forty-nine in 1955 (right). (Courtesy of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Historical Society Archives.)

He recalled that it “was when I was in about the tenth grade that I became aware of my desire to embrace other boys.” Of later on, he remembered, “in college I would always have someone each semester whom I admired and daydreamed about and from whom I could sometimes obtain a photograph,” noting poignantly that “I haven’t had a really deep homosexual love affair because in my case there has usually been so little response on the part of the other person who was what I class a 100% man.” He once visited a “whore house” with a male coworker and paid to watch his friend have sex with the female prostitute, excited only by seeing the friend. On another occasion, he “attempted intercourse after going to a [female] whore house alone on a dare. . . . I put it in and instead of it getting harder it got softer.”33

Solitary as he may have been, Burk festooned the walls of his room in a Berkeley boarding house with what appear to be hundreds of snapshots of groups of people, along with images of individual men. In the Bois Burk Collection at San Francisco’s GLBT Historical Society, along with photographs of that room in Berkeley, are some two dozen photos of individual males who were Burk’s pen pals, such as the man who inscribed his photo “to my oversea friend.” From both the United States and abroad, many of the men were young and conventionally handsome; one photo, of a sedate-looking middle-aged male in an overcoat, is inscribed, “Look out for this sex fiend.” The dated photos are all from the late 1940s through the 1950s, sad testimony to Burk’s loneliness during those years; dated photos of the room demonstrate that he continued to display the photos long after he ceased gathering them (figure 2.3).

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