The above photograph is apparently world-famous -- in fact, it won the photographer a Pulitzer Prize in 1968 -- but I don't remember having seen it before. Someone posted it to Facebook this weekend, under the header "Amazing Facts." It depicts one male utility worker giving CPR to another worker who'd been shocked by a high voltage line. The CPR worked: the stricken man survived to live another forty years, and the man who saved him is still living.
Of course it sparked a lot of comments, some eulogizing the courage of linemen, others questioning how the picture came to be taken -- some speculated that it must have been staged, because who'd have a high-quality camera on a work site? -- some babbling about "heros" and "angles" (meaning "angels, of course), and others fiercely defending the virtue of the men depicted, this was not a dirty gay kiss but the Kiss of Life. The person who posted the photo set a high tone by beginning the caption with "It's not what you may think." (Gee, I thought it was a lineman giving CPR to another lineman -- do you mean they were really making out?) One commenter wrote to another, "I hope Someone lets you die if you need mouth to mouth. Or Elton John is there and does mouth to mouth."
There were, of course, the predictable exhortations to other commenters to "get your mind out of the gutter." There's nothing wrong with two men kissing, there's nothing of the "gutter" in it. It supports something I've long thought: you can't always (or even often) tell, just by looking, whether two people are touching each other affectionately, erotically, or (as in this case) therapeutically. If the circumstances under which this photograph was taken weren't so well documented, it would be hard to be sure what is really going on in it. (If you can bear to read an ignorant and virtually incoherent account of a homoerotic reading of the picture, look here.) It could be a carefully staged erotic photo, though it isn't. I can sympathize, in fact, with those people who question whether it really was unstaged, because the image is so clear and the disposition of the men's bodies looks as if they were posed as lovers. (On the other hand, the photo also reminds me of paintings of the body of Jesus being taken down from the cross. "Passion," after all, meant suffering before it meant strong erotic or emotional feeling.) If you first read the photo as a gay image, that is entirely reasonable. It just happens that it isn't. If it's true that a picture is worth a thousand words, it's also true that pictures may need a thousand words to clarify their ambiguity, and the words that label or describe a picture can change radically the way we interpret it.
Perfume Genius ad from nils bernstein on Vimeo.
The clip features Perfume Genius' singer Mike Hadreas and gay porn actor Arpad Mikos. Neither man is nude below the waist; both are shirtless. It seems that both Google and Youtube refused to allow the ad to be posted, because it violated their Adult Image / Video content policy,
which excludes "any ads that contain non-family safe material," adding that "the overall feeling of the video is one of a more adult nature, including promoting mature sexual themes and what appears to be nude content. As such, the video is non-family safe."
More information is available at the AV Club's source, this article at Pitchfork, including a link to the music video from which the images in the ad are drawn, which is on Youtube. The odd thing (coming from me) is that I'm inclined to agree that the clip is of a "more adult nature," including "mature sexual themes," even though in the very brief ad the two men do nothing more (or less) erotic than embrace while gazing intently into each other's eyes. That doesn't seem to me reason for Youtube to reject the ad, especially when the same material is available in the video for "Hood," because "mature sexual themes" are present in most popular entertainment, including the classic Code-era Hollywood films, and because children aren't harmed by them. You know the famous scene in From Here to Eternity, where Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr kiss in the sand as the surf flows over them? That shows as much skin as Hadreas and Miklos do, and more passion. It was controversial in its day (1953), but nowadays it's fodder for nostalgia.
Of course, it's different, because Lancaster and Kerr were playing heterosexuals. That is probably the reason Youtube and Google rejected the ad. As some commenters at the AV Club pointed out, if the two men were punching each other (or even simulating more extreme violence) there'd have been no problem. The subject of Ultimate Fighting Championship came up too: "It's hard to tell sometimes. The first time I ever saw UFC on TV, it was two guys that looked like they were 69ing each other, except they had pants on. The announcer said it was the 'North-South' position. Give me a fucking break. We all know what that is . . ."
It all reminds me of Michel Foucault's remark that bigots are less bothered by sodomy (though of course they are bothered by it) than by love and romance between men. I don't mean to overgeneralize, but there's something to what he said, and Youtube's reaction to the Perfume Genius ad supports it.
Recently (it was only five days ago, but it feels like longer) one of my Facebook friends from high school, the Methodist minister, posted that "a couple of guys have been giving me all kinds of grief about eating the occasional scone with my cup of coffee in the morning." Apparently scones aren't manly in Methodist land, or at least in northern Indiana Methodist land.
This revelation prompted a thread of joking from both men and women, and Mark responded with a link to his blog, and to an article from Sports Illustrated (I almost spelled that "spurts", hehehe) on the metaphysical significance of the high five.
The SI article was a fantasia on failed high-fives, the difficulty of bringing the gesture off successfully, and on its significance -- along with the dap, the chest bump, "the soul shake, the leaping shoulder carom and, last but not least, the grip-and-rip", as expressions of love between males. Because men don't express affection like you and me.
Mark T. Morman, a Baylor associate professor of communication studies, has spent years analyzing male-to-male communication, and he has a message for all you fivers out there: You're in love, or at least in like. "We call it covert affection, as opposed to overt," explains Morman. "Punching somebody in the arm or punching somebody in the chest, that doesn't look very affectionate, mainly because we tend to frame affection in very feminine ways—hugging, kissing, soft touching. So when a guy punches another guy or pushes or shoves him or wrestles him to the ground, it's covert affection, but it's real."
Of course, Morman points out, this can lead to discrepancies when both genders are involved. For instance, Jeff Lurie and his wife. "I remember that—it was hysterical!" says Morman. "That's an example of the masculine and the feminine crashing into each other. Sometimes there are affection disasters."
"Shoves him or wrestles him to the ground." I need to savor that for a moment. That, and the bit about hugging, kissing, and "soft touching" being "feminine." My friend the minister quoted this passage in his blog post, by the way, and added:
I've been saying this for years. Visitors to Trinity will hear me and my friends verbally "high fiving" or "chest bumping" one another. We talk trash to one another. Give each other such a hard time. And it almost always a sign of affection. Hassling one another is how men show love.
Or maybe this is just Christian love? I mean, when your exemplar is a God who shows his love by crucifying his own son, and by condemning the vast majority of human beings to eternal torture, showing one's manly love by wrestling one's buddy to the ground can seem the most reasonable thing in the world.
Good grief. Are straight men still fussing about this stuff? ...
Just out of curiosity, though, Mark, how do you explain cultures where men show affection by holding hands, kissing each other, sitting close to each other, embracing each other -- all that, you know, sissy stuff that men don't do according to Mark T. Morman? Like the Beloved Disciple resting against Jesus at the Last Supper, or the Prodigal Son's father, who didn't welcome his returning son with a chest bump or by throwing him to the ground (!), but by rushing out to embrace and kiss him, weeping? That doesn't mean those cultures aren't ferociously homophobic, by the way; they just draw the boundaries differently than latter-day American men do. All that aggro stuff you describe isn't love and affection, it's substitution for the love and affection they're afraid to show.
Mark responded, "Different cultures have, I guess, different ways of playing music, showing affection, or playing football." Actually, though, I cheated a bit as I posed my question, because even American men don't only show affection for each other by beating each other up.
In the dorm where I work (admittedly an artsy-fartsy liberal arts living-learning center, but we have our share of jocks, ROTC, and frat boys), I don't see much punching, shoving, or wrestling each other to the ground. I do see young men hugging each other and touching each other affectionately, not just around work but all over campus. This may be partly a generational thing, but if so my generation is impoverished.
Still, I doubt even that. My generation would have been the hippies and other males who rejected -- however inadequately they succeeded -- the rigid masculine roles we'd been taught as children. My generation came up with the Promise Keepers, a reactionary Christian group that wanted to reinstate biblical patriarchy in the home, but which also insisted on men showing affection to each other by being affectionate. Insofar as we failed to carry these changes through, our lives are impoverished, but I think we made a lot of progress anyway, and really, American men are no more all alike than another other group. Some of us can only show affection by punching each other and making fun of each other for eating "sissy" foods like scones (?); others show affection by hugging each other, treating each other with warmth and even tenderness. But where are the adults in my old friend's church? The behavior he describes belongs to Fag Discourse; it's not innocent, and at the risk of granting Christianity its own moral pretensions, what's it doing in and around a church? Or anywhere.
Some years ago, on the night before Graduation Day, I was sitting at the bar of a tavern popular with alumni and other manly men. Two boys came in, evidently graduating fraternity brothers, and stood at the bar a few feet away from me to order a couple of shots. They toasted each other, downed the shots, and embraced each other; I still insist that I heard the sound of one of them kissing the other's neck. Nobody minded, least of all me. They didn't punch each other or slam each other against the wall; as far as I noticed, they didn't wrestle each other to the floor. That's why I disagree with my old friend and with Mark T. Morman, the Baylor associate professor of communication studies. What they are celebrating as normal and positive is neither.
