The Kind of Authenticity That Can Only Be Faked

A disadvantage of not having much real-world contact with gay men's culture is that I'm not always sure what some of the terminology means.  I get a sense of what a "twink" is, for example, from the context of written references to the type, but I'm not sure what the concept's boundaries are.  That would have to come from observing what kinds of men my peers call twinks.  It might not be all that much help, I know, because such classifications change over time.  Take "bears," which used to refer to big-boned gentlemen with a plethora of body hair and, usually, beards.  The men it covered ranged from the hefty to the obese.  Now it seems that a bear can be a gym queen, provided he has a bit of body hair and perhaps some close-trimmed stubble.

This is why I was taken aback when Band of Thebes posted about the work of a Tasmanian/Australian photographer named Paul Freeman.  "Fed up with shaved, steroided gym bunnies," as BoT put it, Freeman produced a body of photographs featuring what, judging by the images BoT quotes, I can only describe as shaved, steroided gym bunnies, though some, I admit, are not shaved.
 

I don't object to such images, nor do I find them unattractive, but they hardly represents a conceptual shift in the photographic depiction of the unclad male.  Putting hunky models in the regalia of Greco-Roman antiquity is actually a well-established convention of male nude photography, from von Gloeden to the American physique studios of the 1950s -- if not from the Renaissance or earlier!  Freeman's aesthetic of carefully styled scruffiness crosses those cliches with the look of fashion photography (think Abercrombie and Diesel) of the past couple of decades.  It's been done before and, predictably enough, touted as the new big thing.  Nothing to see here, folks, move along now.

There's also a link to an interview with the great man, which adds to the hilarity.

But I think [his book] ‘Outback’ triggered a big response because we romanticize these types of men. The men of the countryside, the west, the wild, the outback… There is an established escapism associated with their reality. A timelessness. A freshness and wholesomeness. I accentuated this by the use of earth tones and sepias, aging photos, by choosing rustic and worn environments and settings, and through the actions and camaraderie of the moments and rural activities I captured. I think the lifestyle depicted in this filmic way was evocative and authentic. It connected the body of images into a total world, a mythical utopia where men are natural and at ease and unaffected, unselfconsciously, innocently beautiful while actively and happily engaged in and enjoying their life ...

SR: A very distinct aesthetic permeates your work. The men are natural, rugged, sweaty, unshaven… You have been pretty vocal about the fact that you have no interest in photographing the typical male model in the usual fashion. You enjoy photographing a man that looks like a man.

PF: As a gay male, I am increasingly alienated from the direction that a lot of gay male fashion and erotic male photography is taking, finding its general photo surreal plasticity obliterates  so many of the real, nuanced, subtle features of a man that make him a thing of beauty.  In the mid to late eighties when the gym culture really took off, gays took to improving their bodies with a vengeance. They copied the pro body builders by taking steroids and shaving down their bodies, in order to highlight definition and youthfulness. The new stereotype was faux macho beyond the village people types which had at least been based on real life stereotypes. Now, it was a tribal muscle gym fetishist thing. And it is a pervasive fashion which grows still in popularity and evolves and which I fear is now disconnected from any organic male sensuality or the reality we genetically recognize or respond to intuitively. We respond to it now because it’s the fashion. (As the director of The Australian Centre For Photography once kindly complimented me, it is clear from my work that the erotic lies in the individual not the stereotype.)

BoT remarks, "Never mind that for about half the images, he took Sydney models to the Outback to manufacture the verisimilitude he sought."  Well, you see, I do mind.  Freeman's self-inflating rhetoric is also wearily familiar.  The sexism and misogyny here ("a man that looks like a man") would be offensive if it weren't so tired and dishonest.  Again, the (female) interviewer gushes, "What I love most and appreciate about your work is that it’s definitely missing that 'staged' quality. The men - and the way you capture them - have a kind of raw, rugged energy that makes me feel as though I really am looking at REAL men at work and play in the Australian Outback."  The photos reproduced here don't bear that out.  Outback, Freeman declares, "doesn’t feature - at least by conventional gay standards - the hottest men."  "Hottest" compared to what?  Freeman's models conform to "conventional gay standards" as far as I can tell.  His work is very much in the main traditions of male physique and nude photography.  Which doesn't mean he shouldn't make whatever kind of pictures, featuring the kind of men, he likes, only that there's nothing unusual about it.  Even his considerable technical skill is not unusual in the field.  You or I might not be able to make such images, but hundreds of other professionals could and do.

The recurrent references to "REAL men" especially annoy me.  The men being put down by comparison are just as "real" as Freeman's models, who are surely the result of diligent gym work, costuming, and hair styling.  It takes a lot of preparation and planning to produce art that looks spontaneous, unstaged, and authentic.  It's to Freeman's credit that he brings it off so well, if you like this sort of thing.  And I do, among other sorts of things, but not enough to pay money for his books.

I sometimes muse about what would be genuine alternatives to mainstream gay male photography, featuring men who really aren't typical male models: men who don't work out, men with paunches, men with pronounced guts, men who are losing or have lost their hair, men forty or more years of age, for examples.  A competent photographer should be able to see the beauty in such men and find a way to record it on film or in pixels.  The photoblog The Real Men of New York, which I've linked to before, caught such men on the fly, but it seems to be defunct.  The Bear movement has produced its share of depictions of big men, but often it just poses them according to the conventions of porn, which again is all right but isn't what I mean.  That's the trouble, of course: what pleases me will displease many other gay men.  But I've also learned over the years that what pleases me will also please some others, enough others to be worthwhile.

As I say, I have no objection to Paul Freeman (or his fans) fetishizing whatever kind of man they like.  What I do object to is their contemptuous putdowns of other kinds of men, who are after all fetishized by other men.  What makes Paul Freeman's taste superior to anyone else's?  It's clear he thinks his fetishes are superior to those who like, say, steroided, shaved gym bunnies,  He also needs to look at the history of the male nude before the 1970s; he seems to think that the kind of idealized "surreal plasticity" he deplores is something new.  For that matter, the classical ideal he wishes he could evoke was of the ephebe, the beardless youth, not the stylized cowboys he likes.  And what's this nonsense about an "organic male sensuality or the reality we genetically recognize or respond to intuitively"?  Freeman's kind of photography is anything but organic, and the types of men he objects to are "intuitively" desired by others.

Freeman is making a typical false-consciousness accusation: what I like, I like authentically and autonomously -- even "genetically" -- but what you like, you you only think you like, because you've been brainwashed.  This attitude permeates mainstream sexual culture, both homo and hetero, and though it's often deplored, even those who deplore it tend to share it.  What needs to be challenged and rejected is the belief that sexual tastes can be rationalized, that beauty can be measured objectively, and that beautiful people are morally superior to others.  All these ideas are false, and harmful.

Dissatisfaction

Even though he links to Andrew Sullivan way too much, I like Homo Superior Curates the Web. He puts together a nice mix of images and links, useful and entertaining. Among the images and links are sexy pictures of nekkid men, which are pleasant, but are generally -- all right, nearly always -- typical of what I see on gay male sites: twentyish youths, lean and lightly muscled, pretty, all within a very narrow range of variation; usually white, but even the non-white ones are products of the same mould. I enjoy looking at them, but pretty soon I start wondering why they all look so much alike.

It reminds me of a passage in Marge Piercy's novel Small Changes (Doubleday, 1973), where the character Beth, hiding out in a friend's apartment from her estranged husband until she can divorce him, picks up

some magazines from the coffee table and began leafing through.

They were not exactly like the magazines she'd read in high school. There was more about sex and more about food. The girls' magazines assumed you went to school with lots of boys you had to attract and know how to handle ("How to Say No without Losing Him"). These magazines assumed you had to go out and find men and spouted suggestions for joining activities where They would be sure to be found. They also seemed to assume that you went to bed. ...

There were articles about getting back in circulation after divorce, about making more glamorous dinners than you could afford, about sewing clothes that would look more expensive than you could afford, about buying lots and lots more clothes in new styles, about meeting men at the office, about how roommates could spend their entire joint salary for month giving a New Year's Eve party, and ten articles on beauty. If she followed the directions in even one or two of them, the upkeep on her body would consume her entire free existence.

There were many stories in which women got men in various ways or lost them. The stories were sexier than those she had used to read. The effect of reading them was to feel discontented and sad and vaguely stirred up, as if something were wrong with her.... [315-16]

This describes most gay male magazines nowadays, and the commercial gay websites, which is why they're of limited use to people like me. But it also describes what I feel looking at the photos featured on Homo Superior and the sites they come from: discontented and sad and vaguely stirred up. Which is why I don't look at them much.

So this entry, "The Need for Natural," at HomoSuperior took me by surprise:

The endless stream of zero-body fat model-boys on queer tumblr (At least most of them have retained their natural body-hair…) really numbs my mind after awhile.

Doesn’t anybody like boys/men with a little heft? And who don’t get paid for looking good?

You do realize that’s the reason they look good, right? Um, you do, don’t you?

Oh, I do realize it, I do. But if he feels that way, why do almost all the guys in the pictures on Homo Superior Curates the Web (including most of a page of images from teen-bodybuilding.com) fit exactly that description: zero body-fat model-boys? Even when he links to Real Men of New York, the photo he chooses to accompany the link is of a tattooed guy who doesn't have much more than zero body fat. Which might be a come-on to get his readers to click on the link and have their horizons widened, because most of the men pictured at Real Men of New York are not model-boys. Some are muscular, some are young, but some are older, even old, and some are not In Shape by any criterion, and they come in a variety of colors and types. They're real men, not in the sense of men who've passed the National Machismo Standards Test, but in the sense of actual men rather than fantasy men. "Natural" has nothing to do with it, of course; a lot of these bodies are the products of dedicated gym work, and the outfits are no more "natural" in their calculatedness than a body waxing.

I've written about this syndrome before, in one of the first posts on this blog.

Lamenting gay men's shallow obsession with looks is always good for livening up a slow session in a chat room or for taking a break while guy-watching at the bar. Of course, the complaint is almost always about other gay men's shallowness. I can't recall ever having heard someone moan, "I'm so shallow -- all I care about is looks. Personality doesn't matter to me at all." ...

Let me try to make this as clear as possible: I am not telling gay men (or anyone else) to have sex with people they're not attracted to. I am not arguing that gay men should change their sexual tastes, trying through sheer will-power to crave non-buff non-hunks; if anything, it's most critics of gay male looksism who talk as if they believed that. (Close your eyes, think of England and fuck his personality. It's an odd notion to encounter in individuals who believe that we are born with our sexual desires genetically programmed into us, and that they are absolutely impossible to change.) I'm not even saying that my taste in men is superior to that of most gay men. What I am saying is that our tastes are already broader than we admit.

So, if you like boys/men with a little heft, why not post more pictures of them to your blog, along with all the model-boys, if only for some variety? It isn't only men who are paid to look good who look good.





(Images from The Real Men of New York, via HomoSuperior.)