Gay men have often had a penchant for self-justification, because we so
often have found ourselves confronting a society that stirs up our
self-doubt, so I shall only briefly pause to list the reasons why I
like beefcake:
By the time the First World War arrived, when people began to lose
their taste for art, Tuke had acquired a reputation for himself as a
painter of picturesque youth somewhat analogous to the reputation of
Norman Rockwell in America. His paintings had such charm that often the
Cornish coast would be enlivened by the visits of such notable
personages as Oscar Wilde. A great many of Tuke's friends were
homosexuals, and he himself developed an especial affection for several
favourite models. Henry Scott Tuke occupies a special place in the
mythology of sentimental middle-class values, especially concerning the
British love of hearty boyhood, and his definitive biography has yet to
be written.
If we need a precise date for the beginnings of beefcake, it would be
1888. In that year Tuke's finest and most deservedly famous painting
The Bathers was exhibited in the New English
Art Club. The exhibition prompted a lovely poem on Hyacinthus by
Charles Kains Jackson in the Artist and Journal of Home
Culture, a magazine edited by Jackson. The
Artist had a popularity somewhat similar to
the American Saturday Evening Post (the
vehicle for Rockwell's illustrations), except that while it was
disseminating "home culture" it was also a major vehicle for
the propagation of carefully veiled homosexual verse and short fiction
— and eventually for discreet studies of the male nude. Jackson
was a friend of Tuke, and often visited him, and there is good reason
to believe that one of the figures in The
Bathers is Jackson's fourteen-year-old boyfriend Cecil
Castle (the other figures are Willy Rowling and Albert Pidwell; the
painting is in the Usher Art Gallery, Lincoln). I cannot quite trace
Tuke's interest in such goings-on, but the tale becomes progressively
intriguing.
Jackson lived with Cecil in Tyneham House, London, in the infamous
company of Frederick Rolfe, self-styled "Baron Corvo." Corvo
was not at all averse to the delights of the male nude in art (and
life), and he took a photograph of Cecil Castle, nude, lying on his
stomach, which was printed in the Studio,
another mainstream art journal with a gay subtext edited by
the bisexual Gleeson White — also a friend of Tuke. It was at
White's home that Corvo met Tuke, and Tuke had given him some
drawings of boys to stimulate Corvo's artistic interests. Corvo wrote
to Tuke's most intimate friend, the pederast Charles Masson Fox, that
Tuke's talents would be best served if he went to Venice:
Corvo himself had extracted all he needed from his many gay adventures
in Italy, and when he was hired to create the fresco for the church of
St Joseph's in Christchurch, he had on hand a good supply of nude
photographs of his Italian boyfriends. He would project these upon the
wet plaster (with a "magic lantern") in order to draw the
outlines for his religious figures. Jackson recalls watching in
wonderment as Corvo projected upon the wall a photo of a nude boy
"of seventeen years, yellow haired and blue eyed and of the most
exquisite physical development ... instantaneously photographed in mid-
air, when leaping into the Lake of Nemi." This became the mural
"Ascension of Christ." Among the Nine Orders of Corvo's
Celestial Hierarchy in this very fine fresco can be discerned the
Archangel Michael, created by projecting upon the wall the nude
photograph of Cecil on his stomach, upon the print of which Corvo had
carefully drawn a spear, a shield, and a pair of wings.
Part of this metamorphosis of beefcake was controlled by the aesthetic
dictum that male nudes looked their finest on a background of blue (the
most celestial color, though Wilde preferred yellow). John Addington
Symonds (distributor of his friends' photographs) in a book of essays
titled In the Key of Blue, wrote:
"Whether the flesh tints of the man be pale or sun-burned, his
complexion dark or fair, blue is equally in sympathy with the
model." For this study he made impressionistic photo studies of
the Venetian porter Augusto Zanon dressed in various shades of blue
against different coloured backgrounds. He wrote to Arthur Symons in
1892, "Of things like this, I have always been doing plenty, and
then putting them away in a box. The public think them immoral."
Symonds's lifetime companion was the Venetian gondolier Angelo Fusato,
whom he often gazed upon against the background of the blue
Mediterranean.
Symonds regularly sent photos of young men to his friends, including
photos of his boyfriend Angelo, often by a very good amateur
photographer in Davos, Switzerland, where Symonds lived. For example,
he sent Mary Robinson a photo "of a naked young man with a sword
between his legs" and he hired models to assume Michelangelo's poses
for his biography of the sculptor. The literary critic Edmund Gosse
wrote to Symonds on 31 December 1889 about his attendance at the
funeral service for Robert Browning in Westminster Abbey. A packet had
just arrived from Symonds containing a "beautiful photograph, which is
full of poetry":
Corvo says in relation to his special boyfriend Toto (a nude photo of
whom can be found in Brian Reade's Sexual
Heretics), "That kind of blue, with Toto's kind of
brown, is fine. I learned the blend of him." And in his letter to
Fox about why Tuke should have gone to Venice, Corvo speaks of
"young Venetians poised on lofty poops out on the wide lagoon, at
high noon, when all the world which is not brilliant is blue, glowing
young litheness with its sumptuous breast poised in air like showers of
aquamarines on a sapphire sea with shadows of lapis-lazuli under a
monstrous dome of turquoise, glowing magnificent strength." That
is a bit over-gemmed, and to understand what Corvo was rhapsodizing
about you must examine Tuke's other very fine painting (in the Tate
Gallery in London), of four nude youths in a boat on the sea,
appropriately titled August Blue.
Enough for aesthetics, and back to the mundane. Tuke's
Bathing Boys was so instantaneously famous
that hundreds of amateur painters and photographers gambolled about
trying to capture similar flesh tints, so much so that a mere two years
later, in 1890, the Amateur Swimming Association ruled that henceforth
bathing drawers must be worn for all racing events. Boys (more so than
girls) regularly continued to swim in the nude up through the 1930s. Of
course one needn't always stay on the beach. There was a very nasty
scandal in Tuke's beloved port of Falmouth when the owner of a boys'
training ship stationed there engaged in orgies on deck, and meanwhile
took photos that apparently still circulate in certain quarters. Part
of the scandal was that the boys of Cornwall were so easily enticed
into engaging in such activities.
Enough of my foul-minded suspicions about Tuke's wholesome models, and
on to a Sicilian line of inquiry. Corvo's photo of Cecil Castle
appeared in the context of Gleeson White's essay on the male nude in
art in Studio, and other illustrations that
he used to prove his points were several photographs of nude boys by
Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden, whose studio was located in Taormina,
Sicily. It was rumored that during the wicked 1890s, none other than
Kaiser Wilhelm himself was wont to voyage to Sicily, where he would
anchor the Imperial Yacht in the picturesque bay or Taormina, perforce
to sleep with one or the other of the Baron's boys.
Wilhelm von Gloeden, Baron of the Court of the Hohenzollerns, born in
Schloss Volkshagen, near Wiemar, in the Grand Duchy of Mecklenburg, on
September 16, 1856, has some small claim to fame as a student of the
male nude whose artistic achievement has not yet been surpassed by
promulgators of beefcake.
The Baron claimed to have been an illegitimate child in the family line
of the Kaiser, because of which he was persuaded to become an exile
from his native land, and for which exile he received a regular stipend
from Berlin — on condition that he never return. Being a Bohemian
at heart, the Baron took up quarters in a modest villa at Taormina in
1876,
Soon after the Baron arrived in the city that his fame would later
transform into a major tourist attraction, he engaged the services of
a fourteen-year-old boy (the Baron, being only twenty himself at the
time, cannot at this stage be called a proper pederast). This servant
was Pancrazio Bucini, nicknamed "Il Moro" because of the
Arabic strains in his blood. Von Gloeden and Bucini were in a sense
monogamous lovers, for Il Moro was still with the Baron when the latter
died in 1931, and he inherited most of his master's photographs.
Unfortunately most of these plates (several thousand) were destroyed by
Mussolini's Fascist authorities towards the end of the Second World
War, although several hundred are still preserved by Bucini's own heirs
in Taormina today. It is difficult to determine if these plates were
really pornographic, as the Fascists claimed, but a few surviving
photographs depict youths boasting prominent erections.
By the late 1890s von Gloeden had established himself as
the master of the male nude in photography.
Tuke's paintings were still influencing numerous imitators (especially
Thomas Eakins in America), and every other poet wrote a pederastic
verse or two on boys bathing or "Playmates," the title of
another of Tuke's paintings (exhibited at the Royal Academy). But Tuke
could not keep up with Gloeden's output, and the vogue for painting was
steadily superseded by the vogue for photography. Nearly every one of
the Baron's photographs is a tour de force
when we realize that most of them were produced from 1895 to 1910, at
a time when even a single photograph required him to set up a cumbrous
contraption known as the wide-view camera, to evenly coat a thin piece
of glass with a chemical solution (amateur English photographers were
always dying of poisoning) before placing it in the camera, and to
somehow persuade his model to pose for up to a full minute while the
negative was developing. He nevertheless was able to produce perhaps
4000 to 5000 photographs for wide distribution.
Von Gloeden's photographs (about 80 percent of which were of lightly-
clad or unclad boylimbs) were circulated not merely among the extensive
coterie of the "Uranian School" of homosexual poets, but in
many of the "physique and health" magazines spawned by the
German Korperkulture (physical
health/naturalism/nudism) and Wandervogel
(boy scouts/hiking) movements. His more carefully draped studies were
regularly reprinted in hundreds of travel magazines and brochures
advertising the joys of a Mediterranean holiday. The British concept of
what constitutes "the romantic Mediterranean" was
invented by von Gloeden. Mr and Mrs Alexander
Graham Bell visited von Gloeden in 1898, and came away the proud
possessors of several of his photos of native Sicilians, which they
graciously presented o the National Geographic Society for its magazine
(which thence contained two or three shots of semi-clad boys, up
through recent times). Other of the Baron's renowned guests are said to
include Rudyard Kipling, Anatol France, Marconi, and Richard Strauss.
Oscar Wilde dropped by for a chat (and a look) upon his release from
prison, and humbly presented the master with a signed copy of
The Ballad of Reading Gaol.
Von Gloeden's work was especially popularized through the medium of
various magazines edited by Gleeson White: Art and
Artist, Studio,
Parade, Pageant,
and especially through White's essays on the male nude in
Photogram. White developed at some length his
not very perceptive ideas "On Photographing the Nude,"
usually reproducing two or three of von Gloeden's photos to illustrate
his points. In the March 1894 part of the continuing series we find von
Gloeden's "The White Pillar" (a boy standing against a white
pillar). The first word of White's text was "Giving," and
the first letter of this word was enlarged and superimposed upon the
photograph in order to conceal the model's genitals with its lower
curve. We thus see a naked boy behind the letter
G, which certainly deserves to be circulated
as a Gay Liberation icon. Other photos
included "At the Portal," "On the Terrace,"
"At the Sea," "On the Beach," "On the
Rock,", etc.: not very imaginatively titled.
White underlined the basic defect of male nude photography, then as
now: that professional models have "the rooted tendency to pose
... they fall into their poses with a peculiarly ungraceful
rigidity." This lack of rigidity in most
of von Gloeden's photographs is one of their finest testaments to his
genius. However, some of his photographs were in the self-consciously
posed "Classic" manner, which were somewhat the equivalent of
the glamour pics in fashion magazines, which today have chrome and
glass in the background instead of sarcophagi. Much of the time von
Gloeden's models would be holding Greek urns, sitting atop ruined
pillars, and wearing crowns of laurel leaves. Most of the togas were
home-made (the Baron was also handy at needle and thread) and not
particularly serviceable. He made some very sensuous studies of boys
lightly concealed with a diaphanous gauze, sometimes wearing a barbaric
jewelled necklace beneath the gauze. The archaic settings are one of
von Gloeden's major flaws, but Gleeson White disagrees:
White's series of essays were taken up by Robert H. Hobart Cust in
1897, in Photogram, who argued vehemently
that English boys were better models than Italian boys because the
latter's "lazy life and their food, principally macaroni, produces
a grossness which soon spoils them entirely for artistic
purposes." He also disliked Italian shortness. To prove his point,
he presents his own studies, such as "A Lancashire Foundry
Lad."
James A. Rooth continued the controversy in the 1898 issue of
Photogram, and kept on in the 1903 issue of
Boy's Own Paper, a supposedly boy-scout
magazine filled with interesting diversions by a good many homosexuals.
His argument was merely that Sicilian boys charged less for their
services and therefore were the better models. Rooth, incidentally, was
Inspecting Officer of St Catherine's Light Infantry Cadet Corps.
Rooth and Cust also used photographs by Gugleilmo Pluschow, the Baron's
major rival in Rome.
Other of von Gloeden's rivals were D'Agata, his neighbor in Taormina
who paid his models more money; Vincensio Galdi in Rome; and, more
admirer than rival, Count Jacques d'Adelsward Fersen (hero of Roger
Peyrefitte's Exile of Capri), who fled to
Capri following a scandal about his use of Parisian schoolboys for a
poses plastiques exhibition, but who
eventually returned, to edit Akademos with
full-page illustrations.
By the mid-1970s, directly as a result of this combined influence of
Tuke and von Gloeden through the medium of White's magazines, beefcake
was fully born. The German homosexual magazine Der
Eigene was founded in 1899 and continued until 1929, and
by the late 1920s The Fortune Press and The Cayme Press had been
founded, both of whose early publications were often illustrated with
photographs of boys. In 1929 The Ladslore Series Press published
Lads O' The Sun, with 35 illustrations, and,
to make a long story of tenuous connections short, in 1961 the
Grecian Guild Pictorial was founded. In
ensuing years appeared such items as The Boy: A
Photographic Essay (1964), Boys Will Be
Boys (1966), Boyhood Magazine
(1967), and in due course we see numerous publications by such firms as
The Athletic Model Guild, The Overstock Book Company (Richard Model
Xclusives), S[unshine] & H[ealth] Publications, Colt Publications,
DSI, XXX Incorporated, etc.
But von Gloeden is still with us, though his popularity is limited to
gay circles now that his pastoral cover has been blown. In 1968 Brian
Patten's book of poetry Atomic Age used one
of von Gloeden's photos as its frontispiece (slightly airbrushed), and
in the early 1970s Vulcan Studios of New York offered for sale a set of
six of the Baron's photos — at an outrageous price. In the 1980s
and 1990s book-length selections of von Gloeden's photographs were
published, some at low prices, including a book of postcards and a book
of posters. Today of course male nude photography (the phrase is really
too grandiose nowadays) is big business, and we can lament the passing
away of von Gloeden's eye for quality. The biggest sellers up to the
early 1970s were still the boystudies, but from the late 1970s
photographs of the fully adult (and hirsute) male nude have dominated.
I frankly do not know much about what goes on in the studios of
photographers of nude males, particularly of young nude males, and I
would rather not make any generalizations about the matter. In the late
1960s there was an extravagant villa near San Francisco out of which
came thousands of photographs, in many of which the models, mostly over
eighteen, looked as though they had been picked up off the street,
given a little bread and a little heroin, and told to take their
clothes off. On the other hand, there was a wholesome ranch near
Burbank, California, where models, mostly under the age of eighteen and
many under the age of fifteen, seem to have quite thoroughly enjoyed a
well-paid game, even though that game involved spreading their arse
cheeks for a close-up shot. Many of the models for the Athletic Model
Guild were as rough in reality as they looked, and worked as boxers if
they were in full-time employment at all, or hung around the streets or
on the beaches waiting to be film extras. In respect of copulation
photos, we have come a long way from von Gloeden, not entirely for the
worse, though not very convincingly for the better.
CITATION: If you cite this Web page, please use the following citation:
'Nuff said. Being a scholar as well as a masturbatory philosopher, with
my deep down antiquarian conviction that nothing ever "just
happens" and that everything originates in something earlier, I
assumed that S&H Publications didn't just pop onto the scene, so I
decided to do a little research.
Beefcake in Cornwall
Not surprisingly, I discovered that it all began (with a few exceptions
in Pompeian bedrooms) during the late Victorian era, along with other
equally colorful developments in gay culture. To be precise, it began
in Falmouth, Cornwall. There we find Henry Scott Tuke (1858-1929),
sitting on his quay-punt and busily attempting, as he said in an 1895
interview, "to capture the truth and beauty of flesh in sunlight
by the sea." To be strictly precise, he liked to paint naked boys
bathing. Tuke settled in Falmouth in 1885, after a period abroad in
Florence in the company of Arthur Lemon, with whom he studied the art
of capturing on canvas the effect of sunlight upon uncovered boyflesh.
Tuke was not particularly lonely on the Cornish coast when he returned,
and while there, he produced a substantial quantity of paintings of
local youth, bathing boys, fisherboys, bathing boys, schoolboys,
bathing boys, and more bathing boys — all against a romantic
background of rocky coastline and picturesque sailing vessels.
One thing this world wants is some Tuke pictures of the Venetian lagoon
and some Tuke pictures of mediaeval
gondoglieri poised on
poppe in Venetian Canals. But "Tuke has
all he wants at Falmouth." Hum! Arnold of Rugby held that no man
ought to be a school-master longer than 15 years at a stretch!
A visit to the museum at Falmouth will reveal that Tuke's models
included especially Jack Rolling or Rowling, of whom he took numerous
photographs; William J. Martin, born 1870, a messenger boy with the
Post Office, who appears in The Messenger,
The Swimmer's Pool, The Lamp
Cleaners and A Woodland Bathe
(he and Tuke were both stamp collectors). Colin Goodwyn appears in
The Coming of Day. Dolin Kennedy, 1893-1962,
appears in June Morning, The
Morning Catch, and others. He was Tuke's constant
companion, whom he met through Sydney Lomer (1880-1926). Kennedy was a
junior officer, and nearly a paid secretary to Tuke but really a
voluntary general assistant and companion.The Metamorphosis of Cecil
That Blend of Blue
As I sat in the Choir, with George Meredith at my side, I peeped at it
again and again, and at last, while waiting in the deep silence for the
ceremonial to begin, with many thoughts of love and life and genius and
decay, moving in my mind, this sextain formed itself — I hardly
know how — and I send it to you as the onlie begetter of all that
sehnsucht [yearning]:
One wonders what Mrs Humphry Ward, sitting behind Gosse, and Burne-
Jones, sitting just opposite him, made of all this.
Dark-stamen'd flower, across thy beauty
Sighing, I cast the veil.
In Youth's high spring-tide Love's a duty
And rose-crowned hopes prevail;
But autumn comes, and brings I see
No rose, but rosemary for me.
Baronial Beefcake in Taormina
with a lovely secluded
garden-terrace where he would feed his birds and photograph his models.
This terrace often appears in his photos, sometimes with a spring of a
fennel tree propped in one corner (or in a Greek urn) for its
picturesque effect, often with an animal skin draped over the bench
upon which would be seated an artistic nude. It is said that whenever
a new model appeared uneasy at being photographed, the Baron would
strip off his own clothes, don the leopard-skin, and together they
would gambol about like young animal pups until the model lost his
shyness.
Sunshine and Health
A series of great service to designers could be obtained from models
posed in niches, spandrils, pediments, and other architectural spaces.
I remember at a New York swimming bath seeing two lads who had climbed
into the spandril of a wooden verandah, and sat there unconsciously
mimicking some of the most beautiful figures the art of the Renaissance
has left us.
Alas, the sauna-school of gay art by the later twentieth century had become one of
unmitigated kitsch.
Beefcake in Conflict
Pluschow's
studies are perhaps more sharply delineated, which is really an
indication that he handled light less effectively and less subtly than
von Gloeden, and his boys are somehow "harder" than the
Baron's. His photos are also much more stilted, particularly a famous
one of two boys standing on a pediment who are virtually
indistinguishable from the sculpture itself
(Photogram, May 1897). He also tended to
photograph boys with large genitals, and it would have been less easy
for collectors to claim these as specimens of the antique pastoral.
Pluschow, incidentally, was the Baron's cousin. He was finally arrested
for the corruption of minors.
Beefcake in Full Bloom
Rictor Norton, "The Beginnings of Beefcake", Copyright © 1974, 1998, 3 January 2001, updated 17 June 2008 <http://rictornorton.co.uk/beefcake.htm>.
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