The golden age of gay porn nostalgia and the photography of Wilhelm von Gloeden

GLQ

Volumn 12, Issue 2, 2006, Pages 237-258

  Goldman, Jason ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 33646703288     PISSN: 10642684     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/10642684-12-2-237     Document Type: Review

References (56)

1. Thomas Waugh, Hard to Imagine: Gay Male Eroticism in Photography and Film from Their Beginnings to Stonewall (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 72.
2. See Ulrich Pohlmann, Wilhelm von Gloeden: Taormina (New York: te Neues, 1998).
3. Only portions of Peyrefitte's book have been translated into English. The epigraph of this essay is quoted from Hans Werner, trans., "Excerpts from the Memoirs of Baron Wilhelm v. Gloeden," Impulse, Spring-Summer 1983, 44.
4. Gert Schiff, "The Sun of Taormina," Print Collector's Newsletter, January-February 1979, 199.
5. Charles Leslie, Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden, Photographer: A Brief introduction to His Life and Work (New York: Soho Photographic Publishers, 1977), 52.
6. Wilhelm von Gloeden, "Kunst in der Photographie," Photographische Mitteilungen 36 (1898),
7. quoted in Robert Aldrich, The Seduction of the Mediterranean: Writing, Art, and Homosexual Fantasy (New York: Routledge, 1993), 150. The passage reveals that von Gloeden's references to antiquity were much more than convenient alibis for photographing nude and scantily clad boys. While the ruins and classical costumes may have lent a legitimate air to his work, it seems that von Gloeden's erotic interest in his models was itself routed through a fantasy about antiquity.
8. Waugh, Hard to Imagine, 99.
9. National Geographic Magazine, October 1916.
10. See Waugh, Hard to Imagine, 82-83.
11. James Saslow, "Greek Revival: The Photography of Wilhelm von Gloeden," Gaysweek, November 7, 1977, 6. I am grateful to Saslow for graciously sharing his article with me.
12. Rictor Norton, The Myth of the Modern Homosexual: Queer History and the Search for Cultural Unity (Washington, DC: Cassell, 1997), 61.
13. Ibid., Rictor Norton, The Myth of the Modern Homosexual: Queer History and the Search for Cultural Unity, 12.
14. Whitney Davis, introduction to Gay and Lesbian Studies in Art History, ed. Whitney Davis (Binghamton. NY: Harrington Park, 1994), 2-3.
15. Ibid., Whitney Davis, Gay and Lesbian Studies in Art History, 3.
16. Leslie, Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden, Photographer, ix.
17. Peter Weiermair, The Hidden Image: Photographs of the Male Nude in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 16.
18. David Loo, "The Boys of Taormina: The Baron von Gloeden and His Sicilian Models," Queens Quarterly: The Magazine for Gay Guys Who Have No Hangups 1, no. 3 (1969): 46.
19. Jared French to Alfred Kinsey, July 1, 1951, Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction, Bloomington, Indiana. French spent the spring and summer of 1951 in and around Taormina, where he purchased von Gloeden's photographs and sent them to Kinsey in installments. Kinsey was delighted to receive the pictures, expressing relief that they had passed customs without incident and noting (in a letter from April 23, 1951) "the material is really very distinctive - in some ways curious but certainly a definite addition to our files."
20. Among von Gloeden's contemporaries are his cousin, Wilhelm von Plüschow, and the Italian Vincenzo Galdi. Until fairly recently, both artists were rather understudied and often east as cheap imitators of von Gloeden. While each oeuvre is surely different, the work of these three photographers is similar enough to raise the specter of misattribution, especially between von Gloeden and von Plüschow, who may have collaborated early on. Several photographs once published as von Gloeden's have since been attributed lo von Plüschow or another contemporary. For an important reappraisal of von Plüschow, as well as a discussion of the attribution problem,
21. see Bruce Russell, "Wilhelm von Plüschow [sic] and Wilhelm von Gloeden: Two Photo Essays," Studies in Visual Communication 9, no. 2 (1983): 57-81.
22. See also Tobias G. Natter and Peter Weiermair, eds., Wilhelm von Gloeden - Wilhelm von Plüschow-Vincenzo Galdi: Et in Arcadia Ego: Turn-of-the-Century Photography (Zurich: Oehrli, 2000).
23. Richard Meyer, Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century American Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 15.
24. Ironically, as classicism was one of the principal alibis of the physique genre, von Gloeden's own Arcadian references make this distortion more believable.
25. Loo, "Boys of Taormina," 46 (ellipsis in original).
26. David M. Halperin, How lo Do the History of Homosexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2002), 105.
27. Saslow. "Greek Revival," 6.
28. For a more recent, if slightly over-the-top, example of these conflicting frameworks, see the introduction to Tom Bianchi's book of photographs Bianchi: Outpost (New York: St. Martin's, 1996). Bianchi writes, "One hundred years ago, Wilhelm von Gloeden created an outpost in Taormina, Sicily, for our tribe," by which he means for gay men (9). Bianchi's photographs riff on von Gloeden's, only "in this incarnation, the outpost is in Southern California ... a Mecca for and home to many seriously handsome and intensely playful men" (9).
29. Charles Leslie, "An Afterword," August 2000. in "A Memory of Taormina," 1985, www.leslielohman.org/WVonGloedenl.htm.
30. Leslie, Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden, Photographer, x-11.
31. Ibid., Leslie, Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden, Photographer, 11.
32. Ibid. Leslie, Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden, Photographer
33. Ibid., Leslie, Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden, Photographer, 78.
34. Ibid., Leslie, Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden, Photographer, x.
35. As Susan Stewart has written, "It is in [the] gap between resemblance and identity that nostalgic desire arises" (On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993], 145).
36. David Gross, The Past in Ruins: Tradition and the Critique of Modernity (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992), 75.
37. Peter Fritzsche, "Specters of History: On Nostalgia, Exile, and Modernity," American Historical Review 106 (2001): 1592.
38. Ibid., Peter Fritzsche, American Historical Review, 1595.
39. For an excellent appraisal of how anxiety around the age of von Gloeden's models has hindered research, see Waugh, Hard to Imagine, xv.
40. To be sure, the term underage is an utter anachronism, imposing a retroactive legal standard that was hardly active in von Gloeden's time. That the term violates historical specificity, however, is no cause to dismiss it out of hand. Indeed, the term should be taken seriously for what it reveals about the contemporary constraints and disciplinary forces under which von Gloeden's pictures now circulate. We need only recall the case of actor Paul Reubens, whose collection of physique magazines and other vintage homoerotic photography was raided by Los Angeles police in November 2001. Photographs by von Gloeden were apparently among the materials that police alleged were child pornography. The charge was eventually reduced to possession of obscene materials; as part of his settlement with prosecutors, Reubens was required to register as a sex offender for a period of three years.
41. Leslie, Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden, Photographer, 42.
42. Ibid.Leslie, Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden, Photographer, Leslie assures the reader that von Gloeden had excessive admiration, respect, and generosity for his youthful models and that, during the orgies, "no one was coerced into doing anything he did not wish to do" (42). Likewise, Schiff remarks that von Gloeden "was anything but a cynical sybarite, let alone a heartless exploiter of the youths who eagerly flocked around him" ("Sun of Taormina," 198). The somewhat apologetic tone of these statements may reveal a worry that, once posited as a gay icon, von Gloeden makes easy fodder for homophobic stereotypes that homosexuality is predatory, child recruiting, and exercised through class privilege. The need to guard against such stereotypes is understandable, but hardly justifies overlooking the quasi-colonial aspects of von Gloeden's career.
43. Schiff, "Sun of Taormina," 200.
44. See Russell, "Wilhelm von Pluschow and Wilhelm von Gloeden," 61.
45. Aldrich, Seduction of the Mediterranean, x.
46. Patricia G. Berman, "F. Holland Day and His 'Classical' Models: Summer Camp," History of Photography 18 (1994): 353.
47. Stewart, On Longing, 23.
48. Jean-Claude Lemagny, Photographs of the Classic Male Nude: Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden (New York: Camera/Graphic, 1977), 6.
49. Published in France as Taormina debut du siècle (Paris: Chêne, 1975).
50. Ibid., 7.
51. Roland Barthes, untitled essay in Taormina: Wilhelm von Gloeden, ed. Jack Woody (Santa Fe, NM: Twelvetrees, 1997),
52. n.p., rpt. from Roland Barthes, Wilhelm von Gloe-den: Interventi di Joseph Beuys, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Andy Warhol (Naples: Amelio, 1978).
53. For an excellent critique of Barthes, especially his racism and his bizarre complaint that the models' foreskins are not properly stylized, see Russell, "Wilhelm von Pluschow and Wilhelm von Gloeden," 62.
54. Barthes, untitled essay, n.p.
55. See www.omnigay.com/goldenage/early.html. A paid membership is required to access the complete galleries. While most of the images appear to be vintage, some of them are obviously contemporary.
56. Again, the problem of attribution is relevant. Of the six images offered in the preview, those at top-middle and bottom-right have been attributed to von Gloeden in print, while the photograph at bottom-left is conceivably also his work. (The model in the photograph at bottom-right also appears in "II fauno gigante" [fig. 3].) The paid gallery contains a higher ratio of von Gloedens, although it is possible that von Pluschow, Galdi, or another contemporary made some of these photographs (see note 18).