Our Chinese Crested pup thinks he's all macho, even though we know he's a total lamb. Just don't get between him and his favorite toy, "piggie."
(This is a first experiment with my new Flip Ultra Series Camcorder
Our Chinese Crested pup thinks he's all macho, even though we know he's a total lamb. Just don't get between him and his favorite toy, "piggie."
(This is a first experiment with my new Flip Ultra Series Camcorder
Jack Fritscher sent me this and I recommend it to anyone interested in sex history or gay culture.
To read how this 1950s muscle mag genre formed the first uncloseted gay mags, including the legendary "Drummer" where this all flourished, flip through the pages of new book "Gay San Francisco: Eyewitness Drummer."
The entire text of the trade paperback is posted in a series of free pdfs at my site www.JackFritscher.com. The subtitle is "A Memoir ... Read Moreof the Sex, Art, Salon, Pop Culture War, Gay History of Drummer Magazine from the Titanic 1970s to 1999." 742 pages that are rooted in the 1950s.
Also see the Lammy Award Finalist "Some Dance to Remember: A Memoir-Novel of San Francisco 1970-1982" to see the impact of 1950s muscle and male culture on the first gay decade after Stonewall. Cheers
Buy the books on Amazon:
I am regretfully skipping over a significant piece of male erotic performance history today. Female impersonators have featured prominently on stage since there WAS a stage. Male actors since ancient times have played female roles, usually in drag, depending on contemporary morals (in different cultures at different times, it was taboo for women to perform on stage). It's too vast a subject to squeeze in here.
However, today's show cannot end without a mention of one group who helped revolutionize the social possibilities for trans and cross-dressing performers. The Ballet Trockadero has become so respectable, one may not realize that when they first appeared in the 1970s, they totally freaked people out. Though embraced by critics, average people simply didn't know what to make of this "ballet cockadero" stuff. Happily, the ballet's more sophisticated admirers poured on the love and the money and today they are an institution. If you're interested visit the Trockadero history page.
I hope to revisit the history of drag queens. But for now I am jumping ahead to the rather amazing phenomenon of Boylesque. Erotic male stage performers who offer more than muscles have become a world-wide sensation in the last decade. Boylesque performers do many of the things their female Burlesque predecessors did: they sing, dance, act in sketches, or do comedy, usually ending with a strip-tease.
For more pictures and history, surf over to the Boylesque companies in San Francisco and Toronto
Here is a short picture show, starting with Tigger, perhaps one of the most famous of this new generation of male performers, and some other handsome (but unknown to me) young men.
By the 1950s, it was getting easier to obtain gay porn but still a very socially guilty, and legally dangerous, pleasure. On the other hand, it was a breeze to obtain body-building magazines and men's magazines which covertly catered to the latent homosexual impulses of -- how shall I phrase it diplomatically...umm -- a lot more men than most people will ever admit. Ok, sure, some of the boys and men who consumed the images of naked or near-naked weight-lifters and pawed the pages of gay-looking men's magazines were probably just admiring the athleticism. At least that's what they and the copywriters pretended to believe. But gazing upon the body-builders and the muscle-genre of men's magazines with 21st century eyes, what do you see? I see a lot of delightful 50s beefcake designed to titillate gay men. The idea of men stripping to turn women on was still a couple of decades away, and while I'm sure some women used these materials for masturbation, het females were definitely not a target audience for these.
I'll start with some tasty 50s photography of vintage models and actors.
1950s muscle pulp mags.
Early 1960s muscle pulp fiction:
Curiously, while you could not see naked men for fear that it would arouse homosexual lusts in the male viewing audience, you could see transgendered performers. Here are some rare images of vintage Trans celebrities at work.
Internationally famous female-to-male performer Vesta Tilley, dated 1895.
Vesta Tilley, 1905.
Female-to-male performer, Primrose Rochefort, 1910.
Unknown male-to-female performer, 1920.
They may have called themselves athletes, but I daresay these male models were well aware that their photos would serve more than a purely artistic purpose. What's especially interesting is that it seems the Victorian age created a felicitous environment for men and women who, previously, would seldom see a strange men without his clothes on. More than a few Victorian ladies never even saw their husbands fully undressed. But then three wonderful things happened: the invention of photography, a passionate public obsession with health and athleticism, and a renewed fascination with Greco-Roman culture. Combine those three and you end up with a rich photographic history of magnificently muscled male specimens, naked as Greek athletes.
Since this type of bicycle didn't appear until the late 1880s, this photo was probably shot around 1889.
1880 - 1910:
Ca. 1920 - 1930s:
Male photography got naughtier in the 1940s. These are by "Bruce of Los Angeles":
After doing a show on women in burlesque last week, I announced I was going to research vintage male strippers and burlesque performers for this week. I knew it would be challenging. I didn't realize it would be impossible.
According to Wiki,
Until the 1970s, strippers in Western cultures were almost invariably female, performing to male audiences. Since then, male strippers, performing to female audiences, have also become common. Male and female strippers also perform for gay and lesbian audiences respectively, as well as for both sexes in pansexual contexts. Before the 1970s dancers of both sexes appeared largely in underground clubs or as part of a theatre experience.
Link.
This surprised me, since striptease itself has a long history.
As Wiki notes,
The term 'striptease' was first recorded in 1938, though 'stripping', in the sense of women removing clothing to sexually stimulate men, seems to go back at least 400 years.
Stripteases have been known in some form in most cultures, from ancient Babylon and Egypt, to those of today.....
Clearly, there have always been male erotic performers of one kind or another. They existed in every culture where gay and bisexual men with money could hire or force other men to entertain them, which is to say that they've existed throughout human civilization. Whether in Rome, Persia, or China, there were always men (and more often, boys) who, today, we'd label as sex industry workers. They just didn't appear on the straight stage. No doubt, the public vilification of homosexuality required that performances occur in private or underground bars and clubs -- or, in ancient times, in the private courts and boudoirs of noblemen, and noblewomen too.
Wiki didn't offer any cites to support the claim that male stripping was known in the 1970s. My research was not academically complete by any means but as best I could determine, it seems the "Chippendales" dancers (ca. 1980s) really opened the public stage to erotic male performers. For those who hate their schtick, this may be sad, but there it is: their bumping and grinding muscle-men probably deserve the credit for breaking down the homophobic barriers to men acting sexual on-stage.
The dearth of early male erotic performers made me decide to take things in a slightly different direction. If you couldn't see men strip or dance erotically, what could you see if you were a libidinous gay man or female 100 years ago? The next post up will be a long and delicious look at the world of erotic male modeling in vintage photos.
Some charming SM sleaze, probably from the 1970s. The back pages of magazines like this were often filled with personal ads and grainy photos of SM players desperate to hook up. Ah, BDSM life before the Internet. YUCK.
Meanwhile, uh, what? Are they dominating that boot? Where's the groveling supplicant?
Guessing these were done some time between 1890 and 1915 but if anyone has a better guess, please let me know. It's rare to find men in erotic photos before 1920, so perhaps this is of later vintage.