Absent Essentials: Queer Visualizations of Outlawed Nudity and Sex in Mid-Twentieth-Century Physique Magazines and Photographs

Rubbing the Crotch: Image Manipulation in Early Physique Photography

In the early days of male physique photography made for men, for example by Al Urban or Alonzo ‘Lon’ Hanagan in the 1930s and ’40s, the male models were usually shot in the nude, and the photographers had to either retouch the negatives or cover the pubic area in each positive print with ink or watercolor.^[12] This painstaking but potentially libidinous image manipulation allowed photographers to sell photographs of nude men who appeared clothed. Such practices set queer physique culture apart from the earlier heteronormative physical culture movement and its publications as well as from contemporaneous bodybuilding and fitness magazines that centered on health, strength, and fitness, which queer physique photographers used only as a blueprint and an alibi to focus on the male body’s erotic appeal.^[13] Covering the crotch with ink or paint is, however, directly related to what Thomas Waugh theorized as the “absence of the penis” in early physical culture publications. He notes that “the majority of the Physical Culture poses are the stern frontal assertion of phallic power that are still all too familiar [...]. While the bulk of some other muscle is often accentuated, the athlete’s arms—taut, rigid, flexed, swollen, interlinked, outstretched, or upheld—repeatedly acquire the graphic status of surrogate phallus.”^[14] The absent yet present crotch covered with ink or paint is one such effect of the ‘absence of the penis.’ Even today, traces remain on the surfaces of some of the early queer physique photographs from the 1930s and ’40s, as we see in one example from the middle of this period (fig. 2): The paint that was supposed to remain until eradicated by the customer at home is still partially present, and George Kuchler’s pubic area is half-visible. Rubbing or scratching off the pigment seems to have damaged the photograph slightly, which could explain why the owner stopped short of fully removing it. Alternatively, he might have been interrupted or preferred the half-revealed sight. It can be assumed that the buyer rubbed a finger with some spit on this model’s pubic hair, penis, and scrotum, potentially while masturbating, to erase the ink or watercolor. The damage on the photograph’s surface from rubbing or scratching off ink or paint does not represent the will to damage or hurt the model. Therefore, it does not constitute a “substitutive image act,” which Horst Bredekamp analyzed as the equation of image and body in the case of iconoclasm.^[15] On the contrary, the customer desired and wanted to see this model’s initially hidden penis and therefore set to rubbing or scratching. Despite the aggression behind rubbing and especially scratching something off, the remaining ink is proof of a libidinous act that is based not on violence but desire. These acts of desire pervade queer archival holdings: Countless queer men used their jerk-off materials as substitutes for actual men; doing so required damaging images. Traces of wear are signs of past pleasure and the will to see.

2

Al Urban, George Kuchler, late 1930s, photograph. San Francisco, GLBT Historical Society, Roméo L’Heureux Photographs, coll. no. 2000-33

The queer creation of an absence and presence as an early form of do-it-yourself culture enabled a dynamic between man and image that cannot be overestimated: a man’s lust for making visible the invisible, for freeing the penis and thus freeing himself by allowing himself to gaze at what is forbidden—acts silently condoned by another man, the photographer, who has already seen what the consumer gets to reveal at home. This erotic dynamic must have shaped queer customers’ perception of themselves as queer, of men in general, of male nudity and corporeality, of medialized representations of men, of playful censorship, and of the power of photography. These photo-based practices enabled queer men to relate to other queer men via the images’ figurative representation of a man and the photographer as a real man. To reveal those absences and understand them, one must follow traces that signify absence and presence, as Peter Weibel clarifies in his adaptation of Jacques Derrida’s deconstructivist philosophy of the trace. Weibel relates the trace to the aesthetics of absence: “The dissolving, shifting, and referencing as instances of the dynamic of the trace, as processuality of the trace, certainly form strategies (of the trace) that belong to the canon of an aesthetic of absence.”^[16] It is precisely this dynamic of the trace—“dissolving, shifting, and referencing”—, of “ephemeral evidence,” as José Esteban Muñoz defined it regarding queer culture, that can make an absence and its potential meanings apparent.^[17] The manifest trace of paint or ink and the beholder’s trace of his tactile interaction with the picture are evidence of queerness because, without it, this image of a nude man could pass as just another photograph of a bodybuilder or a nude study for art students. Traces such as these reveal the fulfillment of queer longing and historical self-protection.

Increasing Pleasure, Increasing Sales: (Full Nudity) and (Sex) in Mid-Century Physique Magazines and Photographs

After World War II, homoerotic physique magazines were created by and for queer men. They advertised and sold their own or other studios’ physique photographs, and later also color slides as well as 8- and 16-mm film. Physique Pictorial was likely the first of these magazines, published from 1951 on.^[18] Physique imagery charts a category of queer imagery related to male same-sex desire through photographic scopophilic practices and the ambiguous absence of visualizations of nudity and sex. The Post Office Department was allowed to confiscate ‘obscene’ materials, which were seen as ‘nonmailable,’ until the landmark MANual Enterprises, Inc. vs. Day Supreme Court decision in 1962. However, before and even long after this step towards the legalization of mailing erotic and nude imagery, physique photographers sent customers their existing nudes (that never made it into the magazines) upon request by mail with specific statements and instructions on the back of the photograph to protect themselves and their customers from legal actions.^[19] Others personally delivered the illicit versions of specific photographs, which was likely the case with Pat Milo’s photographs that I initially discussed.^[20] Physique photographers became more and more inventive and created new pictorial strategies to allude to their nudes, which economically strengthened their position: Since nudes could only be bought upon request, customers had to first buy the magazines, and the catalogs and photograph sets advertised in them, to decide which nudes they might request. More importantly, pointing out unaltered versions of the same photographs pushed the limits of censorship and revealed its severity and ridiculousness by simultaneously adhering to the law and mocking it tongue in cheek.

The technique of covering the crotch in developed photographs with ink or paint, as done by pioneering physique photographers such as Al Urban, needed to be modified when physique magazines gained popularity and visibility, for example on newsstands, which ruled out manipulating single positives. Hence, countless unmistakably, sometimes badly, sometimes artfully retouched photographs from the 1950s and ’60s show white areas that represent that the pubic area was dodged, scratched, or cut out; black areas in place of the crotch that were burned, cut out, or blacked out with ink; and drawings of fig leaves or simplified, schematic underwear which were added to cover the crotch before the image was reproduced.^[21] Before a photograph of a smiling Don Banks by Falcon, a studio run by Richard ‘Dick’ Falcon, was published as the centerfold in the magazine MANORAMA in 1962, the crotch had been covered with black ink or paint, or the negative was burned (fig. 3). Banks’s somewhat strained but inviting smile as he turns towards the camera and the beholder, perched rather awkwardly on a piece of driftwood, all seem but a frame for the blacked-out crotch in the middle of the fold. What this form of self-censorship on the part of the image communicated is not only that the photographer had seen the model in the nude but that the full-frontal version might still be available.

3

MANORAMA, January 1962, no. 7, centerfold: Don Banks, photographed by Richard ‘Dick’ Falcon

Other photographers who did not photograph models in the nude or those who did not want their published semi-nudes to evoke existing nudes dressed their models in so-called posing straps or other kinds of campy underwear, sometimes made from shiny gold-colored or mesh fabrics or featuring animal prints. In some photographs, posing straps partially revealed pubic hair or even penis and scrotum silhouettes. Photographers also used other material aids, such as a curtain or a column—long typical elements of portraiture and history painting—to hide the pubic area, which, in turn, led to a charged play with props.^[22] The resulting pictures oscillate between the symbolic (phallus surrogates) and the sexual, which sometimes takes the form of an object fetish (props as sex toys, props instead of another man). A set of four photographs of model Darrel Stoneman by RA Enterprises (Richard ‘Dick’ Fontaine), likely from the early 1960s, is an example of the playful highlighting of the crotch (fig. 4). In the top left photo, Stoneman sits on a mid-century cocktail chair that is partially draped with bright fabric. He poses between two marbleized columns. In the background, a monstera leaf and a neo-classical fluted column, slightly covered by a dark net, are visible. As to the hidden presence of the crotch, the top left photograph clearly shows that Stoneman is not wearing underwear for the photo shoot. Instead, he holds a pseudo-antique accessory that could be a waist belt with his left hand, which reveals a tiny part of Stoneman’s pubic hair. This gesture signifies that the model had taken off the waist belt just before the photographer took this photo or that the model wanted to put it on but was interrupted by the photographer. The top right photograph, however, shows Stoneman with a dreamy mien in a set devoid of clutter, with only a few monstera leaves on the left and the net hanging from above, which he grabs with both arms. A dark piece of fabric that goes all the way up to his right shoulder and around his back covers his crotch. This dark drape contrasts with the white background and covers much more surface than necessary, again accentuating the crotch. In both photographs on the bottom, Stoneman wears a neo-antique costume of Roman sandals, a cape, and a large, high-waisted, gold-colored posing strap. Its size and especially its shine attract the beholder immediately.^[23] The bottom right image further stresses the crotch because Stoneman adopts a phallic position with a much more sincere expression. While all four photographs were taken in the same studio with similar props, only those on the bottom reveal that the columns on the model’s left- and right-hand sides are detached and shorter than the model himself. The columns make the model seem larger than life, and the thin spear in his left hand amplifies the phallic allusion. Furthermore, the artificiality based on a light-minded approach towards historical specificity illustrates that the photographer and the model were interested in the model’s sex appeal and physique, not antiquity.

4

Richard Fontaine, Darrel Stoneman, 1960s, four photographs. Los Angeles, ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries, Erotic and Physique Photography Collection, coll. no. 2014–051, box 26

More detailed is the photograph of Don Fuller that was published on the back of Grecian Guild Pictorial in 1957 to advertise a new softcore physique movie titled In the Flesh by Apollo studio (fig. 5). As Apollo was also run by Richard Fontaine, he most likely took this photograph of Fuller in a half-kneeling posture from a slight high-angle perspective. What makes this photograph visually similar to those of Stoneman is its incoherent, eclectic, and multichronic aesthetic. The neo-antique, heroic, and melodramatic Hollywood pose is complicated by props, such as a little wooden bench in the nineteenth-century Renaissance Revival style, a small pseudo-antique sword or dagger, and a cloak that recalls ancient Greek chlamys cloaks. The multichronic historicism and eclecticism are brought up to date by a mid-century window, curtains, and sunburst mirror in the background. It is antiquity realized against the backdrop of the photograph’s time and place: mid-century Los Angeles.^[24] However, the 1960s mirror in the middle of the sunburst frame is covered over by a grotesque mask that might depict Kinich Ahau, the Maya sun god. All these props show a half-hearted attempt to again highlight the image’s own performativity, or its lack of commitment to its own historical artifice. A shimmery gold-colored loincloth, which also serves as a waistband that holds the dagger’s sheath, covers the model’s gold-colored posing strap. In sum, what is forbidden in mid-century imagery is emphasized in physique photographs through visual excess, the material effects of shine, allusive posture, camp aesthetics of great bad taste (the eclecticism and historical sloppiness), a crotch only just covered, as well as through symbols and metaphors, such as swords and columns, that all highlight the centrality of the crotch.^[25]

5

Grecian Guild Pictorial 2, November 1957, no. 6, back cover, caption: “Hollywood actor Don Fuller in costume for his starring role in the new Apollo physique movie, In the Flesh, Don Fuller, photographed by Richard Fontaine.” Los Angeles, ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries, Physique Magazine Collection

In other cases—as in a three-page sequence that appeared in Champ Annual in 1962 showing a model dressed as a sailor who undresses across 13 photographs—the excitement continuously increases through narrative, format, and form (fig. 6). The first five smaller photographs on the first page are relatively insignificant for viewers because they feature the model either fully dressed or merely shirtless. All subsequent images are almost four times the size. The increase in the viewer’s suspense would have correlated with the growing size of the pile of clothes in front of the model. In the last photograph on the right, the young man is represented from behind, as he teasingly begins to take off his white briefs. However, instead of a climax, the observer experiences a visual coitus interruptus with this final image. In the use of the page format—with the allusion to film and the homosocial space of the Navy via the title (Film Series #2 Lights Out)—the reader is hopeful yet aware that there is nothing to see. Turning the page does not result in complete revelation, but hope remains that one day it might. Thus, the absence of sex and clear views of most male erogenous zones is thematized in narrative renderings in continuous form but never resulted in actual nudes; censorship was too strict to risk it. However, some photographers did risk it, and that is what kept hope alive for their large audience. Milo’s series discussed at the beginning shows all that could not be published in a magazine. Therefore, the revelation of full nudity was only possible in unpublished photographs to which those narrative collages alluded.

6

Champ Annual, New York 1962, 29 –31, photographer and model no longer known. Los Angeles, ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries, Physique Magazine Collection

Allusions Unveiled: Drawing the Illicit at Home

The allusions in published photographs—which can be considered almost implicit instructions—resulted in a phenomenon that remains, to date, completely unstudied: customers (with various levels of skill) drew testicles, penises, and semen on physique photographs either directly in physique magazines or in photographic reproductions that they collaged in scrapbooks, sometimes in layouts that allude to sex between the male figures. For instance, a scrapbook by a now unknown maker, housed at the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco, features rough-grained photocopies of physique photographs and cut-out reproductions from magazines (fig. 7). Four similar black-and-white photocopies on this page show two solo shots on the top and two duos on the bottom. All of these photocopies seem to have been retouched prior to printing, likely by the customer, so that forms of simplified, almost unrealistic penises, pubic hair, and testicles could be added manually where the posing strap had been. The negative was probably dodged to whiten the print, or the customer manipulated an original photo or its reproduction in a magazine with paint and then rephotographed or photocopied the images, which would explain their poor quality. The drawings appear amateurish for multiple reasons: they are drawn with a combination of pencil and ballpoint; the penises are unrealistically straight as poles, and all are about the same length and girth, circumcised, and pointed. They are inaccurately foreshortened, especially the one in the top right image, while the lower right figure is missing his testicles. They are so formally schematic and similar that one suspects the owner either had never seen an erect penis other than his own, that he needed to rely on a drawing in an anatomy book, or that he was simply not good at drawing. Other than that, the album is proof that physique photographers succeeded at their iterative allusions to the crotch. Furthermore, the photographs on the lower half prove that physique photography also succeeded at alluding to sex since the figures are positioned in poses that, especially with their drawn-in, erect penises, suggest imminent sex.

7

Page from a scrapbook, no date, creator no longer known. San Francisco, GLBT Historical Society, coll. no. 1992-15

Another now unknown customer who bought the December 1964 issue of MANUAL took the title seriously and manually drew penises, testicles, and sperm directly on the pages of the magazine, which is now part of the add-on collection at the ONE Archives at the University of Southern California (fig. 8). The model, Bob Fedell, was photographed in a desert landscape by Bruce Bellas (Bruce of Los Angeles). On the left page, Fedell stands on a rock formation and rests his right hand on one of the stones with his left fist on his hip. The photo on the right page shows Fedell smiling at the camera, with his arms raised in a heroic pose. On the left, the customer drew an oversized, almost comic-like circumcised and erect penis and equally huge hairy testicles on top of the model’s posing strap, which indeed shows the tip of Fedell’s penis, possibly incentivizing the customer to draw. The moment of ejaculation is shown in a fantastical manner that even a long-exposure photograph could not have captured: semen shoots up past the model’s face and rains down like a fountain. In contrast, the drawing on the right shows a flaccid yet oversized penis and testicles hanging or falling out of the model’s black briefs. Artistically and aesthetically, it seems a sensitive decision to draw the full crotch over the brighter posing strap on the left and to use the image showing black underwear to explore the motif of penises and testicles slipping, which would have been artistically more difficult vice versa.

Whether men made these changes for their own intellectual or sexual fun, out of creativity, or to share with others remains speculation. Ultimately, the physique genre’s aesthetics and its iterative, seemingly endless sexual teasing left readers stimulated but also unsatisfied. The drawings prove that the absences of the penis, pubic hair, testicles, body fluids such as semen, and sex between men were present in the minds of contemporaneous queer beholders. “Sex can’t be reduced to an organ, but when the body appears to radiate out from this central point, the bulging pouch becomes the focus of attention, energy, and excitement. The photographs’ hidden agenda could not have been more obvious—or more tantalizing,” as Vince Aletti notes regarding physique photographs’ emphasis on the crotch.^[26] Given the add-ons’ partly humorously exaggerated, partly naturalistic or anatomical aesthetics, they likely provoked mixed feelings for their creators: physique photographs prompt despair, desire, humor, and hope in their presence and radicality that is amplified in private—and in their conformism that is countered at home.^[27]

8

Spread with drawings in Manual, no. 59, December 1964, 22–23, creator’s name no longer known. Los Angeles, ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries, Graphic Albums Collection, coll. no. 2008-046, box 9

Multiple art historians have theorized the act of beholding images as triggering imagination. Wolfgang Kemp offers a useful perspective in his theory of the aesthetics of reception under the term ‘implicit beholder.’ Kemp conceptualizes the aesthetics of “indeterminacy” in art as one form of addressing the beholder: “This state of unfinishedness or indeterminacy is constructed and intentional. Nevertheless, it does mean that as spectators we must complete the invisible reverse side of each represented figure, or that we mentally continue a path that is cut off by the frame. In this way, everyday perception is no different from aesthetic perception. The work of art lays a claim to coherence, though, and this impulse turns its ‘blanks’ into important links or causes for constituting meaning.”^[28] He concludes that “works of art are unfinished in themselves in order to be finished by the beholder.”^[29] I would argue that all images, not just art, require a beholder to complete them to achieve meaning. Moreover, images filled with ambiguity and indeterminacy require the beholder’s interaction and imagination to create “potential images.”^[30] Private add-ons show exactly these potential images materialized and document acts of queer perception that made sense of the ambiguity in physique photography. What differentiates queer perception from Kemp’s perspective, though, is that queer subjects did not decide to keep nudity and sex an artful indeterminacy to be completed by the beholder, but the authority of the state, law, and society predetermined it.

Being Away – Not Gone Forever

Across all of the above examples, the momentum between present and absent correlates with Ulrike Lehmann’s definition of the aesthetic of absence: “The absent requires the present. An aesthetic of absence circumscribes therefore something present, which brings into view an absent, destroyed, or invisible image—in whatever form.”^[31] Similarly, Drew Leder offers a short yet enticing etymological definition: “The word absence comes from the Latin esse, or ‘being,’ and ab, meaning ‘away.’ [...] Yet this absence is not equivalent to a simple void, a mere lack of being. The notion of being is after all present in the very word absence.”^[32] Following Lehmann and Leder, I conclude that the absence of the essentials in mid-twentieth-century queer visual culture, most importantly of the penis, resulted not only in iterative allusions but also in the private collecting of physique magazines and photographs and associated artistic practices that reflect and point to this absence through the presence of additions as well as of collaged images in scrapbooks.^[33] Added drawings and suggestive configurations, which materialize and counter this sexual teasing over decades, are a logical consequence of the physique genre’s own visual strategies against censorship. What was outlawed emerged boldly in scrapbooks and on the hand-altered pages of magazines—except depictions of the anus. Contemporaneous imagery did not provide any blueprint for anal representations—in contrast to the phallic masculinity represented in bodybuilding, physical culture magazines, Hollywood film, or wrestling on TV. A lack of templates, the easy perception of phallic symbolism, the anatomically rather hidden position of the anus, as well as the stereotype of the effeminate queer man might have created this absence of the anus that was only filled in a few illicit photographs and later more broadly in explicit pornography.

As discussed, there are multiple mandatory absences in physique imagery: penises, testicles, pubic hair, anuses, body fluids, intimacy, erections, and sex among men. The queer aesthetic and perception of absence in queer materials counter anti-queer absences, including those archival voids mentioned in the beginning. Historical queer approaches to necessary absences prove that queerness can even be found in seemingly normative materials, and that queer subjects connected via imagery and a shared visually strategic repertoire. While the latter demonstrate agency, humor, and a defiance of censorship, their aesthetic nonetheless carries forms of censorship within it, which creates ambivalence. Not only did queer imagery imply the forbidden, but it defied and gained power over censorship by working through its logic: Stressing forced absences, in the end and over the course of countless police raids, arrests, and prison sentences for queer men linked to this imagery, led to legal, social, and sexual liberties.

Milo’s photograph of George Walker with which I began this article is both extraordinary and emblematic in its explicitness: Milo and other photographers who photographed nudes close the circle by representing the presence of full nudity, arousal, and sex in mid-century imagery in spite of it all. As I have shown, illicit images are not diametrically opposed to the imposed inhibition in published materials but constitute one end of the spectrum of visibility, of this only seemingly paradoxical play with absences in mid-century queer imagery.

I thank the editors for their trust, help, and thorough editing; the whole group for their comments that shaped this article during the workshop at the Bibliotheca Hertziana in March 2023; Eva Ehninger’s colloquium for everyone’s recommendations; Chiara Harrison Lambe for her editing; and Luigi Valenti for his support and for understanding the value of absences. Research for this project was made possible by the Terra Foundation for American Art (Terra Immersion Semester 2019; Research Travel Grant 2021).

Photo Credits: 1, 3 Tim Wilbur Coll., Orange, Vermont, URL: http://timinvermont.com (last accessed 13 February 2025; no longer functional). — 2, 7 author (by kind permission of the GLBT Historical Society). — 4–6, 8 author (by kind permission of ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries).