Lost World

[This is the second part of John Ibson's American Sexuality Magazine]

While others have relied on traditional historians’ sources, letters and diary entries, to document nineteenth-century comfort with male intimacy (elaborate terms of endearment and unselfconscious physical closeness; for example), my own documentation of the lost world has been with everyday photographs of two or more American men together. With these photographs we can literally see the lost world as it existed, as it later began to disappear, and as it then reappeared with revealing intensity in a particular moment and setting, only to disappear yet again with stark finality.

After systematically reviewing many thousands of images, as well as more conventional sources, I write in Picturing Men that American males, together in pairs and larger groups, once had professional portraits of themselves taken with a revealing frequency, in dramatic contrast to the virtual lack of the practice today. The poses they once commonly struck were even more revealing than the fact that the portrait was taken. With notable nonchalance, they might hold hands, sit on a companion’s lap, share a chair, drape their arms around each other, or perform for the camera what I’ve termed a “pageant of masculinity,” perhaps dressing up as cowboys or striking a frivolous pose that often included a “token of manhood” such as a cigar, liquor bottle, or firearm. Official athletic team portraits were once especially common scenes of closeness among males, with teammates sometimes lying atop each other. When George Eastman’s introduction of roll film in 1888 made it easier for amateurs to take pictures, the earliest snapshots also often showed males, boys and men alike, posing very close together, obviously delighting in one another’s company.

With a distancing and stiffness of pose in team portraits, the first widespread signal of a change, males began slowly but quite surely to move apart in photographs as the twentieth century progressed. If there was to be any more hand-holding, lap-sitting, or chair-sharing, there would usually be an exaggerated facial expression or some other gesture, reassurance to the observer and the observed alike that this was all purely in fun, with no genuine intimacy involved. The contrast between earlier and later poses of men together in photographs is striking, charting an increasing discomfort with closeness to each other’s bodies. The practice of males having their studio portraits taken together, once such a common token of association, was by comparison virtually extinct by the 1930s.

The closeness of old, and even studio portraits of men together, survived, however, even thrived, in the military, particularly in wartime. So common were poses of obviously tender affection between servicemen during the Second World War, and so extensive was men’s participation in that war, that one can speak of no less than a widespread revival during those years of romantic friendships among men.

Some of the wartime photos displayed in Picturing Men may well be of those who discovered other men with same-sex yearnings during the War, a development analyzed well in Allan Berube’s 1990 book, Coming Out under Fire. But the everyday photos that I have studied, unless there is some explicit inscription on an image, cannot document a sexual relationship between the subjects. The presence or absence of intimacy is another matter, and is something to which an everyday photo can sometimes eloquently attest.

Revealingly enough, the ubiquitous intimacy of wartime was conspicuously absent among male civilians in photographs taken during the early postwar years. Even young boys, who, in contrast to older males, had shown more closeness in everyday photos before the War, posed in the 1950s with a formality and lack of closeness that mirrored the poses older males had been striking for decades. The fear of intimacy that would account for the empty theater seat had triumphed, commonly inhibiting the relationships of American males of all ages. Though Picturing Men ends with the 1950s, I believe that the distancing and fear of intimacy that was intensified and became so widespread during those years continues to vex American males in our own time.

The price paid for the fear of men’s intimacy is high –– for all males, not just those who yearn for each other sexually. William Pollack, Jr., in his Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sons from the Myths of Boyhood, and Dan Kindlon and Michael Thompson, in their Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys, have been foremost among those contemporary analysts looking at how lonely and emotionally inhibited the world of boys can be. They have shown how an intense fear of being thought gay can lead to various forms of overcompensation with cruel consequences.

For many American men, this overcompensation does not cease with the end of boyhood. Because men’s doings have been given more weight, deviations from the culture’s prescriptions for men are particularly troubling for many Americans, with displays of intimacy between men arousing much more scorn than similar displays among women. For example, with a tiresome, utterly predictable, yet highly revealing frequency, the lead actors in Brokeback Mountain were asked what in the world it was like -- implicitly how they could possibly have endured -- kissing another guy. You’d have thought that Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal had climbed Everest. Culturally speaking, for male leads in a major American film, apparently that’s just what they’d done.

It seems plausible, therefore, to propose that some of today’s opponents of same-sex marriage are more bothered by men marrying than by weddings for women. My argument for a gendered approach to sexual orientation does not imply that lesbians have it better. If this must be made a contest, it might be said that, as women, with their doings trivialized, lesbians actually have it worse. What I am suggesting is that some opposition to “gay marriage” is animated by tremendous discomfort with the love, tenderness, and intimacy between men that their marrying each other implies. Notions of men having furtive sex with multiple male partners with whom they are not in love or lastingly involved might be considerably less disagreeable.

Apparently thanks to the cynical design of Bush partisans, debates over same-sex marriage, usually focused on proposals to ban the practice, have in recent years aroused the Bush political base, sending the president’s supporters to the polls in numbers larger than might have been the case without a “gay marriage” controversy. However, the recent Democratic electoral successes suggest that many voters weren't as distracted by the sexual orientation of their fellow citizens as they had been in 2004. This allowed attention to be turned to more pressing concerns.

It might be well if sexual orientation were less of a distraction –– for us all –– in other aspects of American life beyond politics. We would be a considerably healthier society were we to see sexuality as a matter of much more nuance than a simple gay-straight dichotomy implies. And American men, whoever their sexual partners, would surely have a better time of it if they were able to restore some of that world lost to homophobia. At its heart, history teaches us that little in life is inevitable or immutable, that things surely don’t have to stay the way they currently are. In looking at the quite different way that things once were, Picturing Men reinforces that lesson.