How Culture Saved a Little Gay Boomer Boy Part 1: The Visual Arts

American Queer Life

Back in the good ol’ days when Elvis shocked America, the Mickey Mouse Club premiered, and a Batman comic cost a dime, I was a blossoming little gay boy in Ft. Lupton and Brighton, Colorado, farm towns north of Denver. With pandemic-induced free time, I revisited my six-plus decades of coming out and how culture formed my gay identity. Like the virus, the list grew exponentially, so for this installment of my column, I focus on the Visual Arts; others will follow.

Photography

In the late 50s, my sister was 13 years older than me, loved rock n’ roll and to dance and spin, her flaring petticoats thrilling me. Her vinyl stack of 45s and albums exposed me to the hits of 50s hotties: The Everly Brothers, Fabian, Ricky Nelson, Troy Donahue, and the prototype for the adorable nerd, Buddy Holly. I innocently felt joy in their music and appearance.

My teen years found delight in magazines like Tiger Beat and 16, overflowing with cute boy bands and solo acts: Bobby Sherman, Davy Jones of The Monkees, and the British Invasion launched by The Beatles and Paul McCartney’s divine and sublime beauty. I found crude beauty gazing at the male underwear models in the Sears catalog, later the International Male catalog, filled with hunky models wearing hideous clothes.

In college, my taste (ahem!) matured. While the Rolling Stone magazine cover of David Cassidy excited me, the sepia-toned snapshots of Paris in the 20s by Hungarian photographer Brassaï enriched me. He captured the alluring magic of night: lustful lovers smoking in a bar; foggy pictures of parks or Notre Dame; the blurry decadence of a trans ball. I felt at home in this dark, romantic world long-gone, and a few years later would find it mirrored in New York’s nightlife, denizens, and playgrounds.

George Platt Lynes’ photographs of male beauties from the 30s and 40s expanded my critical eye. Taken purely for personal pleasure, his unpublished collection was luckily bequeathed to the Kinsey Institute. The innovator’s black-and-white gems inspired sleazier versions in the bodybuilding magazines of the 50s and 60s like Physique Pictorial, Adonis, and  Vim, followed in the 70s by Colt, Mandate, Falcon, and Playgirl.

Both Lynes’ classic sophistication and the rags’ cheesy fantasies (gladiators, cowboys, and bikers, oh my!) advanced the queer movement, challenging the sexual boundaries and obscenity laws of the time.

The vulgar simplicity of beefcake would be usurped by the colorized, soft porn of photographers Tom Bianchi, Herb Ritts, and others pedaling a jaded Fire Island groove. Though pleasing to the eye, I felt their work slick and cynical, unattainable, and imperious, perhaps even Reaganesque; it was the 80s, after all.

Also during that decade, Robert Mapplethorpe elevated the art of photography: portraits, calla lilies, sexy Black men, a man with a whip hanging out of his ass. His range of subjects declared unquestionable artistry, variety, and statement.

Graphic Arts

Little did I know how accessible art (or future art) was when I tacked up posters on my college dorm walls. In the 60s and 70s, affordable poster art flourished. In 2014, the Denver Art Museum curated “Visual Trips,” an exhibit of hippie posters and mementos. While the psychedelic overload of the design wasn’t exactly gay, the giant pictures of scowling James Dean and Jim Morrison of The Doors epitomized the zeitgeist of the time, when sexual liberation was angrily and violently demanded. Stonewall was the perfect social storm.

In my black-and-white phase, I discovered the Art Nouveau ink drawings of Aubrey Beardsley, a contemporary of Oscar Wilde. His grotesque and erotic illustrations for Lysistrata depict hilariously exaggerated male erections with a playfulness I’d not seen before.

Painting

My knowledge of paintings was very limited. Devouring history or coffee table books, I discovered homoerotic stories of gods and their boy toys, Michelangelo’s pensive and purposeless hunks, the bulging crotches, and bulbous buttocks by Paul Cadmus with their subtle, sexual tension and his social and political critique.

From this eclectic school of art, of life, I learned that same-sex attraction had been part of human history for millennia and that, ravenous for scraps of information often buried and coded, I was not alone.

But culture does not heat a cold bed. I transformed a lonely, hostile world into a world of warm-bodied beauty and wonder.

Next up, television’s impact on this little gay boomer boy. “Oh, Lucy!”