So through the magic of a constantly updating Google News RSS stream to NetNewsWire1, today I stumbled upon a piece in the Orange County Register called Manly Images. It’s an article about how John Ibsen – a researcher into early photography and masculinity – has discovered that men before the 1930s were much more intimate with one another:
“From the dawn of photography before the Civil War through the 1920s … it was customary for two or more American men to visit a photographer’s studio to have their portrait taken together,” he writes. “Posing for the photographer, the men would often drape their arms nonchalantly around each other and would sometimes hold hands.” These days, he notes, a more common way for adolescent men to spend time together is to go to the movies on a Saturday afternoon – and even then, they are likely to sit with an empty seat between them.
Immediately I was reminded of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s concept of the relationship between homosocial relationships and homosexual relationships. She argued that man-on-man friendships have been structured around the continual disavowal of any gay component – that the neurotic denial of any sexual component either was recently or has always been one of the most significant structuring principles of society’s conception of how men can relate to one another. And indeed, if you read the article further, this is one of the assertions of the article itself.
This new reticence, he noted, coincided with the introduction of a new way of thinking about sex. “The notion of people having a specific sexual identity is a modern notion. People weren’t nearly so much inclined to think of sexual identity before the late 19th century,” he says, noting that the word “homosexual” comes from a German word that was coined only in 1869. But in short order, homosexuality and homophobia came to be intertwined with the concept of masculinity and what it means to be male.
But if men used to be more comfortable with one another’s bodies and the physical expression of affection, could they be so again? It’s quite possible that this comfort was directly connected to the invisibility and complete suppression of concepts of homosexual relations. Or it could be that there simply wasn’t as much anxiety associated to such relations. But I’m afraid I think that it’s more likely that having a free and non-disenfranchised gay community probably means (at least in the short-term) a greater degree of anxiety for straight men. Until – that is – we move even further from the stereotypes and the repression and find a place where people no longer feel ashamed even to be suspected of being gay…
Note 1: Courtesy of voidstar you can get a bespoke Google News RSS-feed via this incredibly simple basic format: http://www.voidstar.com/gnews2rss.php?q=gay&num=15 – where in this case ‘gay’ is the word I want regularly updated news about…