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In the Twenty First Cen­tury, prob­a­bly around the time that men are restricted by law to the occu­pa­tions of handy­man and strip­per­grams, it will be agreed that the image which summed up the end of the Twen­ti­eth was not the fall of the Berlin Wall, nor the death of Diana, but a close up of a man’s naked bottom.

And who today can deny that the Twen­ti­eth Cen­tury is end­ing on a bum note? Turn on the TV any time after 9pm and you will almost cer­tainly be faced with sev­eral pairs of naked male but­tocks, shiny and slick with baby oil, being jig­gled to the strains of Donna Sum­mer in yet another doc­u­men­tary about work­ing class North­ern men with fake tans form­ing a male strip troupe to help pay for their gym membership.

The uncov­ered male der­riere is the most elo­quent sym­bol of our times, rep­re­sent­ing the rise of the Rab­ble­sian over the sub­ur­ban, the expres­sive over the repres­sive, the fem­i­nine over the mas­cu­line — and the rosy finan­cial future of Immac For Men.

It wasn’t always this way. Before house­wives were encour­aged to bel­low ‘ger­re­morff!’ (and that’s just dur­ing the ad breaks) such images were strictly for a spe­cialised niche mar­ket that had lit­tle to do with women and even less to do with con­sumerism. They were at best bohemian; at worst degenerate.

The cover image for David Leddick’s Naked Men: Pio­neer­ing Male Nudes 1935–1955, of a naked, mus­cu­lar young male pho­tographed from behind with his open hands rest­ing saucily on his but­tocks, might be almost a cliché today — though per­haps he should be bend­ing over and shim­my­ing down a pair of span­gly knick­ers — but when it was taken in the fifties it was intended for pri­vate col­lec­tors, not the lat­est adver­tis­ing cam­paign for Levi’s or Haa­gen Daaz.

Now that oggling men is in the main­stream sev­eral pio­neers of male nudity have been ‘outed’ by pub­lish­ers. Last year Bob Mizer’s famous Ath­letic Model Guild work from the for­ties, fifties and six­ties, was pub­lished in one painfully loud and proud pink boxed set dec­o­rated with Tom of Fin­land draw­ings. The same year saw the pub­li­ca­tion of Physique a life of the eccen­tric British male nude pho­tog­ra­pher John S. Bar­ring­ton by Rupert Smith. Mean­while, David Led­dick con­fesses that the inspi­ra­tion for his book was Col­lab­o­ra­tion, a recently pub­lished book about the male nude draw­ings and pho­tos of Paul Cad­mus, Jared and Mar­garet French.

Leddick’s inno­va­tion in the crowded pio­neer­ing male nudes mar­ket is to make his book a biog­ra­phy of the pio­neer­ing male nudes them­selves, answer­ing that vague ques­tion that poses itself in the back of the mind when look­ing at old pic­tures of beau­ti­ful young men: ‘I won­der what they look like now?’, by track­ing down Platt Lynes’ sur­viv­ing mod­els and pho­tograph­ing what’s left of them.

Like most vague ques­tions it’s one that’s prob­a­bly best left unan­swered, as is demon­strated by The Gap’s recent adver­tis­ing cam­paign fea­tur­ing a con­tem­po­rary Joe Dalle­san­dro, the famously angelic devil who posed for Bob Mizer and Andy Warhol in the Six­ties and whose torso adorns the first Smiths album, but who now looks like a truck-driver with ulcers. True, the pic­tures of the young men have a cer­tain poignancy when placed along­side an inset head­shot of the young man grown old; and, rec­i­p­ro­cally, there’s a cer­tain dig­nity revealed in old age too. How­ever, while the ephemeral nature of male beauty is undoubt­edly part of it’s appeal, you need to be able to sus­pend dis­be­lief in the immor­tal­ity of such beauty to fully appre­ci­ate it; a dis­avowal not exactly helped by see­ing pre­cisely what Time had in store for them.

On the other hand, if the con­tem­po­rary pic­tures were nudes instead of dis­creet head­shots the effect would have been more provoca­tive and less pre­cious. Two of Platt Lynes’ best, most dis­turb­ing pic­tures actu­ally play on this theme. In ‘Alexan­der and Dio­genes’ he recre­ates Alexander’s encounter with the philoso­pher in a bar­rel. Alexan­der, smooth and strong, stands wear­ing noth­ing but his lau­rels and his youth look­ing down at Dio­genes, wiz­ened and wrin­kled, wear­ing noth­ing but his years and his wis­dom. In his famous por­trait of Som­er­set Maugham, a fat middle-aged man fully-clothed in a dark suit looks down contemptuously/enviously at a slim, naked young man kneel­ing before him.

As this last pic­ture hints, there’s some­thing slightly dis­taste­ful, slightly cor­rupt in the fey, 1940s New York world of writ­ers, artists, bal­let dancers, fash­ion pho­tog­ra­phers and Fire Island par­ties that this kind of pho­tog­ra­phy emerged from and which employed Greek imagery, partly in an under­stand­able attempt to avert the inter­ven­tion of the law, and partly in a faintly con­temptible attempt to bestow some­thing pure, vir­ile and artis­tic on some­thing that — frankly — wasn’t. It’s a world too fey and pre­ten­tious to be erotic and too timid and neutered to be artis­ti­cally impres­sive. As Led­dick writes of one of Lynes’ mod­els: ‘Bill Har­ris was an arbiter of style. Dur­ing the 1940s and 1980s, when one wanted to do things the right way — clothes, travel, lovers — one called Har­ris for advice.’

Curi­ously, in all the trib­utes to the ‘brave’ pio­neers of male nudes there is no men­tion of the L.A. pho­tog­ra­pher Bob Mizer, who also used Greek and Roman imagery, but in a way that some­how man­aged to be erotic and pure, vir­ile and artis­tic, as well as light-hearted. Of course, Mizer was too crude, he used Cal­i­forn­ian sun­light instead of over­wrought New York stu­dio light­ing, he wasn’t a friend of Cad­mus, he didn’t move in Cafe Soci­ety, and the Man­hat­tan Mom­mies Boys no doubt dis­ap­proved of the rough sailor and Marine mod­els he used, and which most of them prob­a­bly didn’t have the nerve to pick up themselves.

A young Yul Bryn­ner shows off his full head of hear — and foreskin.

Mov­ing in Café Soci­ety does, how­ever, have it’s perks — you occa­sion­ally per­suade a celeb, or celeb-to-be to strip for you. A pic­ture of Christo­pher Ish­er­wood from the 1940s shows him dress­ing to the left; and one of Yul Bryn­ner from the same era shows both his heads cov­ered — he sports a full mane of hair and a fully un-American fore­skin. But best of all by far is a pic­ture of Ten­nessee Williams lying face down on a bed. We are told that Mr Williams’ pos­sessed a ‘taut swim­mers body’.

This may or may not be the case, but judg­ing by the pic­ture, I have to say that that I doubt if Mr Williams’ bum will fea­ture in Twenty First Cen­tury his­tory books about the Twen­ti­eth Cen­tury. And it cer­tainly wouldn’t sell much ice-cream.

Ten­nessee Williams rely­ing on the kind­ness of strangers

Orig­i­nally appeared in the Inde­pen­dent on Sun­day, April 1998

Copy­right Mark Simp­son 2011