SPEAKING OF EARLY PORN

GALLERY OF PICTURES   OutUK Premium Members Only

Back in the early days of photography, shots of male nudes were an "artistic" endeavour. Though connoisseurs like Baron Von Gloeden were creating classic images that still look hot today, gay male erotica was surreptitiously handed around, and utterly inaccessible to most queer guys. If you didn't have access to the gay grapevine, you basically had to settle for mass-marketed images of strongmen in "physique magazines."

The magazines and photos often had a conscious artistry (think Tom Bianchi or Bruce Weber) absent from the hardcore porn of today. When they weren't harking back to the ancient Greeks, with faux discus throwers and bits of old statuary and columns, the photos of the time often displayed a variety of queer archetypes: gladiators, cowboys, sailors, American Indians... you know, the Village People shtick. Today, some of the stuff - like naked guys wearing sombreros, maracas in hand - looks a more than a little campy. And the leather-clad biker hadn't reached the erotic ubiquity he enjoys today. Those were chaste times. When two men touched, it wasn't overtly sexual, though neoclassical "wrestling" poses took up some of the slack.

And dicks were verboten. The guys wore "posing straps," those flimsy pouches that revealed even as they concealed. Meanwhile, in the classic beefcake magazines like Demigods, pornboys were clad in strategically placed towels and gauzy G-strings. Hard-ons, when they were present at all, were carefully semi-concealed.

Perhaps the primo provider of stroke material back then was Bob Mizer, whose story has been told in the recent film Beefcake. He founded the Athletic Model Guild in the late '40s, intending to provide L.A. casting directors with their choice of young flesh, and ended up overseeing a softcore empire which mailed material out across the world. Beyond the magazines he published, you could mail-order "photo sets" from Mizer (and a dozen others like him). But even he only provided full-frontal nudes to a small circle of loyal customers.

It wasn't until the liberalizing court decisions of the mid-'60s that porn started to come out of the closet. It's only in the last year or so that here in the UK, it's become legal to sell hardcore gay videos which have been on sale across the in Europe and the US for years. But in short order, explicit nudity and sex has become the order of the day, and now, queer guys in most towns have no trouble finding anatomically-detailed buttfucking pics in dirty bookstores in most major cities.

It's worth noting, though, that self-censorship is far from extinct. Certain activities, like fistfucking, are largely absent from over-the-counter porn And, not too long ago, a Southern California distributor of Drummer magazine wouldn't carry an issue that included a drawing of watersports. Hell, even erotic stories, with no visuals involved, are still subject to censorship if they're to be published by mainstream publishers.

In the Web-based rush to erotic globalization, all this censorship may seem quaintly beside the point. Why worry about a magazine or two when the push of a button can bring up endless scenes of just about any fetish you can imagine on your computer screen? But the freedom to see the unspeakable may have sacrificed a thing or two, as well. If desire rests partly on that which has yet to be possessed, then those marvellous old images of oiled-up, pouch-clad gladiators chained to Corinthian columns may be more "erotic" than all the extreme-close-up clusterfucks that flood our voyeuristic lives.

The DVD of Beefcake(18) is available from Amazon. The book Beefcake is also available from Amazon.

GALLERY OF 50 VINTAGE EROTIC PICTURES  OutUK Premium Members Only

Simon Sheppard

Now here's your chance to meet the man behind this column. OutUK has an interview with Simon Sheppard or you can take a look at some of his books that are currently available:

       

Looking for something very sexy and just as smart? Man on Man collects the best and hottest gay sex writing by Simon, who is also co-editor of Rough Stuff: Tales of Gay Men, Sex, and Power as well as a collection of gay erotica called Hotter Than Hell.

In KINKORAMA : Dispatches from the Front Lines of Perversion he takes readers behind the unmarked doors and black vinyl curtains that lead to the sometimes shocking, often hilarious, relentlessly arousing scenarios of extreme sex. There are also stories of bears in Tales from the Bear Cult: Beat Bear Stories from the Best Magazines.