A Gay Eye
Gay male art, not just the male nude, is what interests me. Like most gay men I love to look at pictures of naked men. As an art student in Albany New York I learned to love looking at paintings of naked men. I quickly figured out that I looked at them differently than my male classmates. I slowly realized that I also looked at them differently than my female classmates.
I believe I have a gay eye, a gay way of seeing the nude male form. I don’t look with desire or lust or even “an appreciation of beauty” as a woman might look at a nude man. I also do not look at the male figure as a thing apart, like an object, as men see women’s bodies in art. As a gay man I think of it as an extension of what I want to be, also what I want to possess, and what I want to be “out there” that represents me.
The classic male form (as represented here) is what I wanted to do in college and have attached to my public self. It is “THE CLASSIC MALE NUDE”: some kind of “pose” that doesn’t make anyone really uncomfortable to look at. We get to concentrate on the skill of the rendering and think of all that flesh and muscle like we would a pretty flower, or the meticulous rendering of a bird.
Illustration was always a way to put the nude male in the public eye in a non-threatening way. Now it seems it’s all about the “sexually charged man”. Advertisements are ambiguous enough to be aimed at men, women, gay men and even children! What you want. What you want to be. What you want to become.
Phillip Core represents the closest you can go to out right voyeuristic adoration of the male form while still having the focus be something other than “the naked guy in the middle of the picture”. Like Paul Cadmus he wants me to ogle the men but still puts them in some context that makes staring at them secondary. This painting of a beautiful young man showing off his tattoos, and some others like it, are just a few props away from the out right leering that came when gay men gave up the pretense of needing an excuse to gawk.Clive Barker, the horror novelist and director, has a very odd perspective on the male figure. As a painter he seems to combine a whimsical skill with a disturbing and dark content, which I love. His nudes both attract and repel. They have what I think of as a “gay” view because they have a sexual tension that borders on obsession. His books are wonderful, his movies mesmerizing; but in his paintings he seem to reveal much more about what it means to be a gay man lusting after “flesh” and the consequences which come from that. He reminds me most of Michelangelo at the end of his life. I am thinking of that last haunting self -portrait where he depicts himself as reduced to the flayed skin held up by the imp/devil in The Last Judgment. Go to Clive Barker’s homepage at: http://www.clivebarker.com/html/visions/gallery/gall.html for more on a modern moralist painter.
Mel Odem’s men exsist in a world of highly sexually charged romance. Every portrait gets me wondering what is happening BELOW the waist…
An artist I enjoy a lot is a guy named Ryon. The men are definitely there to be looked at, but posed in a very odd way. They are almost natural - but somehow not. He seems to mimic all the old tricks painters used to represent nude men with out screaming GAY, but in a way that just makes them obviously gay. How many painters can get away with a naked guy Christina’s World? If anyone has the link to this guy’s web page, please email me, I lost it and now cry each and every night thinking I’m missing out on his new paintings.This stuff is the “gay guy” preoccupation with dick that is all over the place. Thanks Tom of Finland, you created a generation of men that couldn’t get enough DICK. It is the focus and the point of all this art. Highly explicit, and with no apologies about it’s subject matter, it seems to say to gay men; WELL HERE IT IS! My only question is: Now what?
I love to collect art that served as something else, nude men on coins and stamps or in print ads and especially – book covers. Is this stuff for the trade paperback market or for the gay guys? You decide. http://bostonwill.20megsfree.com/index.html
Another master of the form is Sargent. He made his name and his living at grand portraits, but thought his real fame would be his GRAND MURALS, it wasn’t. His portraits are his best work. However, the nude studies he did for his murals and his “throw-away” quick sketches of nude men (he even used a nude man as the model for Athena in the Boston Public library) have a charm and an appeal all their own. What he might have accomplished without the Victorian prudishness about sex and nudity he one of the great sorrows of the art world, let alone the gay world.Send me a little mail and let me know what you think!
Male Art Site Click here for the original page I wrote. Careful, it's crazy with (nasty) pop-ups but has more art.
Posted by bostonwill
at 12:01 AM EST
Updated: March 14, 2006 3:33 PM EST
Well? Any words of wisdom? Any propositions? Had the experience but missed the meaning? OK, now I'm just being pissy. But really, give me a fag like WHITMAN!
