Beefcake and Boyfriends of the Jazz Age

 

 Link to the n*de photos

Europe between the Wars, 1918-1938.  America during the Jazz Age, 1918-1938

Was there ever a time so lost and desolate, so fascinating and seductive, so full of queer promise and doom?

Evelyn Waugh writes Decline and Fall, about a straight but n* aked Oxfordian and thinks about the gay loves of his college days.

Christopher Isherwood finds "his kind" in Berlin, sleeps with straight guys and storm troopers, and writes Berlin Stories.

Virginia Woolf finds a room of her own to write about gender-shifting Orlando and fall in love with Vita Sackville-West.

Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas discuss art with Picasso and eat hash brownies.  

Ernest Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald go to the Louvre to look at the p* enises on the statues.

Dorothy Parker invites Noel Coward to the vicious circle at the Algonquin Hotel , where he sings his new song, "Mad About the Boy"

It's pretty funny but I'm mad about the boy

He has a gay appeal that makes me feel

There may be something sad about the boy

 And James Thurber is so scandalized they he stays in his room all weekend, writing the third most disturbing story in American literature, "The Catbird Seat"

University of Chicago sociologist E. Franklin Frazer complains about Boystown, where "strutting young men, attired in gaudy clothes and flashing soft hands and manicured fingernails" share their streetcar seats with "a girl with her head buried in a book on homosexual love."  

Langston Hughes goes to a drag ball in Harlem, where Ma Rainey sings "Prove it on Me Blues"

Went out last night with a crowd of my friends,

They must've been women, 'cause I don't like no men.

William Faulkner paints a gay teenager's p* enis green as a prank, and later writes him as Luster in The Sound and the Fury

My grandmother goes to art school in Indianapolis, where she befriends two sophisticated young men.  They are arrested for skinny-dipping at Indiana Dunes, and her father forbids her from seeing the "vulgarians" again, but they inspire her younger brother to run away to Hollywood and try to get into pictures.  He ended up a sound man. 

More after the break

Many years later, during my own childhood, I watch Matinee at the Bijou on PBS, and see for the first time Buster Crabbe, Lex Barker, Johnny Weissmuller, and Betty Boop.

And a beefcake bond*age scene in The Mask of Fu Manchu

And an endless series of gay boyfriends.

In college, my professors assign books that will forever be etched  into my memory as Great Literature: The Great Gatsby , The Waste Land, The Sound and the Fury , Ulysses.

I never got through more than 20 pages of Ulysses, although I know that it ends with an org*asm.

The Gay World is big and bright now, but in those days I had to pretend to be interested in homeostasis so I could sneak glances at "homosexuality" in the library card catalog and find the three or four books listed: Death in Venice, The Counterfeiters, Remembrance of Things Past.

I never got through more than 20 pages of the first volume of Remembrance, but I know about Albert/Albertine.

Was there ever a time so lost and desolate, so fascinating and seductive, so full of queer promise?

Illustrations:

1. Matt Smith in "Christopher and his Kind"

2. Clive Owen as Hemingway

3. Ramon Novarro

4. A random guy

5. My grandmother's artist friends

6. "The Mask of Fu Manchu"

7. Frankie Darro and Jimmy Lydon

8. Paul Rudd as Nick in "The Great Gatsby"

9. Alan Delon plays "Swann in Love"

10. Buster Crabbe as Tarzan

See also: Ten Forgotten Musclemen of Movie Serials

Decline and Fall: Theology student set down for immorality in 1930s Oxford

Matt Smith: Who doesn't want to see the p* enis of Prince Philip, Christopher Isherwood, and Doctor Who?

My Grandmother's Gay Artist Friends

William Faulkner and his boyfriend paint Robert's p* enis green