Why the Devil Has No Penis

When I was a kid at Denkmann Elementary School in Rock Island, my friend Greg, had a small oil painting on his bedroom wall: a muscular guy plunging headlong from a sky of thundering, blue-black clouds.  Naked, his backside bare, looking angry, not terrified, as he veers toward the dark mass of land below.

I found it disturbing, and also fascinating.  Who was this guy, why was he falling, and why was he so nonchalant about it?

Later, after Greg moved away, I surmised that the painting depicted Lucifer, the greatest of angels in Christian myth, who began a war to dethrone God, and as punishment was cast down to Hell, where he became the Devil.

 John Milton's Paradise Lost presents Lucifer as a tragic figure, striving against oppression even when he can't win.  Others see him as a queer figure, subverting the hetero-normativity of Adam and Eve in the Garden.



I've never found that particular painting -- it must have been an original -- but Lucifer appears in a lot of artwork.  His muscles are drawn in loving detail, every curve and bulge in place.

All but the penis.  He has none (except maybe Jason Lewis, who played Lucifer in the 2007 movie).

Notice the wisp of fabric hiding the Morning Star's manhood Lucifer in the Bower of Adam and Eve (1805), by Stephen Rigaud.

Or Pietro Calvi's muscular, winged statue (1883), with a rock outcropping covering his privates.

William Blake's 1808 depiction is androgynous and sexless, and so are most modern versions, like Michael Creese's Lucifer (2013, below).

Painters and sculptors who have no qualms about frontal nudity in their depictions of Biblical heroes, epic heroes, Greek gods, famous people, and the guy next door suddenly get skittish when they portray Lucifer, and obscure or erase his sexiest part.

How can we explain the absence of Lucifer's penis?

My suggestions:

1. Because Lucifer is "beautiful," a full set of male sex organs would make him too stunning to bear.

2. His fall from heaven has "unmanned him," left him without male power and potency.

See also: Why Hot Stuff Wears a Diaper.

Tony Cavalero's Magick, with a nude neopagan bonus

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and the Blacksmiths with Brawny Arms

One of the poems parodied on Rocky and Bullwinkle was "The Village Smithy," by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1840):

Under a spreading chestnut-tree the village smithy stands.
The smith, a mighty man is he, with large and sinewy hands;
And the muscles of his brawny arms are strong as iron bands.

Actually, it was parodied everywhere, in cartoons and comedy sketches throughout my childhood.   It must have been a recitation assignment for generations of squirming schoolkids, and a hated memory for comedy writers of the 1960s.

If you read the entire poem, you find that the smithy has a wife and kids, but I only ever heard the part about how the village children come around every day to gawk at his muscles.

I could relate.

Although the poem doesn't really have a plot -- the blacksmith flexes his muscles, children gawk, he goes to church -- it was spun into movies in 1897, 1908, 1913, 1922, and 1936.

In the days before factories, the blacksmith had the job of forging tools and other instruments from iron. There were several blacksmith gods, including Vulcan in Graeco-Roman mythology and Ilmarinen in the Finnish Kalevala.

Unfortunately, they rarely worked shirtless -- too many sparks.

But early cinematographer Eadweard Muybridge filmed two naked blacksmiths for his study of Animal Locomotion.

There are still blacksmiths today.  They even have World Championships.  40 blacksmiths from the United States, Canada, Australia, and Britain competed in the 2014 Horseshoeing Contest in Eureka, Nevada.  Trey Green of Lakeside, California was the winner.

Looks like they still have "large and sinewy hands."

See also: James Whitcomb Riley: Even a Dull, Depressing Poet Can Be Gay

Koloman Moser: The Male Nudity of "Wayfarers"

When I was growing up in Illinois, teachers and professors kept inundating us in Scandinavian culture,  from  Icelandic sagas to the the bawdy Seven Brothers to the dense psychodramas of August Strindburg.  Norwegian literature was my least favorite: Ibsen's A Doll's House and An Enemy of the People, Undset's Happy Times in Norway, Hamsun's Growth of the Soil.  All dark and dreary and over-realistic.

I was drawn to this cover to Knut Hamsun's Wayfarers (Landstrykere, 1927): a hard-muscled guy, naked, striding across the world.  But the stupid story turned out to be about a guy named Edvard who wanders around, living off the land and getting crushes on unsuspecting women.

(Trond Peter Stamsø Munch, top photo, who played Edvard in the 1990 film adaption, also starred in the Disney movie Shipwrecked.)

Ok, so maybe the artist was gay?

He was Koloman Moser (1868-1918), an Austrian artist who specialized in graphic design.  His work is reminiscent of tBritish Decadents like Aubrey Beardsley, with some Art Deco thrown in.

His repertoire contains a lot of female nudes, but also quite a few male nudes.  That walking figure appears again and again, in various poses.

Here a golden boy with a very small penis wins a fight.

The Battle of the Titans from Greek mythology becomes a lot of naked, swaying men throwing rocks at each other.

You even see male nudity in unexpected places, as in this scene of Wotan and Brunhilde from the Ring of the Nibelungs.  Notice how cleverly the god's cloak has been torn away to reveal his sex organs.

Moser didn't marry until he was 37, and his wife turned out to be the wealthy Editha Mautner-Markhof.

The verdict: Impossible to tell if he was gay in real life or not. But he did produce some nicely homoerotic paintings.

Nude Norse Gods

I went to a Swedish Lutheran college, where we were proud of our Viking heritage.  Our team was the Vikings, our radio station was WVIK.  There was a quote from the Icelandic Hamaval over the circulation desk in the library.  The courses in Norse Mythology was well populated.

Ancient Greek and Roman myths seemed somehow decadent: wandering around the bucolic Mediterranean half-naked, eating grapes and having erotic encounters.  The last story is about Venus and Cupid.  But the North was harsh, with frost giants and battle-hammers, and it ended with Ragnarok, the Apocalypse of the gods.

But Greek and Roman myths had a benefit: nudity.  The gods were portrayed naked, with hard, thick chests and abs and even penises on display.  You had to did deep to find a Norse god with his shirt off.

Ok, it was cold in the north, but still...

Thor was the most popular of the Norse gods among the college students, due to his appearance in comic books and fantasy illustrations.  Here Boris Vallejo shows him fighting some very buffed giants.

But Freyr or Frey seems to have been the most popular among the real Vikings.  He was the god of fertility and prosperity.

Some phallic images of Freyr have survived.

Some phallic images have survived, and modern Neo-pagans have produced many more.

My favorite myth is of Baldur the Beautiful, so beautiful that all the gods were in love with him.  His mother went around to ask every animal, plant, and natural object to agree not to hurt him, so the gods played a game of throwing things at him, to see them bounce off harmlessly.  But Mom forgot to ask mistletoe.

The evil Loki convinced the blind god Hodur, here portrayed as a muscular Classical beauty, to throw a sprig of mistletoe at Baldur, thus killing him.

For punishment, Loki was chained beneath a giant serpent that sprayed venom onto him forever.

We don't see a lot of myths about Odin, the leader of the gods, but here he, plus archaic gods Villi and Ve, are creating the world.

See also: Loki.

Donald De Lue and the Male Nudes of Public Art

The Boy Scout Memorial, on the Ellipse in Washington DC, gives visitors quite an eyeful.  A muscular man who has apparently just stripped is walking beside the boy scout.

He represents nothing more arcane than "American Manhood."  There's a fully-clothed woman, also, representing "American Womanhood."

It is particularly surprising because it was sculpted in 1963, when male nudity was not commonplace in public art, even with the penis covered.

The sculptor was Donald De Lue (1897-1988), who grew up in Boston and studied in Paris, like many artists of his generation.  After eleven years as assistant to sculptor Bryant Baker, he pushed out on his own, specializing in public art.

Stately,  muscular male nudes, gods and other mythological and allegorical figures.

Like this Babylonian-style frieze "Law and Justice," on the Federal Building in Philadelphia, is from 1941, just before the U.S. entered World War II.

Or The Rocket Thrower, created for the 1964 World's Fair, now at Flushing Meadows-Corona Park in Queens, New York.

Among his most famous sculptures is The Spirit of American Youth Rising from the Waves, in the American Cemetery at Normandy (1956).

















Most of his public art hides the penis, but his smaller pieces don't.  The Sun God (1937) is now at the Dallas Museum of Art.

Icarus (1934) is at the Smithsonian.

Of course, drawing artistic inspiration from the bodies of naked, muscular men doesn't necessarily mean that you are gay.  But it doesn't mean that you are straight, either.

Loki: Beefcake and Gay Rivalry in Norse Myth

In Norse mythology, Loki was a trickster god with a dark side.  Jealous over the attention that the other gods were giving Baldur the Beautiful, Loki arranged for him to be assaulted by a spring of mistletoe .  Jealous over the attention that Baldur the Beautiful was receiving from the other gods received, he arranged for him to be assaulted by a sprig of mistletoe, the only thing that can kill the God of Beauty.

Lots of gay symbolism there:
1. Loki is upset over the attention that other men were giving a male god.
2. The male god can only be killed by a symbol of male virility,  Maybe a symbolic rape?

Outraged over the murder of thee most beautiful man in Asgard, the other gods tied Loki naked to a rock, where a serpent drooled venom all over him.  His wife Sif took pity on him, and captured the venom in a bowl.  But every now and then she has to be gone for a few moments to empty the bowl, and Loki's agonized thrashing is the reason we have earthquakes.

The story may have a heteronormative end, but it's inspired many male artists to emphasize masculine beauty by painting a  muscular, naked man next to a fully-clothed lady.

Such as Marten Eskil Winge (1863).

Or Christoffer Eckersberg (1810)

Or Karl von Gebhardt.(1891)

Ernst Hermann Walther (1851) gives us a Loki with no Sith.

19th century writers often reformed Loki, making him a friend to humans and bringer of fire, like Prometheus.

But more recently, he has been demonized again, appearing in movies and comic books as a god of evil who wants to destroy the world. Some notable Lokis on film have been played by Tom Hiddleston (top photo), David Blair, and Jayson Sloan.

Henry Fuseli: The Gay Painter of the Romantic Era

Henry Fuseli (1741-1825) was born Johann Heinrich Füssli in Zurich, Switzerland.  He studied theology, but after publishing a pamphlet critical of the Swiss government, was forced to flee to Britain, where he fit in with the artists and writers of the Romantic Era, especially William Blake.

He specialized in mythological topics, including illustrations of Milton's Paradise Lost and Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream, or Thor Battling the Midgard Serpent from Norse mythology (left).

Sometimes he seems to have quite a fetish interest.  Here the Germanic goddess Brunhilde has tied up a naked Gunther on their wedding night instead of having sex with him.

Ok, the scene happens in the Nibelungenlied, but still, it's a rather unusual topic for a painting, unless you're a bondage enthusiast.

Maybe Fuseli just wanted to show a naked guy not having sex with a woman.

He also drew pornographic drawings for private collectors, mostly of men having sex with each other, but sometimes of women together, and occasionally of men and women.

He often depicts men being accosted by predatory women.  Here Satan fights with the feminine Death (odd, because Death is a masculine noun in German, der Tod).

Gay in real life, Fusili put off marriage until he was 47, when he was too old to fuss with that "sex" stuff.  Later proto-feminist Mary Wollstonecraft (A Vindication of the Rights of Women) got a crush on him, and proposed a "threesome" with his wife Sofia.  He refused and cut off all contact.

Fusili was neglected for many years, but today his work is in demand for its bold colors, surrealistic nightmare imagery, and gay themes.

See also: The Gay Romantic Era

The Surrealistic Nudes of Lembit Sarapuu

These photos by Triinu Jurves on the Noolegruppe blog for Estonian artists are entitled A Homage to Lembit Sarapuu.  There are several other photos of semi-nude men flexing their muscles in rustic settings.

I'm interested in any artist who inspires semi-nude male photographs.  But who is this Lembit Sarapuu?

The Estonian version of Wikipedia just states that he was born in 1930, he's won several awards, he's interested in surrealism, and he's married to a sculptor.

The surrealism is obvious: Euro Referendum in Estonia depicts two Western Europeans in 1950s garb trying to interview Estonia, depicted as a wild man, naked,  fully aroused.

Kalevipoeg and the King of the Underworld, depicts a muscular, naked Kalevipoeg encountering a talking anus.

An interview with Eve Kask doesn't reveal much more: he likes women, he is interested in myth and nature, and if he could choose to live in another time, he would be a Cro-Magnon painting on a cave wall.

Thus, his frequent use of male nudity may not be a deliberate attempt to evoke the homoerotic, but an evocation of the pre-civilized wild man.

His work is sometimes criticized as sexist, depicting women only as objects of male conquest, as in A Walk Through the Park.

Of course, that doesn't explain his many nude men standing alone, raging against the modern world.

See also: Kristjan Raud; Kalervo Palsa.

Kristjan Raud: Male Nudity in Estonia

Kristjan Raud, the founder of Estonian art, memorialized the Estonian spirit through a series of paintings and drawings of nude, muscular men, leading one to wonder if he was gay.

Born in 1865, he studied art in St. Petersburg and Munich, then returned to Tallinn, where he became a schoolteacher.

When Estonia became independent in 1917, the 52-year old won a contest for the design of the new postage stamps with his drawing of a nude, muscular man sowing seeds, his bag extending outward as a phallic symbol (below).

The next year, he won the contest for the design of the new currency with a romantic picture of farmers and shepherds, and was commissioned to draw the new coat of arms.

From then on, Raud's career was established: he would promote Estonian culture for the rest of the world.  He produced a wide variety of paintings depicting traditional Estonian life, the villages, the landscapes, and the objects of every day life: costumes, tools, furniture.

Also busts and monuments devoted to important public figures, like wrestle Aleksander Aberg (top photo).  They, too, were often muscular and semi-nude.

Raud was particularly interested in Estonian folklore and mythology.  His various illustrations of the Estonian epic Kalevipoeg began the tradition of depicting the epic hero naked..

But even his non-patriotic art frequently depicts muscular, naked men, as in Inimene ja öö (Man of the Night).

Raud married late in life, and had three children.  He died in 1943, when people often lived and died without being aware of the existence of same-sex desire, in themselves or others. So there's no way to tell.

But his art is an inspiration, both to the Estonian people and to everyone mesmerized by male beauty.

See also: Lembit Sarapuu; Kalevipoeg, Gay Epic Hero of Estonia and Yuri and I Cruise in Estonia.