Fred with Tires: The Iconic West Hollywood Photograph

This is one of the iconic photos of West Hollywood.  Nearly everyone I knew had a print in their living room or bedroom.  It was a fixture in our homes, like the family photos that heterosexuals keep on their mantles:

A buffed young man carrying tires through an auto shop, his male-model face and expensive hairstyle contrasting with his working-class surroundings, a sweaty, macho, implicitly heterosexual grease monkey emerging from his closet, transformed into an object of homoerotic desire.

He represented all of small-town joys that we left behind in the Straight World, and the much greater joys we found with our friends and lovers in our new home.

I didn't know where it came from until yesterday: it's "Fred with Tires" by fashion photographer Herb Ritts (1952-2002).

He grew up in a wealthy household in Los Angeles (his next door neighbor was Steve McQueen), and attended Bard College.  His photography career began in 1978, when he and buddy Richard Gere had car trouble on a road trip, and he began photographing the future star in front of their jalopy -- not shirtless but sultry, bulging, a canny evocation of working class machismo combined with pretty boy sensitivity.

The next year, a photo of John Voight made it to Newsweek.

Pleased with the critical reaction, Ritts began photographing other celebrities, such as Brooke Shields and Olivia Newton-John.  He specialized in female supermodels like Naomi Campbell and Cindy Crawford.  He published a number of books on fashion photography, and became a renowned expert in the field.

He was also a well-known commercial photographer, with work for Levis, Revlon, Brut, Chanel, Maybelline.

Although he was gay, out since college, in a committed relationship with partner Erik Hyman, his artistic emphasis was always on the feminine.  There are only a few male celebrities in his archive, and those few are rarely shirtless, displaying a sensuality but not overt eroticism.  This color photo of Justin Timberlake is an exception.

So how did we get "Fred, with Tires"?  In 1984, Herb hired a UCLA undergrad named Fred for a raincoat ad in the Italian magazine Per Lui.

 He hated the raincoats, so he had Fred pose in jeans instead.  The editor hated the photos -- too sultry, too erotic, too gay -- but ran them anyway.  And the last, taken when Fred was tired, sweaty, and little annoyed, anxious to finish up and go home -- perfectly captured the West Hollywood moment.

The original hangs in the Getty Museum, and prints became fixtures in our apartments, emblematic of home.

Joseph Szabo: There are Men Standing Behind the Women

There are a few gay artists out there, but the field is dominated by straight men, who will praise what they find sexually attractive and dismiss everything else.  So photographers who win awards, get grants, and get their work hung in museums tend to photograph women.

Take Joseph Szabo, for instance. As a teacher at Malverne High School on Long Island in 1972, he began photographing his female students.  It sounds inappropriate and creepy, but the photos "capturing the beauty and promise of youth" won him acclaim, and resulted in an extremely popular hippie-dippy book, Almost Grown (1978).

 It combines Szabo's photos with teenage girls' poetry compiled by Columbia University professor Alan Ziegler:

I am a woman.
It's autumn and cold outside.
Not inside.
My hands are ripe for you.
I cry.
I hate to go to sleep.
I love dessert and
    the sun going down on
the highway overpass.
Kiss me.


It is noted as "A celebration of teen-age experience: the years of restless desire and blossoming sexuality; the world of high school, parking lots, and street corners; and the uniquely American culture in which all of us have grown up."

Well, not gay men.  The book is intensely heteronormative and fraught with the straight male gaze: lots of long-haired girls gazing wistfully at the camera, or boys and girls together hugging.

But sometimes some male beauty shines through.











After he retired from Malverne High in 1999, Szabo published some more photo books:

Teenage, with new works from the 1970s and 1980s, mostly about long-haired girls and boys and girls kissing, with an occasional lifeguard.

Rolling Stones Fans.  Szabo explains that during the 1970s, two of his high school students (girls, no doubt) asked him to drive them from Long Island to Pennsylvania to a Rolling Stones concert.

 Today it would be highly inappropriate for a teacher to accept such an invitation, but in the touchy-feelly 1970s, it was no problem, so he went.  And he took photographs, mostly of long-haired girls hugging boys.  But some beefcake shines through.

Jones Beach, mostly about long-haired girls in bikinis, but occasionally there is a hot guy in the background, or this hot dad in the foreground.

Szabo's work can be seen in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Toledo Museum of Art, the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, and elsewhere.

But be warned: most of the men are hidden the background, behind endless vistas of the feminine.

Like in most art.

Enrico Natali: Accidental Beefcake

Enrico Natali was born in Utica, New York in 1933, and moved to New York in 1954.  His photographs of people on the New York Subway were published in 1960.  During the next decade, he traveled to several cities in the U.S. to photograph real people engaging in their daily activities, producing moments frozen in time.  His most acclaimed, Detroit 1968, was recently republished.

His world depicts the heterosexual male gaze, with women outnumbering the men, and the men mostly in couples.  There is no one obviously gay, except maybe this short-short and bulge number.

But male beauty leaks through anyway, as if it is impossible to keep it hidden, regardless of what the artist intends or hopes for.

It's accidental beefcake.

And who's to say which of the pairs living their lives in the dark days of 1968 didn't care for each other like that?


In the 1970s Natali gave up photography to concentrate on Zen Buddhist meditation. In 1990s he and his wife moved to the Matilija Canyon, in Ojai, California, where they opened a Zen meditation center (the Blue Heron Zen Center

His oldest son Vincenzo Natali is a writer and director known for horror movies and tv series such as  Cube and Darknet.  His Splice is about a genetically-modified being who changes gender.

In 2000, his youngest son Andrei suggested that they go on a photography tour together.   Andrei died in an auto accident in 2005, but Enrico continued the project, and in 2015, presented Just Looking: Photographs of the American Landscape.

Lionel Wendt, the Oscar Wilde of Colombo

Lionel Wendt (1900-1944) was a photographer, cinematographer, pianist and scholar, who had a profound impact on the development of the fine arts in Sri Lanka (then Ceylon, a British colony until 1948).

















Of Ceylon-Dutch ancestry, Wendt studied law in London and practiced for awhile in Colombo, the capital of British Ceylon, but soon dedicated himself to his music.  Aside from being a concert pianist, he was a cinematographer, photographer, artist, literary critic (he imported books from London by the bushel), teacher, and patron of the arts.

He and his friends wore their hair long, wore flamboyant costumes, and delighted in scandalizing the Colombo blue-bloods.  He was big and brash and open, as one could be in Ceylon in the 1930s, the Oscar Wilde of Colombo.

His photography shows the influence of European modernism.

Yet Wendt was not just a Eurocentric flaneur; he wanted to develop a distinctly Sri Lankan vision.  He published photographs of rural Ceylon (Lionel Wendt's Ceylon, 1950), and spearheaded the documentary Song of Ceylon.  He brought two traditional dancers to England to film.

He organized the Photographic Society of Ceylon and the Colombo 43 Art Group.  There's a Lionel Wendt Art Center in Colombo, with two galleries and a theater dedicated to his memory.

He photographed many of his male lovers, creating an image of Ceylon as a homoerotic paradise that remains firmly embedded in the popular imagination today.

Yet none of the many articles and retrospectives published in Sri Lanka today mention that he was gay.  Seventy years after his death, Lionel Wendt is still closeted in his homeland.

Terry Smith: A Life Devoted to the Beauty of Youth

Terry Smith grew up in Oklahoma, became a missionary and then a juvenile probation officer, and finally found himself in San Diego.  In May 1996, he bought a new camera and went out to shoot some skaters and surfers.  Soon he was photographing dozens of boys, trying to capture the fluid beauty of youth before it faded into the rigidity of adulthood.  He got some models from professional agencies, but most were discovered on the street, hanging out, skateboarding, swimming, being kids.

Chris (left) was one of his first models.

The project expanded to thousands of photographs of hundreds of boys taken over a period of over 20 years.

Terry preferred the androgynous, gender-atypical boys, the outcasts, Goths, Emos who rejected the macho sports culture of their high schools, the gay, bisexual, asexual, and queer.

But he didn't just photograph them.  He took an interest, got to know them, helped them through the turmoil of their teen years, kept in touch after they grew up.  Some have become models and artists.  About 20 have children of their own.   Five have died, three from the effects of drug addiction, two from suicide.

In 2012 there was a retrospective exhibit at the DRKRM Gallery in Los Angeles.

A book is planned for 2017.

A film of Terry's work with the kids, America's Finest Kids: A Historical Journey in Art and Anthropology, is in development, with a portion of the proceeds going to raise awareness of youth suicide.

Some of the photographs are uploaded to Terry's tumblr page, americasfinestkids.tumblr.com.

Here are some of Terry's favorite models:

Joshua was an Emo kid.

Matt was a model from the Pacific Northwest.  Terry is the first photographer to ever shoot him naked.

Reed is a more recent model, just 18, a skateboarder in vintage hip-huggers.

Siaha is pink, androgynous, and reflective.

Sergei on the beach.

Thomas stretching.

Nude photos are on Tales of West Hollywood.

Edmund Teske, the Gay Photographer of East Los Angeles

Edmund Teske (1911-1996) was born in Chicago.  Trained as a pianist, he began to work in photography in 1933, when Frank Lloyd Wright hired him to do photographic montages of the relationship between architecture and the visual arts.

He also liked photographing men, catching them in moments of power, joy, erotic desire, or quiet reflection.

Richard Soakup, 1940 captures his first lover, whose parents ran a music studio in suburban Chicago.  Teske would photograph Soakup in many more nude and semi-nude poses.

During World War II, Teske was was rejected for military service for being gay, instead assigned to become a photographer for the Army Core of Engineers in Rock Island, where he photographed many of his friends, lovers, and coworkers nude.  They weren't physique photographs, however; he was trying to capture spirit, not muscle, the human condition rather than the human body.

In 1943 he moved to Los Angeles and went to work in the photo stills department at Paramount Studios.  He immersed himself in the gay life of 1950s Hollywood, befriending Christopher Isherwood, Joel McCrea, Man Ray, Rock Hudson, Anais Nin, Montgomery Clift, George Cukor, and Jim Morrison.

He began to experiment with photo montages, combining images of nude men to explore time and memory, beauty, decay, and erotic desire.

Don Mills and Jerry Kahn (1954-55) are photographed nude and clothed among abandoned ice boxes in Cornell, California (near Malibu).

The folk singer Ramblin' Jack Elliot, nude with guitar (1952)

During the 1960s and 1970s, Teske's work was on display at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art, and in galleries around the world.

He lived alone in East Los Angeles, with lovers but no permanent partner.

In 2004, there was a retrospective exhibit at the Getty Museum.

To be on the safe side, I'm putting the photos with frontal nudity on Tales of West Hollywood.