Bhutan: Land of the Penis

This post has been moved to Boomer's Small Town Beefcake

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.

Ken Olandt

During the 1980s, it seemed that every adult actor and teen idol spent eight hours per day pumping iron, so physiques that were merely stunning risked being overlooked in the exalted company of Robby Benson, Allan Kayser, Jon-Erik Hexum, Adrian Zmed, and Sylvester Stallone.

Ken Olandt was almost overlooked.  Trained as an advertising agent, he and his physique started making the rounds of tv guest shots in 1983 -- Love Boat, The A-Team, Simon & Simon, Hotel.  He got a recurring role as a streetwise dock boy on the short-lived Riptide (1984-85).  But he was rarely asked to do as much as unbutton a button by casting agents accustomed to walking, talking versions of Michelangelo's David.

 And the teen magazines, when they paid attention to him at all, showed off his smile (which, to be fair, was very nice).

In 1986, Ken -- or his agent -- hit on a gimmick to get him noticed.  If his pecs and abs were merely spectacular, why not show off the regions where he really surpassed mortal expectatons?  Most other actors were too timid or inadequately superhuman to agree to underwear and jockstrap shots, but Ken was more than qualified, and not at all timid.

April Fool's Day (1986) was a psycho-slasher -- a genre not generally known for male nudity, with the possible exception of Hell Night -- but Ken spent a long scene in his underwear (and, incidentally, buddy-bonding), and gay men and straight women finally started paying attention.

Summer School (1987), a comedy about a substitute teacher (Mark Harmon) who bonds with his students on the way to the beach, featured Ken as a student moonlighting as a stripper.

And so it went for the next decade.  Whether he guest-starred on a remake of the 1960s tv show Gidget,  set mostly on the beach, or Murder, She Wrote, set elsewhere, more likely than not, Ken would be asked to strip down to his underwear or appear nude except for a g-string or swimsuit.

Not that anyone was complaining.