Male Nudity in English Class: The Canterbury Tales

During my junior year in college, I heard The Word in my college class for the first time.  My Culture and Civilization of Modern Germany class was devoted to proving that no German ever wrote about homosexualitat, but the professor in my Chaucer class, a big, hoarse-voiced woman named Dr. Dorothy, thought that The Canterbury Tales was all about how terrible "homosexuality" was.

Ok, but the Pasolini adaption of The Canterbury Tales had the most impressive male nudity I had ever seen at that point.  I can't show a picture here, but those guys were huge.


















The Pardoner, one of the pilgrims who tell stories on the road to Canterbury, was thin and willowy, beardless, with long yellow hair and a high pitched voice.

"An effeminate homosexual!" Dr. Dorothy cried, obviously delighted to say a forbidden word.  "How grotesque!"

Ok, but look at the Squire: a powerfully built young man of about twenty.  But instead of jousting and fighting dragons, he spends his time dancing, singing, and embroidering, quite feminine pursuits. He is a "lover and a lusty bachelor," so busy having sex that he doesn't sleep much at night.  Yet who does he have sex with?  Chaucer leaves this vague, but traditionally squires were devoted to the knights they served.






In The Miller's Tale, a parish clerk named Absolon is infatuated with the Miller's wife, and asks her for a kiss through a peep-hole.  Instead, the Miller shoves his bare butt through and farts in Absolon's face.  But Absolon gets revenge by shoving a red-hot poker into the Miller's butt.

"Symbolic homosexuality!" Dr. Dorothy cried, enjoying the shocked expressions on the students' faces. "How humiliating for the Miller!"

Ok, but look at The Knight's Tale, about two bosom buddies, Arcite and Palamon, who are both in love with Emily.  A classic triangulation, with the quarrel over the girl an impediment to their love, which is described in lushly romantic terms:

Sworn as we are, and each unto the other,
That never, though for death in any pain,
Never, indeed, till death shall part us twain.

Medieval literature was filled with men in love, like Roland and Oliver.  Shakespeare and John Fletcher used the same story as the basis for The Two Noble Kinsmen (1634), here performed by Tyler Neale and Tim Elliott.

A Knight's Tale (2001), starring Heath Ledger, tells a different story, but it does feature a nude Geoffrey Chaucer (Paul Bettany), plus a gay couple, the Knight's humorous sidekicks, Roland and Wat (Mark Addy, Alan Tudyk).

As I discovered in my classes in Modern British and American Literature, you can't always believe what you hear from a college professor.

See also: Pasolini's Canterbury Tales: More gay characters and cocks than Chaucer imagined

"Superman" (2025): You'll believe a man can queerbait

Pasolini's Canterbury Tales: more gay characters and cocks than Chaucer imagined

Link to the cocks

The Canterbury Tales (I Racconti di Canterbury, 1972) is my favorite of Piers Paulo Pasolini's Trilogy of Life (others include The Decameron and The Arabian Nights), maybe because the set-up and many of the stories are familiar from my college claasses, so I don't get lost in the abrupt sedgeways.

And because I saw it last of the three, so some of the cast was familiar: Pasolini's lover Ninetto Davoli as a comic-relief buffoon, Franco Citti as someone morose and frightening,  Although I'm still annoyed by the closeups of random people with bad teeth grinning at the camera for no apparent reason, and the groups of people sitting around singing for no reason.

There is less full-frontal nudity than in the others, but for some reason the penises on display are much more impressive. The biggest of the lot -- probably the biggest portrayed in any film anywhere -- belongs to John McLaren.

Pasolini includes adaptions of 8 stories:

1. The Merchant's Tale: An old man gets a young wife, who is having an affair with Damian,  Oscar Fochetti, so two naked teenage gods (left) decide to have a little fun with them. While a naked boy plays the flute.

2. A new tale: A professional blackmailer, who has just turned a man (Philip Davis) over to the authorities for a same-sex relationship, meets the devil.  The execution of the sodomite is uncomfortable to watch, especially when one considers that similar atrocities are still happening in the world today, but at least the blackmailer gets his comeuppance.

3. The Cook's Tale: The foolish Perkin (top photo), channeling Charlie Chaplin, invades a wedding, hangs out with the guys, and has a three-way relationship with a man and his wife.

More after the break

DH Lawrence and the Naked Cornish Farmer

D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930) was the darling of the grad English students when I was at Bloomington, maybe because he was more accessible than James Joyce or T.S. Elliot, but still Great Literature, and he wrote about sex.

A lot.

The heterosexual girls seemed to gravitate toward Lady Chatterley's Lover (1926), a Harlequin Romance with bad words.

The heterosexual boys liked Sons and Lovers (1913), about a boy who is in love with his mother.

No one ever mentioned Women in Love (1920), and I hadn't yet seen the 1969 movie starring Oliver Reed and Alan Bates (top photo).

Turns out it's about two sisters who become involved with a gay couple.  Actually they're all bisexual.  One of the men dies, and the other is told, "There can't be two kinds of love."




Aaron's Rod (1922) is about a flutist who leaves his wife and kids to go to Florence with his boyfriend and show his "rod" to men and women.

Lawrence was rather critical of heterosexual romance, Instead spinning wild fantasies of all-male Arcadias.

But he also created horribly homophobic characters, and criticized Walt Whitman for his gay subtexts in Studies in Classic American Literature. 

D.H. Lawrence had several same-sex relationships, notably with a farmer named William Henry Hocking, whom he apparently encountered naked on the beach in Cornwall.  He spent the rest of life searching for someone as perfect, just as Ernst Josephson spent his life searching for the "beautiful boy with a violin" he met in Norway.

But he also warned writer David Garnett against pursuing his "homosexual tendencies," and he hated the gay men he met in the Bloomsbury Group, such as Duncan Grant and John Maynard Keynes; they made him "mad with misery and hostility and rage."

Do you get the impression that this guy was a little nuts?



He tried his hand at painting, and exhibited 25 works at the Warren Gallery in London in 1929.  But they were mostly of nude Italian men with their penises flapping around, including his lover Piero Pini.

The police raided the gallery and seized 13 paintings. They were later returned, on the condition that Lawrence never again show them in England.   When his wife, Freda Lawrence, died in 1956, she willed them to her friend Saki, who willed them to Taos art collector George Sahd.  They're in Taos, New Mexico today.



Priest of Love (1982) stars gay actor Ian McKellen as D.H. Lawrence, Graham Faulkner in a five-second flashback as a nameless Cornish farmer, and Massimo Ranieri (left) as Piero Pini.  It displays his bisexuality in a couple of "you have to be looking for it" scenes.

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)

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.

John Milton: 10 Gay Things About the Author of "Paradise Lost"

In one of the iconic scenes in Animal House (1978), Professor Jennings admits that he hates English poet John Milton (1608-1674), author of Paradise Lost:  "He's a bit long-winded, he doesn't translate very well into our generation, and his jokes are terrible."

And, I presumed, as heterosexist as most of the other "great writers" purveyed by English teachers.

A few months later, I started my freshman year at Augustana College, and my English Literature survey assigned Milton's  L'Allegro and Il Penseroso. 

1. Expecting the worst, I plowed in.  Surprise -- not boring at all. The poems contrasted the perennial college student question: should you spend your time partying and having fun, or studying and getting good grades?

 I leaned toward "having fun," since Milton mentions partying with Corydon and Thyrsis, two gay characters from Virgil's Eclogues.

2. During  my sophomore year, a course in Renaissance Literature assigned Comus, a masque (a sort of pageant with minimal plot): a Lady is kidnapped by the evil Comus, who tries unsuccessfully to seduce her while her brothers rush to the rescue.  It was performed for the Earl of Bridgewater, whose own brother had been executed for sodomy.  So Comus becomes a stand-in for a gay temptation.

3. This muscular, shirtless Comus appeared in the only modern production that I'm aware of, at Florida International University in 2010.

4. We also had to read Lycidas: An elegy lamenting the death of Milton's Cambridge classmate Edward King, who drowned (here he is portrayed as a naked muscle god).

Anything celebrating a same-sex love can't be boring.

5. John Fletcher (left) recites Lycidas in his underwear before a blow-up version of Stonehenge.  I don't know why.

6. During my junior year, I took an entire class in Milton, and we read the big, scary one: Paradise Lost, an epic poem the fall of Satan, the temptation of Adam and Eve, and their expulsion from Paradise.  But there were lots of gay subtexts: Satan, an "angel of light," heterosexual sex leads to downfall, and so on.  I wrote a paper on it at Indiana University.

7. And you can't beat the beefcake of the illustrations by Gustav Dore.

8. We also had to read Paradise Regained, about Christ being tempted by all of the pleasures of the world, including: "fair stripling youths rich clad, of fairer hew than Ganymede or Hylas."  So they're hotter than the boyfriends of Zeus and Hercules in Greek mythology?

9. And the "closet drama" Samson Agonistes: the Biblical strongman has been captured by the Philistines, blinded, and enchained.  He bewails his seduction by Delilah: "foul effeminancy held me yoke."  That's right, liking women is effeminate.  Real men like men.

10. Strongman Fernando Lamberty played Samson in a performance at Florida International University in 2009.

John Milton was no doubt homophobic -- who in 17th century Britain wasn't?  But there's still a lot of gay interest in his works.

The Famous Five Have Plenty of Fun

The Famous Five were Britain's answer to the Boxcar Children or the Hardy Boys, five youthful detectives who appearing in 21 volumes by Enid Blyton from 1942 to 1962.

There have also been original Famous Five novels in French and German, films in English, Danish, and German,  comic books, a video game, and even a stage musical.
The Famous Five are really the Famous Three:

1. Julian Bannard, age 13 (right), described in boys' adventure novel terms as tall, strong, and muscular.  He was played by Marcus Harris in 1978 and Marco Williamson in 1995.

2. His brother Dick, age 12 (far left), a practical jokester and standard boys' adventure novel sidekick, played by Gary Russell in 1978 and Paul Child in 1995.

3. Their cousin George, age 12 (center), a girl who "wants to be a boy."

The other members are:
4. Their young sister Anne, who doesn't do much except get scared and "stay here where it's safe."
5. The dog Timmy (a regular dog, not talking).

Perpetually 12-13 years old but acting several years older, the Five solve their mysteries during school holidays, usually while on vacation on Kirrin Island.  There are kidnappers, smugglers, secret rooms, gypsies, decadent circuses, ghosts that really aren't, and lots of scenes set on the beach, giving Blyton the opportunity to describe the boys' physiques in swimsuits.

One might suspect that the family dynamic and the presence of both boys and girls would eliminate buddy-bonding, but in fact Julian and Dick behave rather like the Hardys, going off alone with each other to investigate the mystery, and there are lots of other kids to interact with.

The gay-vague George is most likely to seek outside friends, mostly other girls "who want to be boys," such as Berte and  Jo, but Julian does his share of bonding with older boys as he tries to establish his own adolescent identity.

The gender-transgressive girls are not the result of gay-friendliness, but of sexism: Blyton thought that adventuring was a masculine preserve, so any girl with an interest in danger and excitement must "want to be a boy."

There have been three incarnations on British tv.  The 1978-79 series was never shown in the U.S.

The 1995-97 series was a period piece, set in 1940s Wales.

In 2008, an animated series featured the children of the original Famous Five.  Even George has a daughter (but her partner is never mentioned; maybe she had a wife).

Mikel Murfi: Intellectual, Avant-Garde Bulge

Speaking of Irish men that I want to see a lot more of:

I saw the movie The Last September (1999) because Elizabeth Bowen, who wrote the 1929 novel, often included gay-coded characters.  So I figured there would be gay subtexts.

It was set during the Irish War of Independence in 1920, when a wealthy Anglo-Irish family go through romantic intrigues against the backdrop of the political crisis. I didn't see much gay subtext.

But there's a three-scene minor character, Sergeant Wilson, who terrorizes and humiliates the Irish villagers.

They get revenge by kidnapping him, stripping him naked, and sexually assaulting him (off camera).  But there's a frontal nude shot.

You have to freeze frame to see it, but his beneath-the-belt gift is astounding. Easily Mortadella+.  Definitely deserving a place on my Sausage List.

Sergeant Wilson was played by Mikel Murfi (great name!).  The Internet Movie Database lists some screen appearances, mostly in Irish movies that I haven't seen: After Midnight (1990),  Guiltrip (1995), The Butcher Boy (1997).  

In 2014 he starred in Edwart and Arlette, a gender-bending take on the Sherlock Holmes story "The Adventure of the Cardboard Box."

Most of his work has been on stage, a lot of avant-garde theater, with some gay subtext potential:

The Man in Woman's Shoes: about a man walking to town to deliver a pair of shoes in rural Ireland in 1978.

Sick Dying Dead Buried Out: the relationship between two clowns who are dying.

Ballyturk: Two men (Mikel Murfi, Cilian Murphy) trapped in a room, don't know how they got there or how to get out..

Murfi has also produced and directed a lot of avant garde plays through his theater company, Barabbas.  He's particularly interested in works that invoke the spirit of playwright Samuel Beckett.

And, apparently, have gay subtext potential.

The Country Girls: two girls from the west of Ireland in the 1950s have a relationship.

The Last Days of Ollie Deasey: a man searches through Ireland for his long-lost father.

Penelope: four men at the bottom of a swimming pool wait to die.

Knowing that he's done so much intellectual creative work, it's rather embarrassing to be thinking about something so mundane as Murfi's package.

But it was a magnificent sight.

Endymion: The Eternal Sleeper

When I was in grad school in English, we had to read the poem "Endymion" by John Keats (1818).  Four thousand dreary lines about the ancient Greek shepherd Endymion, who is in love with Diana, the goddess of the moon, but also with an Indian maiden, but it turns out that they're both the same person, because all women are really one woman, the Eternal Feminine who is the goal of "all" men's lives.

As Snoopy would say, "Bleah!"

At least the first lines are praising male beauty:
A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness.

In the original Greek myths, it was Selena, Goddess of the Moon, not Diana (who didn't care for men), who fell in love with Endymion and asked Zeus to make him immortal, so his beauty would last forever.  Zeus consented, but -- psych! -- he also put Endymion into an eternal sleep, so Selena couldn't act on her desires.

But she found a way to make it with Endymion while he was asleep.  Eventually they had 50 children.

Another myth says that it was Hypnos, the God of Sleep, who fell in love with the sleeping Endymion and decided to keep him that way.

Endymion is a favorite of artists interested in depicting muscular men who aren't being killed or trying to kill someone.  Usually Selena or Diana is hanging around, but it's pretty obvious that she's not getting anywhere with him, as in this painting by Francesco Trevisani (1656-1746).

Or this one by George Frederic Watts (1817-1904), where Selena looks more like the crescent moon than a real woman.

Other artists just skip the moon goddess altogether, as in the Endymions of Nicolas Guy Brenet (1728-1792), and Anne-Louis Girodet (1767-1824) .  Girodet was male, by the way.

This Endymion by Girolamo Troppa (1637-1733) has him sleeping sitting up.

There are lots of sculptures, too.  Endymion was a mainstay on ancient sarcophagi, since he represented the "eternal sleep" of death.

This supine statue is by Antonio Corradini (1668-1752).

You may have noticed that Endymion was a favorite of the Baroque Era.  He doesn't show up much in the 19th and 20th century,, although this naturalistic (and very well hung) sleeper by contemporary American painter Kendric Tonn is called "Nocturne in Blue (Endymion)."

Spring 1983: Cruising Dublin with James Joyce

When I was an English and Modern Languages major, one of my professors said that Ulysses was the greatest work of literature ever written.  Even more, the only work.  If ever civilization is destroyed, we can rebuilt the entire opus of English literature with a copy of Ulysses.

It would be a heterosexist world.  There is only one reference to gay people, a sniffing rebuttal of the allegation that Shakespeare was a pederast. 

There's hetero-sex -- lots of it -- a visit to a brothel, Molly Bloom's famous nine-page long "yes yes yes" as her husband tups her.

Tom Jones: Sex and Nudity in 1749

When I was studying for my M.A. in English at Indiana University, I had to select two historical eras.  The first was easy: the Romantic Period, full of exuberant homoerotic scenes and buddy-bonding monsters. For the second, I chose Restoration-Augustan, mostly because Professor Singer, who taught my Restoration seminar, was gay.

I didn't like the texts much, especially those endless boring things that were the precursor of novels: Moll Flanders (1722), Pamela (1740), Tom Jones (1749), Tristram Shandy (1759), Humphrey Clinker (1771). 

 Tom Jones, by Henry Fielding, was not the worst of the lot, just the longest, over 300,000 words (the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy is just over 400,000).  And the most heterosexist, a celebration of heterosexual horniness.

Tom Jones, a foundling raised by Squire Allworthy, courts lots of women, but is interested primarily in girl-next-door Sophia, whose father rejects him due to his lack of parentage.  He doesn't have any male friends; men always betray you, due to malice or ignorance.  Mostly he butts heads with his half-brother, the snively, hypocritical Blifil.

There have been several movie and tv versions, which usually concentrate on Tom Jones' heterosexual exploits.  But at least they offer a lot of beefcake, endless scenes of Tom jumping out of beds in his underwear and scramming before the father or boyfriend shows up.

The most famous (1963) stars bisexual actor Albert Finney as the randy foundling.

In 1997, a tv miniseries starred Max Beesley with full frontal nudity.

Nicky Henson (top photo) starred in a sex musical, The Bawdy Adventures of Tom Jones, in the heart of the swinging seventies (1976).

There is also a comic opera by Francois Philidor (1765), which is still performed occasionally, plus a number of stage plays, none of which apparently give Tom a buddy.

Try Joseph Andrews (1742) for some homoerotic scenes between the young footman and his mentor, Parson Adams.

The Dandy and the Gay Cult: The Last Days of Pompeii

When I was a kid, my church didn't like anything "worldly," not even literature.  Novels were at best a waste of time, and more likely they would promote heresies like atheism, Catholicism, and witchcraft.

But they made an exception for historical dramas set in or around the time of Christ: Ben-Hur, Quo Vadis, The Robe, The Big Fisherman,  Barabbas, and even Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton's Last Days of Pompeii (1834).

Later I discovered that Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873) was gay, and a member of the Dandy movement, about well-sensitive, highly refined gentlemen who obsessed over fashion and grooming, swooned over opera arias, enjoyed hedonistic vices, and wrote poetry.  During last days of the Romantic Era (1770-1830) and the first days of the Victorian, "dandy" was code for "gay."

Most of the Dandys weren't great writers; in fact, Bulwer-Lytton gave his name to a contest every year to see who can write the worst opening for a novel.  I only got through a few pages of the purple-prosed Last Days of Pompeii. But apparently, if you slog through the romance between Roman citizen Glaucus and the "beautiful" Ione, you'll meet the evil Egyptian sorcerer Arbaces, who seduces and "destroys" Ione's brother Apaecides -- he sings a song of "love" and then leads him to "a curtain on the other side of the chamber."

Now Apaecides is a priest for the evil cult of Isis, which engages in all sorts of decadent activities.  Not to worry, he renounces Isis and converts to Christianity before Arbaces murders him.

At least the destruction of Pompeii is not caused by God's wrath against the sodomites.

There have been several film versions, mostly skipping the gay subplot.  In the 1959 peplum version, Glaucus (bodybuilder Steve Reeves) gets a gay subtext with his best friend Marcus (Mario Berriatua), but the character of Apaecides, renamed Antonius (Angel Aranda, left, from a Spanish movie) is insignificant.

In the 1984 tv miniseries, Nicholas Clay (left) plays Glaucus, Ernest Borgnine Marcus, and Benedict Taylor Antonius, in a minor plotline that gets him a girlfriend.  There's also a new hunk, the gladiator Lydon (Duncan Regehr, top photo, posing with phallic symbol).

See also: The Flowers of Evil

Spring 1981: Gay-Free Great Books: The Modern British Novel

Even after my dreary experience with Modern Literature during a freshman course in Fiction Writing, I had to take courses in Modern American Literature and The Modern British Novel.  Both assigned works that were deadly dull, all about heterosexual courtship and marriage, with same-sex relationships, even friendships, absent (the same might be said for my upper-division French, Spanish, and German classes).

Sons and Lovers, by D. H. Lawrence (1913), is about a man attempting to choose between a farm girl, a feminist, and his mother, with no men in sight.

My professor claimed that, if civilization ever ended, we could reconstruct it with nothing more than Ulysses (1918), by James Joyce.  But such a world would be gay free.  The day in the life of Stephen Dedalus includes a visit to a prostitute and lots of descriptions of ladies, but only one mention gay people once, when Buck Mulligan warns Stephen Dedalus that the guy ogling nude statues at the British Museum might be a "sodomite."

In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1931), sex is the chief recreation in a near-future dystopia, yet no one considers anything but straight sex.




One novel  did evoke same-sex practice, as a symbol of debauchery and moral decay, but so subtly that at the time I didn't even notice.

In I, Claudius (1934), Robert Graves assigns the decadent, insane Emperor Caligula a laundry-list of sexual practices, including bestiality and incest, but only hints at his interest in men, as if it is by far the most disgusting of the lot. (And it's not mentioned at all in the 1976 miniseries).




No wonder I stuck to the Victorians, where same-sex relationships were portrayed with depth and poignancy, if only in subtext.