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

"Timewasters": Black Jazz Quartet Zapped into the Jazz Age

 The Jazz Age!  Flappers and philosophers! Picasso, Charlie Chaplin, and Thomas Mann.  Christopher Isherwood in Berlin, E.M. Forster in Bloomsbury, Gertrude Stein in Paris, Garcia Lorca in Cordoba.  Drag balls in Harlem.  Ulysses, The Sun Also Rises, The Well of Loneliness, Death in Venice!   And...Timewasters?

A Britcom about a jazz quartet magically transported to 1920s London, where black people aren't exactly welcomed.  They become the wards of the wealthy Victoria and her twin brother Ralph.  Victoria starts sleeping with Jason (Kadiff Kirwan), and Ralph, who is gay, gets a crush on Lauren (Adelayo Adedayo), whom he thinks is a man.   I watched Episode 3, "Follow Your Dreams," because it says that Ralph "stands up for himself"

Scene 1:  The group -- Jason, Lauren, Nick (Daniel Lawrence Taylor), and Horace (Samson Kayo) -- performing for their wealthy patron Victoria (Liz Kingsman) and her Mean Girl friends, who ignore them to look at dirty photos.  

Victoria gives her butler a 10 pound note to shove into Nick's crotch (wow!), and says "We'll have a dance."  

Scene 2: Later.  Jason in his bathrobe, Lauren pouring a champaign fountain.  Nick complains: "We're a jazz quartet in the golden age of jazz.  Why are we a rich lady's pets?"  "But it's a good life.  Look -- quail eggs.  They don't exist in the future!"

Victoria announces that they will be playing at her Egyptian-themed party tonight. She also brings a letter from Ralph in Algeria.  He has sent Lauren a lot of money.

Scene 3:  Nick bonds with the butler, Langley (Nigel Planter), while in the bathroom (huh?).   He hoped to become an opera singer, but that didn't work out.  Nick: "I'm going to tell Victoria about your talent. You just need a chance to shine." But Langley rejects the idea.

Scene 4:  The party.  Almost all ladies.  The group is forced to wear ridiculous costumes, except for Jason -- shirtless, heavily muscled, getting objectified.  Lauren is fed up with the condescension and abuse, and pushes her way into a roulette game with the money Ralph in Algeria sent.  Surprise -- she wins!  Now the Mean Girls want to be friends.

Nick is fed up with the abuse they heap on Langley the Butler, and calls them out: "He could have been a great opera singer!"  Victoria immediately orders him to sing.   He performs an excellent "Ave Maria."  

Victoria: I had no idea that you were so talented.  You must follow your dream.  You're fired!

Scene 5:  Jason is trying to prove that he's not just a muscular boy toy by reading a book.  Meanwhile, Horace is being used as the post for a hoop game, and Lauren has joined the Mean Girls.  

Langley is in his room, drinking and crying over his lost job -- he's got seven kids to feed!  (Aren't house servants required to be single?)   He attacks Nick: "You've ruined my life!"  Nick: "I'll ask Victoria to give you your job back, but first put on some pants."

Camera pans out to show that Langley is lying atop Nick, naked from the waist down.  Apparently Nick doesn't like feeling a man's penis atop him.  I rather enjoy it, personally.

Scene 6:  Lauren buttering up the Mean Girls with fancy presents.  Nick enters and asks Victoria to give Langley his job back.  She refuses: "I already have a butler. Horace."  Langley responds by pissing on her furniture.  

Scene 7:  Nick and Horace help Langley get dressed.  "We tried, but pissing on the furniture may have been a turn-off. But you still have your opera dream.  Go out there, and become a star!"  Langley asks Nick to go with him, but he refuses.

Scene 8: Horace being used for the Mean Girls to play hop-frog on.  Jason appears with his new intellectual look.  The Girls order him to take his clothes off, but he refuses: "I'm not just a body.  I can do other things."  Victoria suggests some master-slave role playing, with him as the master.  They leave.

The Mean Girls discover that Lauren is out of money, and reject her. 

Scene 9: The group rehearsing.  Victoria enters and discovers that Horace can sing, so she fires him.  She'll do without butlers from now on.  

Langley drops by to tell them that he has become a famous singer -- in blackface!  Ulp!  

Beefcake: just Jason.

Other Sights: Every scene is inside the house.

Gay characters: No.  Kadiff Kirwan is gay in real life, but his character is straight. 

Ralph appears in only the first two episodes.  I read the plot synopsis wrong: it's Jason who stands up for himself.

In the second season, the group ends up in the 1950s.  They reconnect with the middle-aged Victoria, and discover that she had a son with Jason, the now-32 year old JJ (Oliver Wellington).  I figured that the prissy, button-down virgin would turn out to  be gay, but no, he starts dating Lauren.  

JJ doesn't know that Jason is his father, but he still doesn't interpret Nick's sudden, intense interest as romantic. 

My Grade: B. 

Cleonike: Gay Illustrator of the Jazz Age

Cleo Damianakes, aka Cleo Wilkins, aka Cleonike, aka Cleon (1895-1979) was an artist and illustrator of the Jazz Age.  Born in Berkeley, she studied at the University of California, and then moved to Hollywood.

During the 1920s, she was consigned to illustrating the covers of many jazz age classics, including 3 Hemingways, an F. Scott Fitzgerald, a Zelda Fitzgerald, and 2 Conrad Aikens.  Later she moved to New York.

90% of her works feature butch, muscular women with biceps and abs.  Even where they are out of place, as in this cover of The Sun Also Rises, which has nothing to do with ancient Greek women in togas.

 A few butch muscular men appear alongside the buffed women.

You probably know Conrad Aiken only from the horrible short story "Silent Snow, Secret Snow," but he also wrote horrible novels.

Occasionally Cleonike gives us some androgynous characters that could go either way, as in this cover to Saturday Afternoon by Marion Strobel (a famous poet of the day).

But Cleonike's interest definitely resides in big, butch, muscular women.

Why does this person not appear on the list of great lesbian artists?   She was married twice, to Richard Oliver and then to Richard Wilkins, but how is that relevant?  She liked what she liked.