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Affectionate Men: A Photographic History of a Century of Male Couples (1850's to 1950's) Russell Bush, St. Martin's Griffin, New York: paperback, $16.95
I'm celebrating Affectionate Men for other reasons too: It refuses to label captured moments of affection among males as either "gay" or "straight." The photographs speak for themselves. They speak through other cultures and races. But even more significantly, they effectively celebrate the joy of affectionate male pairings throughout the entire first century, following the dawn of photography: 1850-1950. Thus, there's an extraordinary accumulative effect on the psyche as one peruses a century's worth of these old photographs, illuminating, as they do, long-ago attachments between men across their social classes: the proletariat, aristocrats, farmers, bathers, soldiers and, of course, proud urban lovers.
The photographs show, as Walt Whitman once said, that "the germ is latent in all men." Among other things I like about Affectionate Men is how its editor/compiler, Russell Bush has given genuine homage to America's great Poet of Democracy to illustrate a significant part of the photo-book's good mood. He quotes Walt Whitman about:
…two simple men I saw today on the pier in the midst of the crowd, parting the parting of dear friends, The one to remain hung on the other's neck and passionately kiss'd him, While the one to depart tightly prest the one to remain in his arms. Bush himself writes: "Some of the men pictured in this book may have been what we now consider gay; others assuredly were not. At the dawn of the 21st century, man's love for his fellow man is being reappraised. Perhaps the label homosexual will be discarded as obsolete, perhaps the word gay will once again just mean merry, and Whitman's "love of comrades" will prevail regardless of a man's sexuality." Affectionate Men had its genesis on a lazy Indian summer Sunday afternoon when Russell Bush, wandering through a flea market, saw a small tintype "a sort of photograph" of two men together. He noted:
In this manner and with a jaunty air Affectionate Men was assembled.
Operating on the theory that historically, one picture is worth a thousand words, Affectionate Men effortlessly makes a century-old statement celebrating same-sex affection within a given timeframe. |
This book's title-Affectionate Men -- appeals to me mucho, resurrecting, as it does, a too-little talked-about approach to male love, a nearly unconditional kind of love whose roots-sexual and otherwise-- are always necessarily strengthened through the growth of a couple's genuine affections.
I showed it to a startled 20-something neighbor. "Oh my god," she said, "I didn't know these things were going on back in those days."