Naked Men

I've been rolling this around in the back of my head for a couple of weeks, and I decided it's not something that should stay there.



I was participating in the comments at the SSM debate hosted by Right Off the Shore and got an email from one of the guys at the pro-marriage side asking me to remove the photo from my profile, since it would turn off conservatives who would not then read the arguments. There's enough holes in that to strain cheese, if you'll pardon the Wisconsin reference, but it's their fight and I didn't want to jeopardize their chances, so I took down the photo. It was this one. Nothing showing -- not like my dick was spotlighted or anything -- and I thought it fairly safe for any adult reader, which is, after all, my audience. I finally emailed him back and said that anyone who was turned off by that image wasn't going to pay attention to any arguments anyway, but it was his fight.


I sort of dropped out of the discussion after that -- I'm long past the point where I have to apologize to anyone for being gay, and the totalitarians of the left leave the same taste in my mouth that the totalitarians of the right do, and if you think you have to fight for freedom by censoring those on your side, what is it, exactly, you're fighting for?.


But back to the images, since it's just another facet of the so-called "culture war" (I hope you've noticed that the Christianists want to govern the content of art and literature, as well as everything else). I make pictures of landscapes, close-up abstract natural forms, oddball city views that I like, and naked men. All pretty much part of the standard modernist repertoire. I don't see the naked men as necessarily sexual, although in some images that is the point. I am, however, bemused by the kind of mind that sees any nudity at all as sexual. (Sorry, but one of my most important themes is innocence -- I'd like to do something on the order of Bruce Weber's Bear Pond one of these days -- because to me, that is one of the most enduring and appealing characteristics of men. Somehow, if you dig under the exterior, you will find innocence. Some people just can't see it. 'Nuff said?)



There are other things in those images -- grief and loss, for starters. I've lost a lot of men I loved in the past thirty years.



I also sometimes do classic (or nearly classic -- I have my own ideas on balanced composition) figure studies, as abstract as anyone else has ever done.













So, in case any "conservatives" who get turned off by art are looking, this is what it's about -- these are pictures of men mostly without clothes, not, to my mind, particularly titillating. I will admit that there are images that are much more frank at Hunter's Eye because not every image is meant to say the same thing, but each, to me, has something to say about men, because men are a lot of things, and they don't all have to do with sex.