Daniel Laurin, a PhD Candidate at the University of Toronto, recently launched an exhibition that offers a glimpse into a rich visual archive of mid-twentieth-century erotic photography. Titled Beefcake, the exhibition features 45 black and white photographs, 17 periodicals, and three photo albums that have one thing in common: the celebration of the male body. Most of these materials date from the mid-twentieth century, they were produced in the United States, and they circulated widely across the country and abroad. Physique photography and physique magazines catered primarily to a gay readership and, for that reason, the launching of the exhibition last June, during the celebrations of Pride month, was well-timed.
When visitors enter the Museum Exhibit Space on the 5th floor of the Claude T. Bissell Building, they are welcomed by the sight of numerous photographs of various dimensions placed against a white wall. The combination of the black and white photographs, the black frames, the background’s color, and the careful disposition of the pictures create a harmonic atmosphere that invites visitors to walk through the display. The photographs are grouped by some visible themes. On one side of the wall, we find a set of seven photographs portraying men in the shower. We also find groups of photographs with bodybuilders flaunting their musculature for the camera, as well as groups of white and non-white models wearing cowboy attire, holding sabers, or bows and arrows to produce images that evoke stereotypes of Native American men.
On the right side of the wall, a group of photographs show what Laurin refers to as “fantasies of domesticity.” In such pictures, young white men were portrayed in what seems to be domestic spaces, such as the kitchen and the living room. In one of these images, a man vacuums the carpet, while wearing a thong and nothing else. These photographs are evocative of mid-century representations of housewives in advertisements, where cheerful women, surrounded by home appliances, smile to the camera while performing house chores. In placing nude men in such domestic spaces, physique photography subverted gender expectations, but also turned such subversion into a source of pleasure for a gay male viewership.
These fantasies of domesticity were particularly appealing to the curator, and for that reason they feature prominently in the exhibition. Laurin explains:
“The images that struck me most while sorting through the thousands of photographs in this collection were the ones that had a more mundane, everyday setting. Sure, there are lots of cowboys, jailbirds and Grecian gods, but the fantasies of domesticity really stood out to me: playing records while making coffee, doing the dishes, waking up in the photographer’s bed. I found it moving to see these fantasies of cohabitation or domestic bliss mixed in with the more salacious prison hazing or leather-clad motorcycle hunks, as if they were just as unattainable. Of course, we know that some of these photographers were engaged in complicated relationships with their subjects, and these photos blur the lines between home mode imagery and commercial erotica in ways that feel very of-the-moment even as they speak to a very different time.”
The material on display comes from the collection of Dr. Thomas Waugh, Professor Emeritus of Film Studies and Interdisciplinary Studies in Sexuality at Concordia University and author of the groundbreaking Hard to Imagine: Gay Male Eroticism in Photography and Film from Their Beginnings to Stonewall (1996). Some years ago, the Mark S. Bonham Centre’s Sexual Representation Collection (SRC) acquired Waugh’s pornography collection, which he assembled throughout the years while researching the history of adult and queer film, and erotic visual culture. The Waugh Collection includes photographs, illustrations, drawings, negatives, slides, audio visual materials, books, periodicals, notes, and writing. These materials have made a valuable contribution to the SRC, already the largest archival collection of pornography in Canada.
Laurin’s exhibition aims to make the Waugh Collection known among the UofT community. He explains that “working with former director of the SRC Patrick Keilty, we thought that a display of Waugh’s peerless collection of Beefcake photography would make for a compelling exhibit that will hopefully encourage students and researchers to engage with the collection and all the other collections the SRC holds.” Laurin’s own research focuses on queer male erotic film and video, and Beefcake photography, he observes, is a kind of historical antecedent to that: “The magazines that printed these photos helped establish both the gay community as a market but also the tropes that will come to dominate the gay male erotic imaginary in the decades that follow, for better or for worse: exaggerated musculature, whiteness, hegemonic masculinity.”
Although the exhibition’s main focus is photography, the materials that caught my eye were the magazines on display. These magazines help visitors to visualize one of the mechanisms through which the photographs on the walls were reproduced and circulated. They are testament to an old era when periodicals not only visualized homoerotic desires, but also created them. Even though a glass frustrated my desire to leaf through these magazines, I am thrilled to know they are now part of the SRC collection at UofT!
Beefcake runs until August 31 on the 5th Floor of the Claude T. Bissell Building, located at 140 St. George St., Toronto. It is open to the public Monday-Friday, from 8:45am to 6:30pm.
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Juan Carlos Mezo-González is a historian of sexuality, race, and visual culture in Mexican and transnational contexts. He holds a Ph.D. in History from the University of Toronto (2022) where he is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow.