From: joe@spdcc.com (Joseph Francis)
Newsgroups: soc.motss
Subject: Re: Ageism
Date: 23 Dec 92 19:41:12 GMT
Article-I.D.: spdcc.1992Dec23.194112.15834
Organization: S.P. Dyer Computer Consulting, Cambridge MA

In article <1992Dec23.165203.58966@ns1.cc.lehigh.edu> dh0a@ns1.cc.lehigh.edu (DONALD L. HARDY) writes:
>>> The fascism of gay male aesthetic. <
>>Many gay men have bought into the notion that youth is the sexual pinacle.
>>Young men have been idolized for at least decades in american gay male
>>culture.
>
>Judging from such things as Greco-Roman statuary, Michelangelo's David,
>Shakespeare, and lots of other stuff, this idolization of the young male has
>been going on in Western Art LONG time, and not just in gay culture.

For every 'youth' figure I'll give you two of men with flowing beards,
in greek statuary (forget vase painting entirely). Jumping 500 years
(doncha hate graeco-roman? It seems like saying Turkish-American, if
we can conflate the cultures of Constantinople and New York...) Roman
statuary was even 'butcher', and I think there are half again as many
bearded figures for every hermes. Run through the Vatican sometime, it
has great sculpture in the back area, near the huge bronze pinecone.
The Renaissance gets even better.  For some reason, it dwindles a bit
in the 18th century, but back with a vengance in the 19th, to suddenly
butterly vaporize with the advent of "the souls" and pre-raphaelites
(though even then the visions of Valhalla were always dominated with
yummies).  The downfall of Wilde produced lots of men retreating to
grow fierce moustaches again, and everthing was bush until about the
30's, when everything just went straight downhill until the 60's.
Lasted until the late '70s, then dwindled in the '80s. I'll have to
see what Cervantes said, and Moliere, on male beauty; the only real
equivalents to Shakespeare for their respective languages. I have
little input on Elizabethan and Medieval art. This was a very
Ganymedean period, so I suspect youth would be back in favor. My mind
is a blank. I can't visualize anything except damn tapestries and
hideous Cranach the Elder things. Everything I'm flipping through in
my head is biblical, and there are lots of martyrs (not youths) and
female figures. St. Sebastian. Always clean-shaven, and clearly
youthifical. The figures are so rarely realistic I can't think that
they would be homoerotic. God it seems like 1000 years ago I was in
the Accademia in Venice.  Max would know. Where are you! I should
spend a year and do a nice picture book on the subject. Does anyone
remember the books of drawn nude males that circulated in the 30's and
40's and 50's which were ostensibly for studying the male form, but
were functionally pornography?

A short history of adult males and body hair in art since
post-Etruscian times (Etruscan funerary art always had smiling adult
men or women reclining, but I don't think what I've seen was in any
way intended to be anything except a vision of the content of the
coffin in the best of health.)

The neolithic stick figures in the Lascaux caves have beards, and
virtually all early Egyptian and Abyssinian art had bearded men, but I
haven't really studied much art older than 3000 years.

-- 
US Jojo; damp, slighly soiled, but tasty nonetheless.