Hosmer’s colossal bronze statue of Senator Thomas Hart Benton; Anne Whitney’s larger-than-life recreations of Charles Sumner, Samuel Adams, and Lief Erickson; Emma Stebbins’s imposing statue of Horace Mann; Edmonia Lewis’s marble sculptures of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, John Brown, Ulysses S. Grant, and Abraham Lincoln—all glorified the patriotic American male body.
Viscerally, these imposing works of public art represented the gender of a new body politic: the strong, indomitable, progressive American man who symbolized freedom and resilience in the face of injustice—and who, if Whitman was correct, contained within himself the potential for an expansive same-sex desire. In the public discussion over the changing nature of American masculinity, these statues represent the antithesis of the persecuting society. That these representations were being created by women who were outside of traditional gender or sexual roles indicates that significant shifts had occurred in who had permission to represent American patriotism.
As these commanding masculine statues of politicians and generals were erected across the United States, other artists, almost all of whom were men who desired men, were creating a different image of American masculinity: the male nude. Classical Greek and Roman statuary had depicted the male nude, but until the Italian Renaissance, Anglo-European sensibilities had discouraged displays of the male body and genitals. Although this attitude was due in part to the Christian church’s stigmatization of sexuality, it also stemmed from the fact that such representations often implied physical, psychological, and emotional vulnerability, which was viewed as unmasculine. But after the Civil War highlighted the vulnerability of the male body, and as public discussion of same-sex male desire became more common, images of male nudity were considered increasingly acceptable. In the 1870s, English art critic John Addington Symonds wrote about Michelangelo’s and da Vinci’s nudes, explicitly associating them with contemporary male-male desire. At the same time, in Sicily, German photographer Wilhelm von Gloeden began taking photographs of local young male peasants in “classical” poses. His work with clothed models garnered popular attention in Europe and America.
Von Gloeden’s more explicitly erotic photos of nude males, many of them in sexually suggestive poses, also gained attention among American and European men who identified as lovers of men. In the 1880s, Philadelphia painter and photographer Thomas Eakins did extensive work with the male nude, including a series of photographs of a probably eighteen-year-old Billy Duckett, who was intimately involved, and lived for five years, with Walt Whitman. (Eakins also took formal photographs of Whitman, including a traditional “wedding portrait” of Whitman and Duckett.) 17 The Swimming Hole , Eakins’s famous 1885 painting of five youths bathing nude on a lake, echoes Whitman’s images of an eroticized pastoral scene from “Song of Myself”:
An unseen hand also pass’d over their bodies,
It descended tremblingly from their temples and ribs.
The young men float on their backs, their white bellies bulge to the sun, they do not ask who seizes fast to them,
They do not know who puffs and declines with pendant and bending arch,
They do not think whom they souse with spray. 18
Boston-based photographer F. Holland Day, considered by art historians to be one of the founders of American photography, also worked with the male nude at this time. Day’s publishing company, Copeland and Day, printed works by the English Decadents, including works by same-sex-loving Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley. In 1898 Day’s nude portrait of Thomas Langryl Harris, Study for the Crucifixion , was the first frontal male nude to be publicly exhibited in Boston. Day, like von Gloeden, was interested in men of color. Some of his most noted works were of his
Viscerally, these imposing works of public art represented the gender of a new body politic: the strong, indomitable, progressive American man who symbolized freedom and resilience in the face of injustice—and who, if Whitman was correct, contained within himself the potential for an expansive same-sex desire. In the public discussion over the changing nature of American masculinity, these statues represent the antithesis of the persecuting society. That these representations were being created by women who were outside of traditional gender or sexual roles indicates that significant shifts had occurred in who had permission to represent American patriotism.
As these commanding masculine statues of politicians and generals were erected across the United States, other artists, almost all of whom were men who desired men, were creating a different image of American masculinity: the male nude. Classical Greek and Roman statuary had depicted the male nude, but until the Italian Renaissance, Anglo-European sensibilities had discouraged displays of the male body and genitals. Although this attitude was due in part to the Christian church’s stigmatization of sexuality, it also stemmed from the fact that such representations often implied physical, psychological, and emotional vulnerability, which was viewed as unmasculine. But after the Civil War highlighted the vulnerability of the male body, and as public discussion of same-sex male desire became more common, images of male nudity were considered increasingly acceptable. In the 1870s, English art critic John Addington Symonds wrote about Michelangelo’s and da Vinci’s nudes, explicitly associating them with contemporary male-male desire. At the same time, in Sicily, German photographer Wilhelm von Gloeden began taking photographs of local young male peasants in “classical” poses. His work with clothed models garnered popular attention in Europe and America.
Von Gloeden’s more explicitly erotic photos of nude males, many of them in sexually suggestive poses, also gained attention among American and European men who identified as lovers of men. In the 1880s, Philadelphia painter and photographer Thomas Eakins did extensive work with the male nude, including a series of photographs of a probably eighteen-year-old Billy Duckett, who was intimately involved, and lived for five years, with Walt Whitman. (Eakins also took formal photographs of Whitman, including a traditional “wedding portrait” of Whitman and Duckett.) 17 The Swimming Hole , Eakins’s famous 1885 painting of five youths bathing nude on a lake, echoes Whitman’s images of an eroticized pastoral scene from “Song of Myself”:
An unseen hand also pass’d over their bodies,
It descended tremblingly from their temples and ribs.
The young men float on their backs, their white bellies bulge to the sun, they do not ask who seizes fast to them,
They do not know who puffs and declines with pendant and bending arch,
They do not think whom they souse with spray. 18
Boston-based photographer F. Holland Day, considered by art historians to be one of the founders of American photography, also worked with the male nude at this time. Day’s publishing company, Copeland and Day, printed works by the English Decadents, including works by same-sex-loving Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley. In 1898 Day’s nude portrait of Thomas Langryl Harris, Study for the Crucifixion , was the first frontal male nude to be publicly exhibited in Boston. Day, like von Gloeden, was interested in men of color. Some of his most noted works were of his
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