Arnold Zwicky's Blog

(Mostly not about language — gender and sexuality, gay stuff, art and photography, including collages — though a couple portmanteaus sneak in.)

From Chris Ambidge recently, this poster from the 40s urging daily bathing:

What struck me about the poster was the stylistic similarity between the art work (with its affection for the male body) and the cover drawings for gay male pulp fiction of the period.

Sticking close to the showers — in the locker room, in fact — here’s Lance Lester’s Cruising Horny Corners, first unamended and then turned into one of my collages (strictly speaking, not XXX-rated, but it definitely skirts the line), with the addition of an assortment of phallic images:

And now another shower scene from roughly this period, from Bob Mizer’s Physique Pictorial magazine (transparently homoerotic in tone from the beginning, eventually moving to explicit gay porn) — in my (silly) collaged version:

The wider context is what I’ve called “The triad: jockstrap, locker room, shower room” on my XBlog (in a posting that focuses on jockstraps):

More shower room fantasy, this time in a photo of French rugby players from Dieux du Stade:

From Wikipedia:

Dieux du Stade (English: Gods of the Stadium) is the title of two books and several calendars and DVDs first published in 2001, featuring nude and semi-nude photographs of members of Stade Français, a Paris-based domestic French rugby team. In more recent years, players from other rugby union clubs and athletes from other sports have also been included.

The calendars and book have mostly black-and-white nude, erotic and sometimes homoerotic photographs of the players.

… Originally created in support of charity, the popularity of the calendars has been credited for the increased fame of the Stade Français team, as well as rugby in general, in France. The calendars have also received a warm welcome from the gay community around the world due to the homoerotic quality of the images. The British writer Mark Simpson coined the word ‘Sporno’ to describe the DDS aesthetic. (link)

That’s sporno from sport + porno.

Now that I’ve wandered onto Portmanteau Place, let me add the entertaining homotography, which substitutes the libfix homo- for the first syllable of photography; it serves as the name of a blog devoted to homoerotic photography (with special attention to fashion models: fashiontography). Fashion models are one of the traditional objects of homotography, male athletes and military men being two others (as just illustrated).

This entry was posted on September 10, 2011 at 10:15 am and is filed under Art/lit/music/film, Gender and sexuality, Libfixes, Photography, Portmanteaus. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.