Hard to Imagine: Gay Male Eroticism in Photography and Film from Their Beginnings to Stonewall (review)

Abstract

Tom Waugh's Hard to Imagine: Gay Male Eroticism in Photography and Film from Their Beginnings to Stonewall is a lovingly and painstakingly compiled collection of evidence for the gay male erotic imagination, a visual history to complement and bring to vivid, and sometimes lurid, life the textual histories of the construction of homosexuality that have been documented by John D'Emilio, Jeffrey Weeks, George Chauncey and others. By telling this story visually, Waugh connects the advent of photographic technology to the formation of a gay culture that eagerly seized upon this new and more immediate form of communication to speak itself and its desires, albeit often in a clandestine voice audible only to fellow travelers. Waugh celebrates the courage of men who transgressed cultural taboos (as well as laws and ordinances) in order to produce, collect and preserve this most amazing visual record of their desires. The erotic power of these images and their transgressive potential remains even today, or perhaps, especially today, when threats of censorship and sexual panic proceed hand in hand with improvements in quality of life and visibility for people who practice "non-normative" sex, such as gays and lesbians. Waugh, in simply distilling, presenting and interpreting this history, had to negotiate a maze of nervous attorneys and archival administrations--and, according to his preface, make some "heartbreaking" compromises in order to see his project of thirteen years appear in print. In fact, out of thirty printers to which Columbia University Press presented the book, all but one declined to print the material. The result, however, is a body of evidence, at the same time contradictory and coherent, which itself makes up the syntax of a "reverse" [End Page 171] discourse, flaunting (sometimes coyly, sometimes blatantly) social proscriptions against male same-sex desire and social, judicial and political efforts at containment and control of that desire. "Representation is the cement of úcommunity," 1 according to Waugh, and while the more visible, post-Stonewall gay community today is diverse and varied, Waugh's collection contains the seeds of its collective erotic imaginary.