Vintage Season 14 - Fight Fire with Fire

Whilst I have have a lot of fun over the last few weeks poking fun at some of the eccentric aspects of vintage posing pouch photography. I hope my readers will have detected a great underlying fondness for the garment which was forged in the heat of battle against Victorian-minded bigots, censors and other detractors who opposed not only male nudity but gay culture itself.

I set out in this series to show that the strangeness and absurdity that some people see in G-string is not entirely ill-founded. Each of my posts in this series to date highlights some of those absurdities but many are, in their own way, little gems of homoeroticism, from WPG's stylish torso's to Wally Grimme's astonishing banana boat. There are plenty more.

To me, Vic Siepke's posing pouch in this image is one of the Seven Wonders of the Vintage Era. It's skimpiness and tightness would be very sexy even if it's contours were less revealing. Is it ridiculously brief? Emasculating? Perhaps, but that is part of what makes it so erotic when it's worn (if that is the word!) by such a manly representative of our gender, a body-builder of some renown in his day.

Billy Joe's pouch is similarly skimpy but even more minimal in volume terms. There's no doubting his masculinity but the photographer seems to be trying to emulate the flat appearance of female G-strings where the censorship challenge was to see how small they could go. Carr's pubic overflow makes a jokey (and erotic) commentary on the futility of this endeavour for men. By drawing the comparison, the studio presents it's gay audience with an image no different in substance from it's heterosexual equivalent. The relaxed, informal, smiling pose with erotic zone to the fore and eyes engaged with the audience has a similar 'normalising' effect, doing away with the sense of furtive lusting which formal beefcake poses seem to demand. Billy Joe says it's OK to admire my body and desire me, fill your boots!

The playfulness of this pose also draws on a common heterosexual stereotype where the decorative belle is carried aloft by her muscular beau. This simple juxtaposition is therefore daringly suggestive of sexual roles, although there's a contradictory jokey implication that the strong man is not strong enough to lift his partner (and arguably that's equally 'suggestive'). The G-string worn by the chap on top is barely visible and the impression that he is nude is just as challenging to social mores. While hiding the sexual organs of a nude with foreground objects and body parts gradually became acceptable, touching was still not, not even in heterosexual images.

It's a moot point whether touching via a flimsy, posing pouch was any less sexual. His apparent nudity also draws attention to the improvised, artificial modesty of his companion. Skimpiness is the name of the game here too, with a mini-pouch framed by an overspill of pubic hair. As we have seen, G-strings are not really fit for purpose as 'active wear'! Leaving aside the possible interpretations of it's small size in this pairing, there's an element of intrinsic vulnerability and insecurity in the garment which stems from it's crude simplicity and is readily apparent in this shot where it's no longer pulled flat against the abdomen. That looseness casts a different light on the one behind his head.

This is not a particularly ourstanding image, but it demonstrates how posing pouch 'duos' are full of interesting undertones and I plan to return to this subject at a later date.

This image predates the era of AMG and Co., but not by as much as the sepia finish suggests, methinks. It's the lean, cut physique of the model that makes this picture sing but nevertheless this early example of a pouch shows that with sensible proportions matched to the lines of the body and a bit of erotic enhancement the garment can put up a respectable showing. The model's slightly apprehensive look and stiff pose suggests an uneasy relationship with the photographer. That is the stuff of fantasies and elevates the image from familiar beefcake to unexpected eroticism. It's partly down to that sense of vulnerability the posing pouch conjures up, the way it suggests a modest wearer whicle concentrating his male essentials into one very obvious and highly grabbable handful.

That idea of grabbability also features in this image. The handsome model seems so preoccupied with positioning and shaping his foot that he seems to have left an opening for a third party to make a closer approach to his dangling assets. If the guardians of morality missed that lascivious angle they had no chance of spotting the appeal to foot fetishists!

Paradoxically, the posing pouch, intended to preserve modesty and decency, became a fetishistic object in it's own right. Because it had no other purpose than to contain and conceal men's gentitalia it came to represent them to the intended audience. It's inaccessibility became it's attraction.