Male prostitutes, Columbia Hall brothel, aka Paresis Hall, The Bowery, NY, ca. 1890.
1920s
France, c.1910
Miss Buterfly, 1925
1919
Henry Scott Tuke with lesser-known artist William Ayerst Ingram (left), who founded the Falmouth Boys' Club with fellow philanthropist Charles Masson Fox – later subject to homosexual blackmail. An insightful book about their circle has yet to be written.
One of the lovely photos of Geoffry Wheatly Cobb and his crew that have been hidden away in dusty albums for far, far, far too long. That purposely neglected gay history is about to end.
"You do not know how I love you, And even if you knew, you would not believe; That such desires reside within me, Of which I dare not speak." The future Grand Duke Ernst of Hesse (right) in 1887 to his adjunct and first love (left), Alexander von Frankenberg und Ludwigsdorf.
The notorious Harry Smith – as President (centre) of a New Zealand fruitgrowers association!!!! Of his wild youth, to echo Lady Bracknell: to be seduced by one duke’s son may be regarded as good fortune; to be seduced by two looks like shamelessness.
The past is another country. Illustrator Ernest Prater's amusing image of 1909 was used by Fry's chocolate on cards and in advertisements. While most would have read it innocently, its ambiguous flirting must have given many chaps a knowing laugh, as it was surely intended to.
Such a sweet open face. The young Giovanni Montini, later Pope Paul VI, for whom every sperm was sacred. At the link is his sometime boyfriend, actor Paolo Carlini, who was 25 years younger, warbling on Italian TV in 1958. Ah, la dolce vita!
youtu.be/mUnNynnrBvo?...
Gestapo photographs of Alfred W., an 18 year old telephone operator at S.S. head office in Berlin; arrested after being denounced by a sex partner. His youth likely saved his life, as remarkably he was only sentenced to 4 months in prison rather than a concentration camp.
What's the point of having a boyfriend if you don't immortalise them? In 1907 the cosmopolitan Count Harry Kessler commissioned Aristide Maillol to preserve the willowy youth of Gaston Colin as a bronze focal point of his Weimar salon.
Andrew Kozak
Carlos McClendon, 1947. George Platt Lynes.
@troytagger.bsky.social Willy Schmeltzkopf by an unknown photographer, c. 1913
