"The Golden Age of Gay Porn": Nostalgia and the Photography of Wilhelm von Gloeden

My memoirs are not for historians. They can be of interest only to voluptuaries and artists.

—Roger Peyrefitte, Les amours singuliers

When the French novelist Roger Peyrefitte wrote these words in 1949, he was not writing as himself or one of his invented characters but as the largely forgotten nineteenth-century photographer Wilhelm von Gloeden. The "memoirs" in question assume von Gloeden's voice but were composed by Peyrefitte and published as the dramatized autobiography Les amours singuliers nearly two decades after the photographer's death. Moving between factual account and poetic embellishment, the narrative describes a libertine artist who deeply admires his boyish models and thrills at providing homoerotic pictures to a lustful clientele.

Peyrefitte seems to think that von Gloeden's story would have little to offer historians, or perhaps that his experience escaped the rational frame of historical analysis altogether: von Gloeden was for "voluptuaries and artists." However, the mounting interest in von Gloeden over the last few decades suggests that the photographer would come to intrigue historians after all. "A famous photographer in his own day," writes Thomas Waugh, "[von Gloeden] has emerged from a half century of subsequent obscurity to become enshrined as the most important gay visual artist of the pre–World War I era."¹ In the more than fifty years since the publication of Les amours singuliers, numerous articles, exhibitions, and books have advanced the research on von Gloeden, assuring his popularity as an early photographer of the male nude and his prominent place within queer (art) history. Nevertheless, Peyrefitte's interlacing of historical fact and nostalgic fantasy has proved hard to shake.² Even a casual survey of the extant literature reveals the tendency of certain details to vary greatly from one account to the next, the desire to give von Gloeden a vivid psychological interiority for which there is little archival basis, the prominence of speculation and inference in ascertaining certain lost portions of his oeuvre, and a broad sense of nostalgia for the time and place in which he lived and the kind of pederastic eroticism he was able to pursue. While much attention has been lavished on von Gloeden himself, the nostalgic historical packaging that surrounds the photographer begs for an analysis of its own. In this sense, the von Gloeden historiography—which includes scholarly texts and tawdry magazine articles, coffee-table books and pornographic Web sites—offers a great deal more than the story of a single photographer; it also reveals the influence of nostalgia and fantasy on the ways that homoeroticism is organized, imagined, and consumed as a historical feature.

Wilhelm von Gloeden, or Baron von Gloeden, as he is sometimes known, was born into minor Prussian nobility in 1856. After a brief stint as a student of art history, von Gloeden went to the art academy in Weimar, where he trained as a painter. The young artist suffered a severe lung condition, and by the time he reached his twenties von Gloeden's doctors ordered him to depart Prussia for a warm, dry climate. In 1878 von Gloeden settled in the remote Sicilian fishing village of Taormina, where he would reside until his death in 1931.

During his earliest years in Sicily, von Gloeden received an ample allowance from his stepfather and by all accounts led a rather leisurely existence. He occupied a villa, employed one or more houseboys, and, as one of few northern Europeans to have taken up residence in Taormina, began to host members of his aristocratic set as they underwent the Grand Tour. In addition to the town's natural beauty, coastal vistas, and many classical ruins (including the impressive Teatro Greco), some of von Gloeden's male guests enjoyed another local attraction. After nightfall and much wine, so the story goes, von Gloeden and his visitors would routinely participate in wild orgies with boys from the village. Though evidently notorious in certain circles, the orgies seem to have been tolerated. According to one account, von Gloeden's "bacchanalian revels . . . reached new heights of orgiastic abandon, but never caused a scandal...