How I published vintage queer filth in film, video, photography, and graphics over 25 years of editors, designers, lawyers, printers, and booksellers -/- and survived
After 25 years of historical research in sexual representation in cinema, video, photography, and the graphic arts, it sometimes seems I have invested as much energy navigating problems in visually illustrating my research—problems of censorship and self-censorship, whether political, legal, bureaucratic, economic, logistical, technical, or neurotic—as I have in writing about it. An exaggeration, of course, but having now churned out three books on queer cinema, video, and photography, and edited three volumes of collected vintage erotic drawings—all of them copiously illustrated—one would think that either I would have the swing of things by now or I would have got it out of my system, contentedly looking forward to retirement and the prospects of having a real sex life as opposed to a symbolic one. One would be wrong, for each new book—and there seem to be a couple more in the pipeline—offers new surprises and new challenges that spur me on and reopen the scar tissue at the same time. (Refer to CD for Waugh Figures 1 and 2.)
The first of these six books, Hard to Imagine: Gay Male Eroticism in Photography and Film from their Beginnings to Stonewall1 came out in 1996 after 15 years of trauma over illustrations. The ordeals ranged from threatened lawsuits by the Kinsey Institute for publishing in a nonscientific journal to the nightmarish appearance of photoshopped body snatchers in nine of the volume s illustrations (it is about protecting the privacy of now-90-year-old Dutchmen, as anonymous as they are no doubt litigious—see Figures 1 and 2). The experience of dealing with all of this was so intense that I had to publish a long chapter in my next book about that alone. The trauma began with mid-1980s efforts by the Kinsey Institute and its [End Page 101] then-director June Reinisch to block my use of photos and stills obtained legitimately and in good faith from their collections. The brouhaha crystallized around three issues, as I described them in my 1997 account, later reprinted in The Fruit Machine:2
- obscenity: still contradictory and unsettled territory, but centred on a hysterical consensus forbidding the representation of under-18 bodies. Reinisch refused outright any of the Institute s unique collection of turn-of-the-century teenagers, whether in the arty nudes by Baron von Gloeden that are on every bookstore art rack or the irreplaceable, stagey fuckphotos starring mustachioed young men in vintage brothels.
- civil liability: The pretext that the individual identities of proud, horny and recognizable faces captured forty, fifty, sixty years ago needed protecting. Dr. Kinsey s fastidious confidentiality protocols may have been necessary during the McCarthy era but need updating in an era when gay people display publicly and proudly their social identities and gay bodies. (For example, for the Institute to maintain the shroud of confidentiality over two George Platt Lynes thirties nudes of Jean Cocteau s lover Marcel Khill, dead for over fifty years—his identity a matter of published historical record—while glibly naming the sitters in Lynes portraits of clothed intellectuals and artists, is erotophobic, homophobic, classist and pedantically anti-historical.)
- copyright: Archives around the world are increasingly jittery about copyright as artifacts of the cultural past become increasingly marketable, and as historians are increasingly being blocked by individuals commandeering the collective past. But the fear that anonymous producers of underground noncommercial and unpublished photos of generations ago, rights holders who could never be traced, would come back from the dead to sue the archive or publisher which had dared let them out into broad daylight, was clearly one more unreasonable restraint on my historical research.
The other two film (and video) books involved much less scarring, for by 2000 and...
