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

262 LETTERS IN CANADA 1996 for the first wife's death. Indeed Restless Spirits not only identifies a body of protofeminist or covertly feminist literatrne, but also reveals a relationship to the developing discourses of psychology anci psychoanalysis. It is ghostswho undo the relationshipbetween the psychological and the social, the public and the private spheres; where there are ghosts the heroine is not alone; where there are ghosts she is not mad. The individual stories in Lundie's volume make the best argument for reading this collection. We should be grateful that Restless Spirits has brought them back to life. (NAOMI MORGENSTERN) Thomas Waugh. Hard to Imagine: Gay Male Eroticism in Photography and Film from Their Beginnings to Stonewall Columbia University Press. xvi, 470. us $60.00 Identities require, indeed are produced by, collective memories. Memories themselves are not simply there, but are produced by shared images, by a discourse. The invention of photography coincides more or less exactly with the constitution of the modern homosexual subject. The increased accessibility of the technology of photography (and, later, film) provided for vastly increased opportunities to participate in the construction of perSonal images of desire. While it had always been possible for the wealthy traveller to bring back copies of antique sculpture or painting, photography democratized desire and, by making images available to a larger population, permitted the construction of a sexual identity. Thomas Waugh~s monumental new workmakes available more ofthese crucial images than one had ever believed were there. It is the product of years of work, in countless archives in many parts of the world. Naturally, since this is the first work of its kind, it cannot provide a full analysis, say, of cultural difference, of the relation between the national and the physical body, let alone the body politic. What it does provide, in its magnificent display of a varied vocabulary of male desire, is the raw material for works to come, perhaps from Waugh himself. What this study does above all is to put on display a male homosexual imaginaire. At the same time, it does not suggest that that imaginaire is transhistorical or transnational. If much finde -siecle pornography is now camp, it is not because the images have changed, or because we see better, rather because we see differently. Waugh's study also helpfully addresses the means of production. How did these images circulate? To what extent do they correspond to personal fantasies (the amateur photographer who enshrines his desire), to what extent are they the product of a pornography industry? Even if it is essential to know how images were constructed, marketed, and distributed, , there remains an extraordinary perversity of desire. What is it that, in an . I age of ephebes, allows one to prefer a body-builder, or the reverse? Why I HUMANITIES 263 are toes an erotogenic site for some, while others are left wondering at the mystery? While Waugh's study stops at the end of the 19605, one might wonder at the 'buffed' look of recent years, only to be followed by the new androgyny now in evidence. Waugh is particularly instructive on the various I covers' that have allowed for the circulation offorbidden rnaterial- such as nudism orbodybuilding . Not all of the images produced in these fields are gay (that is, the product of a gay man), but all are capable of a gay reading, of appropriation . Many of these photographs and journals needed to pretend, of course, to a non-erotic purpose in order to escape censorship, and conveyed their 'true' erotic message with a wink. Other images, such as those of the German FKK or nude physical culture league, have amore complex relation to eros. As someone like Hans Bliiher makes clear, these images of men frolicking or exercising were already political. If they were not already fascistic, they were appropriable with little change. They inscribed a body type and a relation to nature that could then be used against the unnatural, or entartet. The erotics ofthe gymnasium go back as far as Greece, of course, and they rest upon the assumption that nudity is non-erotic, even when the fictionality of that claim is self-evident...