And let there be no mistake: it is still a Bad Thing for the vast majority of heterosexual males, who will go to great lengths to avoid any hint of being gay. If homosexuality was invisible in the past, now it is everywhere: in the news, at the movies, on TV. Just as paintings or sculptures of nude males have become embarrassing or suspect-just watch the nervous response of a heterosexual man to the sight of nude male statuary in a museum-so has male nudity in the real world become problematical, because it is now tainted with the possibility of gay desire. This unprecedented awareness of homosexuality, which has been building steadily since the 1970s, is what has changed everything. The Entrance to the Port of Marseilles, 1754, by Claude-Joseph Vernet (1714-1789). The City of London purchased Ruby, Gold and Malachite for the Guildhall Art Gallery from the artist himself, following its exhibition in 1902. Tuke is now generally considered to have been homosexual, and he may well have derived more than artistic satisfaction from painting these adolescent males, but the public viewed his art as perfectly innocent. Ruby, Gold and Malachite is an example (page 18). Tuke lived in Cornwall for much of his life, painting portraits, sea scenes, and other genres, and sometimes nude young men. Tuke painted a number of scenes with naked youths at their center that we would view as homoerotic but which were deemed “innocent” at the time, because mere nudity (in males) was not seen as intrinsically sexual. A revealing example of this revolution may be seen in the changing reception of some of the paintings of the English artist Henry Scott Tuke (1858–1929). That mainstream society’s view of male nudity totally altered during the second half of the 20th century is remarkable, if seldom remarked upon. In the background, male peasants halt their hard work to cool themselves with a swim in a stream, stripping naked to do so-presumably a perfectly typical event during harvest.
We can see an example of this in the early 15th-century illuminated manuscript known as the Très riches heures of Jean, Duke of Berry (see page 16). Male nudity was treated as unremarkable, provided no women were present, in activities such as bathing and swimming. Even the highly Christianized medieval world tended to be quite “earthy” in matters of everyday conduct. The fall of Rome and the ascent of Christianity, which is not normally thought of as friendly toward nudity, undoubtedly put a damper on many sexual practices, but there was never any particular taboo on nudity among males (unlike in many Islamic cultures). The ancient Germanic peoples as well, according to Tacitus, took a very casual view of male nudity. The phenomenon of nudity in all-male settings is widely documented in ancient Greece and Rome.
Representation of the month of August in the Très riches heures of Jean, Duc de Berry, c.1413-1416.
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