Vintage black and white pictures of gay men
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The partners they can attract may be limited and, in response to this limitation, they may be particularly attuned to seek out partners who will not reject them. We speculate that Bears are viewed as less attractive than what is traditionally considered to be attractive. We concluded that Bears are intensely sexual. Bears had lower self-esteem but were no less (or more) hypermasculine than non-Bears. Bears were more likely than mainstream gay men to enact diverse sexual behaviors (e.g., fisting, voyeurism) and were comparatively more masculine. They were less likely to reject sexual partners and the partners they did reject were more likely to be young or weigh too little (i.e., were not bearish). They reported wanting partners who were hairier and heavier. Our studies indicated that Bears were more likely to be hairier, heavier, and shorter than mainstream gay men. In response, we conducted two large-scale studies of gay men identifying as Bears ( n = 469) to survey their self-reported physical, behavioral, and psychological traits.
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While qualitative data document such self-identifiers as masculine-acting gay men who weigh more and have more body hair, there has to date been no quantitative analysis of this group’s characteristics. It rejects the normative idealized male beauty revered by mainstream gay men. And if you’re experiencing it, you can’t hide it.The Bear community exists as a subculture in reaction to the larger gay community. There is an unmistakable look that two people have when they are in love. Nini and Treadwell admit that “friendship photos” between men were not uncommon a hundred years ago, so they’ve avoided those and have come up with rules to determine when deciding if a snapshot is “loving.” “We look into their eyes. The sweetness of the images is palpable, and may even startle in their brazenness, such as the photo of the men holding a preprinted sign that reads: “Not Married But Willing to Be.” Yet, when thumbing through the book, you may scoff and think: Maybe it’s just guys horsing around (despite the kissing and legs wrapped around in intimate bedroom or picnic scenes) or that we’re unfairly placing our contemporary notions upon innocent, youthful friendships.
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Soon they began actively looking for these photos that spoke to them and felt they were on “some kind of rescue mission.” They’ve accumulated more than 3,000 photographs that they found in shoe boxes, estate sales, family archives, flea markets, and online auctions, and the collection includes daguerreotypes, glass negatives, tin types, photo postcards, and simple snapshots from all over the world: Australia, France, Germany, Japan, Latvia, and the United States (with a considerable amount sourced from Bulgaria). Taking such a photo, during a time when they would have been less understood than they would today, was not without risk.” … The open expression of the love that they shared also revealed a moment of determination. The couple explain in the book’s foreword that they began collecting over 20 years ago, when they discovered a vintage photo dating from somewhere around the 1920s in an antique shop in Dallas, that they thought was “one of a kind.” As they write: “These two men, in front of a house, were embracing and looking at one another in a way that only two people in love would do. The book, subtitled A Photographic History of Men in Love, is a visual narrative that reveals tender moments between men - 19th-century working-class guys, fashionably dressed businessmen, university students, soldiers, sailors, and many more - through benign, vernacular portraiture. But I was reminded of this impulse and drive to collect obscure photos when I flipped through the pages of Loving, a gorgeous new monograph composed of hundreds of photos of men from the 1850s to 1950s amassed by Hugh Nini and Neal Treadwell. Or why it continues to hold us spellbound. Now that we are bombarded by billions of images and everyone is a wanna-be avant-garde pocket picture maker, it’s easy for us to forget that until very recently photography was rejected as something with lesser aesthetic value.