Ron Peck | What Can I Do with a Male Nude? / 1985

an abbreviated history of male nude photographs

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ron Peck (screenplay and director) What Can I Do with a Male Nude? / 1985 

 

A decade after his seminal treks through British gay bars in his 1978 film Nighthawks, in this 23-minute short Ron Peck chooses a fussy, somewhat prissy photographer of gay male nudes who has apparently not heard of the passing of The Sexual Offenses Act of 1967, although to be fair British law still had a great many anti-LGBTQ laws on the book, including the payment of money for sexual acts and what one did in one’s own home with a third party present. And some of the police who continued to harasses gay men had evidently not heard of the changes in the previously draconian English laws against homosexuality.

     Moreoever, as the narrator (John Levitt) makes clear, even by 1985, the date of this film, feminists and even sympathetic LGBTQ figures began to see photography itself as a denigration of the human body, and public reaction to male nude photography in Britain was still often a matter of outrage as the Photographer makes clear in a little satiric diatribe with which he begins.

      But still, this man, having locked all the doors, sealed up the windows, blacked-out every crevice, and turned out the lights is quite overcautious in his behavior toward his own activities. When he turns the lights on, we discover a muscularly attractive young man (John Brown) waiting to pose, as the Photographer basically recites a history of male nude photography, beginning with nudes with covered crotches posing between Greek columns, peeking through drapes of fabric and curtains, and hiding their crotches behind every possible object available: bowls, flowerpots, bedsheets, furniture, books, beads, paintings and the heads of other males, as well as partially clothed in any costume imaginable, from cowboys, sailors, Indians, and Scotsman in kilts to doctors, leather boys, and nude males draped in cascades of chiffon. Even he is amazed the contortions they put their models through.

      Fortunately in the l950s and 60s photographers discovered the posing strap, putting their muscular men on full display and producing hundreds of nude-boy collections that the narrator satirically claims father, junior, and sometimes even mother could openly peruse with the excuse that they were studying muscular development and exercise techniques. Suddenly you could buy pictures of the male nude even in some local grocery shops, but certainly at any news kiosk featured alongside The Guardian, The London Times, and The Observer.

     Our rather retrograde photographer is still not sure what to make of the 1960s when suddenly a whole slew of US magazines begin to picture male nudes with penises in full view. One suspects that this photographer prefers the posing strap.

      He still doesn’t quite know, in fact, what to do with his own nude, finally at the very last moment, briefly revealing the cute boy’s penis.

      While the boy dresses, out photographer wonders if 100 quid is enough, since that’s all he has on him. Perhaps a dinner. He begins to plan what he might serve as the model dresses, finally appearing to his evident surprise in the uniform of a British bobby, writing out what apparently is a ticket for the photographer’s arrest for financial procurement of sex—despite the fact there has been no bodily contact. I’d like to think he’s leaving his name and address?

       Frankly, although Peck nicely summarizes the tortured history of male nude photography forced by societies to hide the fact of the simply joy of the human body, this film today seems terrible dated, as it probably seemed even in 1985. Porn was already being popular, a full erections with masturbation and male sexual engagement were available to almost any American viewer in a major city who dared to enter a porno movie or in the larger cities, the hundreds of porno video shops.

       This film might be very nicely paired with the slightly more adventuresome movie of six years later, Constantine Giannaris’ Caught Looking (1991), which covers in a far more engaging way much of the same territory.

 

Los Angeles, August 7, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2024).