Queer love has been around forever, but it can be hard to picture what it looked like even a century ago. Now, thanks to a new exhibition at the Musée d’art et d’histoire (MAH) in Geneva, Switzerland, visitors can see firsthand via a collection of 400 photographs of men in love, dating from between 1850 and 1950.
The collection is the product of couple Hugh Nini and Neal Treadwell. 20 years ago, the duo stumbled upon a photograph of two men embracing at an antique store in Dallas, Texas. They couldn’t help but see themselves in the photo, and they decided to take it home.
“When we found the first, we had no expectation there would ever be a second,” Nini told The Art Newspaper.
But there was a second. And a third, and a fourth, and so on, until their collection reached its now massive scope of more than 4,000 historical photographs of men in love, originating from 36 different countries.
“We felt [it] was our obligation to keep these photographs. To keep them safe,” Treadwell said. “Our goal is to continue to have museum exhibitions wherever we can that will propel us into telling this story and sharing the history that love is love. Love has been around forever.”
In 2020, Nini and Treadwell turned their collection into a popular photography book, Loving: A Photographic History of Men in Love 1850-1950, that featured more than 300 of the photographs they’d found over the past two decades. They also released a short documentary telling the story of their collection.
Now, their collection has been adapted to an exhibition, also titled Loving, which features nearly all the photographs from the book, along with 80 never-before-seen pictures that Nini and Treadwell have collected since the book was released.
“In these pictures it’s fantastic the number of different stories it could activate,” said MAH director Marc-Olivier Wahler. He gave a 1951 photograph of two soldiers sitting close together on a bench as an example.
“You wonder, they’re in the army and are they really together? Then suddenly you see the entangled feet. And all these possible stories — what happened to them, what happened to this photograph? Where was it found? It’s endless.”
Loving is on display at MAH through September 23. Get a sneak peek at the photographs for yourself:
JClark
Great pics, but I wonder whether some are take out of context. Men expressing affection toward one another back in the day wasn’t necessarily gay nor did it necessarily mean the men were “in love.”
Gadfeal
Absolutely, in the 19th Century, photographs were very expensive and there was only one studio in the smaller frontier towns. Men often spent weeks or months with only their company before there were paved roads and trains, and physical closeness was a natural consequence of a) extended time together and b) lack of heating, especially when on the move. So, when there are very playful male pictures, you can be sure that they were deliberately planned for comic or platonic effect; even the one titled, “Marry me”, is most probably playfulness. You can even find photographs of all male parties with some men dressed as women — but they were not “gay”.
Things changed when a) lowered cost and increasing spread of personal cameras (20th Century), and b) charlatan Sigmund Freud, who must have been a repressed or latent homosexual, proposed his preposterous ideas that many/most mental afflictions could be traced to homosexual feelings, introduced a label, “homosexuality”, to categorize people, which did not exist, other than “the love that dare not speak its name.”
Pre modern transport, husbands (and men, in general), who traveled for work would spend days or weeks away, and, judging by the sheer number and open knowledge of “maison closes” (bordellos) in Paris in the 19th Century, extra-marital relations for those who had time and money was tolerated and surprised no one. In Paris, well-to-do men often had “love nest” apartments called “garçonnières” where their mistresses and parallel families lived. The famous “anonymous” “My Love Life” is the travelogue of sexual encounters of an Englishman, including through the US, in the 19th Century, when prostitution was very frequent in London. In one chapter, he explores sex with a male, though both had not previously had same sex relations; but, in absence of a moralizing, surveillance State, all was permitted in private.
Let’s study our History, behind the high school narratives, before we imbue photos and anecdotes of another era with our present day context.
Kangol2
Gadfeal, Sigmund Freud did not introduce the word “homosexual,” in German or English.
“The word homosexual is a Greek and Latin hybrid, with the first element derived from Greek homos, “same” (not related to the Latin homo, “man”, as in Homo sapiens), thus connoting sexual acts and affections between members of the same sex, including lesbianism.[26][27] The first known appearance of ‘homosexual’ in print is found in an 1868 letter to Karl Heinrich Ulrichs by the Austrian-born novelist Karl-Maria Kertbeny.[28][29] arguing against a Prussian anti-sodomy law.[29][30]
In 1886, the psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing used the terms homosexual and heterosexual in his book Psychopathia Sexualis. Krafft-Ebing’s book was so popular among both laymen and doctors that the terms heterosexual and homosexual became the most widely accepted terms for sexual orientation.[31][32] As such, the current use of the term has its roots in the broader 19th-century tradition of personality taxonomy.”
Freud wrote most of his famous studies of homosexuality between 1905 and the 1920s, after Magnus Hirschfeld, Kortbeny and Krafft-Ebing, who influenced his theories. He also did not propose that “many/most mental afflictions could be traced to homosexual feelings,” which is a misreading of his work, and furthermore, was one of the leading figures to argue that homosexuality was not a pathological illness, and should and could not be cured.
Also, he famously wrote: “Homosexuality is assuredly no advantage, but it is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation; it cannot be classified as an illness; we consider it to be a variation of the sexual function, produced by a certain arrest of sexual development. Many highly respectable individuals of ancient and modern times have been homosexuals, several of the greatest men among them. (Plato, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, etc). It is a great injustice to persecute homosexuality as a crime–and cruelty, too. If you do not believe me, read the books of Havelock Ellis.”
Colorado Couple
No doubt the curators of the exhibit are quite knowledgeable about this subject.