Gay pride’s being celebrated again in Chicago this week with all the usual trappings and trimmings–parade, festival, wigs and boas, countless rainbow flags, and pointed public displays of affection. Conventional wisdom has it that all of these are hard-won privileges enjoyed only in the post-Stonewall era. But David Deitcher’s recent book, Dear Friends: American Photographs of Men Together, 1840-1918 (Harry N. Abrams), shows that not everything you’ll see under the sun at the parade is new. Dear Friends is built around a collection of astonishing photographs of pairs of men in affectionate poses, which are all the more surprising because they were struck a century and more ago. The anonymous sitters wear sailors’ uniforms, workmen’s overalls, straw boaters, muttonchops, and other accoutrements of the period, but their poses look thoroughly modern–they hold hands, sit on one another’s laps, intertwine legs, and share embraces usually reserved for lovers. Though never sexually explicit, the images are shocking in their juxtaposition of dated styles of photography and dress with casual displays of affection that are still controversial in these purportedly more liberated times. When similar contemporary photos are used in advertising campaigns they’re hyped as something radical and daring. But such photographs were commonplace in their day, and many survive today; in recent years they’ve become popular with collectors, particularly gay men.
