Hard to Imagine: Gay Male Eroticism in Photography and Film from Their Beginnings to Stonewall

Columbia University Press, 1996. Hardcover. Very Good/Very Good. Book is clean with a square, tight binding and bright, white pages. Book has minor wear on the edges that is difficult to see in the scans. The form and context of homoerotic representation in the West shifted radically after the 1960s, when gay identity and liberation became public issues in a broader climate of unprecedented sexual freedom. Yet for more than a hundred years before this earthquake in sexual politics, homoerotic photography and film had been a focus of gay male consciousness. Hard to Imagine is the first work to chronicle in detail the evolution of gay male erotic image culture, from the canonical works of "art" cinema and photography to the private and often highly explicit productions of amateurs. In this visual history of homoerotic image-making in its first century, Thomas Waugh brings together nearly four hundred photographs and film stills, from archives and personal collections in Europe and North America. Waugh identifies four primary aspects of homoerotic photography and film-the artistic, the commercial, the illicit, and the politico-scientific-tracing their development against a background of advances in visual technology. This comprehensive work explores a vast, eclectic tradition in its totality, analyzing the visual imagery in addition to its production, circulation, and consumption. Hard to Imagine begins by discussing the articulation of gay eroticism in "high art," covering a spectrum of well-known works from the photographs of Wilhelm von Gloeden to the films of Jean Cocteau, and including revisionist readings of artists generally excluded from the photographic canon, such as George Hoyningen-Huene, Herbert Tobias, and Lindsay Anderson. The book you see in the images is the actual book we have for sale. Why pay more? When you buy this book from us, you are helping to support a small brick and mortar family owned store. We have been curating our collection for three generations and currently have over 250,000 volumes in stock. Please feel free to call for more stock.