The mantra of the web is: “one thing leads to another” and
surely it does as an endless stream of thoughts and images deliver to the eye
an unprecedented amount of information.
It is no secret that many of us spend time looking at what can
only be called pornography. It is abundant, free and available at any hour in
various dispositions: live cams for those who like to look and especially for
those who like to be looked at, galleries upon galleries of images that suit
any particular desire, fetish or lust, and of course, the so-called “dating”
sites where people pretend to be interested in your personality when its really
sex they are after.
Recently and without being to trace the footsteps, we fell
upon a great site called homocomix, which is about gay characters living in a
gay comic universe. Funny, occasionally sexy, always fresh, homocomix is visual
relief to the oversaturated, over modeled (or painfully unrehearsed) world of
gay imagery. Then, as one thing really does lead to another, homocomix lead us
to Le Voyeur.
A series of unrelated images bounce back in forth in time; Polaroid’s
from the 60s, black white images from the 40s and 50s, with men doing what they
do. There is a penchant for shower images and military photographs and tossed
into the mix is the frequent celebrity image (Burt Lancaster nude!). The men on
this site for the most part are very happy, they all seem to be enjoying their
nudity without the usual pornographic grin of “check me out”. There is a kind
of life caught between the moired images the past and the overdeveloped ambers
of digital photography, without the polish and sheen of Photoshop, there is a
truth about these photographs. It is almost archival in its review of
homoerotic imagery: a series of black and white military images from the 40s
catalog men in jockstraps in Muybridge fashion, though not particularly erotic,
they demand you ask the question “why do these images exist?” There are many
images of men in spandex, wrestlers, swimmers and the like, showing hints of
their manhood in the embossed traces of flesh against fabric. There is beauty,
humor, sadness and much tenderness in the selections that for those of an age
will be nostalgic and for others a revelation.