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 Table of Contents
Introduction
Stefano Ramello

Part I: Exploring the New Meanings of ‘Queer’

Queer Theory and the Female Homosexual of 3

Psychoanalysis
Anne Worthington

Scrutinizing Historiography: From Pederasty to Sodomy 15

to Homosexuality to LGBT/Queer Sexualities
Fernando Cascais

(Un)Queering the Intersex Body in Elite Sports 23

Annette C.G. Brömdal

Is Nonce the New Queer? 35

Helen Gavin and Tracey Yeadon-Lee

Part II: Reading between the Lines: The Hidden Queer in Literature

Subdue Our Fears: Displacing Homophobia in 49

Bram Stoker’s Dracula
Gregory Luke Chwala

‘…so much to say, and little of it speakable’: Closeted 59

Queer Identities in Colm Toibin’s The Master and
Emma Donoghue’s The Sealed Letter
Malwina Degorska

Melancholic Masculinity and Representations of Traditional 69

Homoeroticism in an Indonesian Novel
Alicia Izharuddin

(Fe)male Trouble: The American South According 79

to John Waters
Beata Zawadka and Joanna Reimann
Part III: Desirable Queer Bodies

Philoctetes and Antibodies, or the Vanishing Acts of 89

Unconventional Queer Bodies
Gian Pietro Leonardi

Queer Junk 99
Ladislav Zikmund-Lender

Part IV: Queer Lives and Experiences

Acting Out: What We Can Gain by Treating Hetero-Queer 111

Fantasy and RT as Ritual Performance
Dean West

Disidentification: Alternative Sex/Gender Identities 123

through Sadomasochistic Praxes
Ingrid Olson

The Structure of Sexual Casual Encounters between 135

Men in Italy: A Case Study
Stefano Ramello

Queer Lives: Some Notes on Non-Normative Sexual 145

Constructions and Identities in the Lived Experience of
Men Living in Rural Indonesia who have Sex with Men
Ed Green

Part V: Pop Culture and ‘Queer’

Queer Interpretations of Fiction Literature: Application 159

of the Developmental Stages of the Coming-Out Process
Ashley Taylor Haurand

Just a Queer Little Love Story: Skins and the Naomily 169
Phenomenon
Anne- Marie Cook
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 Introduction

Stefano Ramello
1. Queer Theory: Antecedents and Key Concepts
‘Fascination of Queer’ constitutes a living proof of the vital force of the
concept of queerness: the force to affect and effect changes in the way one
theorizes, its ability to produce deviant lines along established thinking and
disciplines, its ability to queer the queer, that is, to undermine the self, to resist any
normalization. In this collective work anthropologists, sociologists, literary critics,
psychologists and historians join forces to critically approach the concept of ‘queer
sexualities’, questions of identity and its representations, interpretations,
enhancement and destabilization.
‘Queer’ was once commonly understood to mean ‘strange,’ ‘odd,’ ‘unusual,’
‘abnormal,’ or ‘sick,’ and was routinely applied to lesbians and gay men as a term
of abuse, now shows possibilities so complex that entire volumes are devoted to
spelling them out. Teresa de Lauretis coined the phrase ‘queer theory’ to serve as
the title of a conference that she held in February of 1990 at the University of
California, Santa Cruz, where she is Professor of The History of Consciousness.
The conjunction was deliberately disruptive. In her opening remarks at the
conference, Professor de Lauretis acknowledged that she had intended the title as a
provocation. 1
The conference was based on the speculative premise that homosexuality is no
longer defined either by opposition or homology to a dominant, stable form of
sexuality (heterosexuality) or as merely transgressive or deviant in relation to a
proper or natural sexuality. ‘Queer’ describes those gestures or analytical models
which dramatize incoherencies in the allegedly stable relations between
chromosomal sex, gender and sexual desire. Resisting that model of stability -
which claims heterosexuality as its origin, when it is more properly its effect -
queer focuses on mismatches between sex, gender and desire. 2 Institutionally,
queer has been associated most prominently with lesbian and gay subjects, but its
analytic framework also includes such topics as cross-dressing, hermaphroditism,
gender ambiguity and gender-corrective surgery. Demonstrating the impossibility
of any ‘natural’ sexuality, queer calls into question even such apparently
unproblematic terms as ‘man’ and ‘woman’. 3 Some key experts in the study of
culture, such as Barbara Rogoff, argue that the traditional distinction between
biology and culture as independent entities is overly simplistic, pointing to the
ways in which biology and culture interact with one another. 4 To understand the
myriad of ways in which heteronormativity organizes and structures everyday life,
queer theory explores how education, law, religion, psychiatry, family, and any
other area of human activity all embed assumptions of what counts as normal and
are normalizing mechanisms in human relations. As Warner writes: ‘Realization
that themes of homophobia and heterosexism may be read in almost every
x Introduction
__________________________________________________________________
document of our culture means that we are only beginning to have an idea of how
widespread those institutions and accounts are’. 5
The term ‘queer theory’ was consolidated in 1990 through Judith Butler’s 6 and
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s 7 works. The rapid development of lesbian and gay
studies in universities in the 1990s is paralleled by an increasing deployment of the
term ‘queer’. As queer is unaligned with any specific identity category, it has the
potential to be annexed profitably to any number of discussions. In the history of
disciplinary formations, lesbian and gay studies is itself a relatively recent
construction, and queer theory can be seen as its latest institutional transformation.
Introducing the word ‘queer’ into academic discourses suggests both a rupture
as well as continuity with the older categories of lesbian and gay. Queer theory’s
debunking of stable sexes, genders and sexualities develops out of a specifically
lesbian and gay reworking of the post-structuralist figuring of identity as a
constellation of multiple and unstable positions. In this way ‘queer’ has come to
stand in for a range of subjectivities that defy the ‘normal’, including lesbian, gay,
bisexual, transsexual and transgender: specifically queer theory works to
problematize, transgress or transcend the ideological baggage of distinctions
produced by the terms lesbian, homosexual and gay. As a matter of fact, queer
theory shows how fixed categories like lesbian or gay, even when these are used as
a corrective to heteronormativity, leave heteronormative discourse unaltered and
that ‘gay’ or ‘lesbian’ specify sexual identities that reproduce the ideology of
heterosexual society. Further, queering the norm or standard 8 reveals the
arbitrariness of all social categories: in other words, the effects of these categories
is to fix a normal human identity in a two-sex, two-gender, one-sexual orientation
system in what Warner calls ‘the sexual order’. 9 Because the sexual order
permeates all social institutions (family, religion, work, leisure, law, education),
challenging this order has the effect of challenging common-sense ideology about
what it means to be a human being.

2. Queer Theory: Debate and Criticism

Queer theory opens up possibilities for human relations by producing and/or
noticing other ways of living and thinking. The least known and represented forms
of desire may produce new and different forms of identity, community and social
relations: many theorists welcome queer as ‘another discursive horizon, another
way of thinking the sexual’. 10 Anyway others researchers question its efficacy. 1
‘Queer’ is contentious and many refuse to be contained by ‘queer’ because it is
perceived to be Euro-Western, white, male and therefore exclusionary. Queer’s
transcendent disregard for dominant systems of gender fails to consider the
material conditions of the west in the late twentieth century and simply replicates,
with a kind of historical amnesia, the stances and demands of an earlier gay
liberation. For some, queer is a word that cannot be reclaimed and symbolizes
horrific forms of homophobia. Taking up queer theory obligates a researcher to
 Stefano Ramello xi
__________________________________________________________________
work within what Hutcheon calls complicitous critique 11 and Flax calls recognition
of one’s own non-innocent forms of knowledge. 12 This requires researchers to be
vigilant about how their own assumptions are on an ongoing site of conflict,
ambivalence and power/knowledge.
Whatever ambivalences structure queer, there is no doubt that its recent
redeployment is making a substantial impact on lesbian and gay studies. Yet,
almost as soon as queer established market dominance as a diacritical term, and
certainly before consolidating itself in any easy vernacular sense, some theorists
are already suggesting that its moment had passed and that ‘queer politics may, by
now, have outlived its political usefulness’. 13 Does queer become defunct the
moment it is an intelligible and widely disseminated term? Teresa de Lauretis
abandoned it barely three years later, on the grounds that it had been taken over by
those mainstream forces and institutions it was coined to resist. Explaining her
choice of terminology in The Practice of Love: Lesbian Sexuality and Perverse
Desire, de Lauretis writes: ‘As for ‘queer theory’, my insistent specification
lesbian may well be taken as a taking of distance from what, since I proposed it as
a working hypothesis for lesbian and gay studies in this very journal, has very
quickly become a conceptually vacuous creature of the publishing industry’. 14
Distancing herself from her earlier advocacy of queer, de Lauretis now represents
it as devoid of the political or critical acumen she once thought it promised.
In some enunciations, no doubt, queer does little more than function as
shorthand for the unwieldy lesbian and gay, or offer itself as a new solidification of
identity, by kitting out more fashionably an otherwise unreconstructed sexual
essentialism. Certainly, ‘its sudden and often uncritical adoption has at times
foreclosed what is potentially most significant-and necessary-about the term’.
Queer retains, however, a conceptually unique potential as a necessarily unfixed
site of engagement and contestation. Admittedly not discernible in every
mobilization of queer, this constitutes an alternative to de Lauretis’s narrative of
disillusionment. Judith Butler does not try to anticipate exactly how queer will
continue to challenge normative structures and discourses. On the contrary, she
argues that what makes queer so efficacious is the way in which it understands the
effects of its interventions are not singular and therefore cannot be anticipated in
advance. Butler understands, as de Lauretis did when initially promoting queer
over lesbian and gay, that the conservative effects of identity classifications lie in
their ability to naturalize themselves as self-evident descriptive categories. She
argues that if queer is to avoid simply replicating the normative claims of earlier
lesbian and gay formations, it must be conceived as a category in constant
formation:

[It] will have to remain that which is, in the present, never fully
owned, but always and only redeployed, twisted, queered from a
prior usage and in the direction of urgent and expanding political
xii Introduction
__________________________________________________________________
purposes, and perhaps also yielded in favour of terms that do
that political work more effectively. 15

Queer, then, is an identity category that has no interest in consolidating or even

stabilizing itself. It maintains its critique of identity by understanding that even the
formation of its own coalitional and negotiated constituencies may well result in
exclusionary and reifying effects far in excess of those intended.
Acknowledging the inevitable violence of identity politics and having no stake
in its own hegemony, queer is less an identity than a critique of identity. But it is in
no position to imagine itself outside that circuit of problems energized by identity
politics. Instead of defending itself against those criticisms that its operations
inevitably attract, queer allows such criticisms to shape its-for now unimaginable-
future directions. ‘The term’, writes Butler, ‘will be revised, dispelled, rendered
obsolete to the extent that it yields to the demands which resist the term precisely
because of the exclusions by which it is mobilized’..
For Halperin, as for Butler, queer is a way of pointing ahead without knowing
for certain what to point at. ‘Queer does not designate a class of already objectified
pathologies or perversions’, writes Halperin; ‘rather, it describes a horizon of
possibility whose precise extent and heterogeneous scope cannot in principle be
delimited in advance’. 16 Queer is always an identity under construction, a site of
permanent becoming: ‘utopic in its negativity, queer theory curves endlessly
toward a realization that its realization remains impossible’. 17 The extent to which
different theorists have emphasized the unknown potential of queer suggests that
its most enabling characteristic may well be its potential for looking forward
without anticipating the future. Instead of theorizing queer in terms of its
opposition to identity politics, it is more accurate to represent it as ceaselessly
interrogating both the preconditions of identity and its effects. Queer is not outside
the magnetic field of identity. Like some postmodern architecture, it turns identity
inside out, and displays its supports. If the dialogue between queer and more
traditional identity formations is sometimes fraught-which it is-that is not because
they have nothing in common. Rather, lesbian and gay faith in the authenticity or
even political efficacy of identity categories and the queer suspension of all such
classifications energize each other, offering the ambivalent reassurance of an
unimaginable future.

3. Concluding Remarks
The studies collected in ‘Fascination of Queer’ utilize many established social
sciences research methods and generally view the posing of research questions, the
development of data-gathering activities and the processes of analysis and
interpretation as iterative and recursive. That is, all aspects of research informed by
queer theory continue to shift as the research develops. Outcomes are as varied as
the different methodologies employed. However, what the studies share is a
 Stefano Ramello xiii
__________________________________________________________________
commitment to revealing the usually-non-perceived relationships between
experiences of human sociality and culture, and expressions and experiences of
sexuality. All outcomes of these studies in some way illuminate the ways in which
sex, sexualities, sexual identities are both influenced by and influence individual
and/or collective experiences.
The organization of this collection builds directly on the interdisciplinary
purpose of the project to critically approach the concept of ‘queer sexualities’ by
exploring constructions of sexuality in cultural discourse, aesthetic representation
and modes of social practice across cultures and historical periods.
To bring the contents of this introduction to a temporary conclusion: the fluid
title, ‘Fascination of Queer’, reflects not merely the prolific and heterogeneous
nature of contemporary queer cultural production, but also, more profoundly, the
need of an interdisciplinary overview for discussing the relation between gender,
the body, language, sexuality, artistic form, and politics. Rather than attempting to
formalize a specifically ‘gay’ or ‘lesbian’ style and identity - something that
perhaps is impossible - our volume seeks instead to open up to different sexualities.
The queer theory both confirms and questions the concept of a queer identity:
confirms it, that is, as a platform, from which to challenge stereotypical
representations of sexuality, yet also question it as, at least in part, a product of
precisely those stereotypical representations. ‘Fascination of Queer’ is thus
necessarily both critic and self-critic. ‘Fascination of Queer’ will contribute
towards a fundamental rethinking of the relations between theory, sexuality and
identity.

Notes
1
David Halperin, ‘The Normalizing of Queer Theory’, Journal of Homosexuality
45 (2003), 339-343.
2
Annamarie Jagose, Queer Theory: An Introduction (New York: New York
University Press, 1996).
3
David Halperin, Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1997), 62.
4
Barbara Rogoff, The Cultural Nature of Human Development (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2003), 63-64.
5
Michael Warner, Introduction to Fear of a Queer Planet, ed. Michael Warner
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), xiii.
6
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 1990).
7
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1990).
8
Debra Shogan, The Making of High-Performance Athletes (Toronto: University
of Toronto Press, 1999).
xiv Introduction
__________________________________________________________________

9
Warner, Introduction, vii-xxi.
10
Teresa de Lauretis, ‘Queer Theory: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities’, Differences: A
Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 3 (1991), iv.
11
Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism (New York: Routledge, 1989).
12
Jane Flax, ‘The End of Innocence’, in Feminists Theorize the Political, eds.
Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott (New York: Routledge, 1992), 445-463.
13
Halperin Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography, 54.
14
Teresa de Lauretis, ‘Habit Changes’, Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural
Studies 6 (1994), 296-313.
15
Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York:
Routledge, 1993).
16
Halperin, Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography, 112.
17
Ibid., 114.

Bibliography
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge, 1990.

Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. New York:
Routledge, 1993.

Flax, Jane. ‘The End of Innocence’. In Feminists Theorize the Political, edited by
Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott, 445-463. New York: Routledge, 1992.

Halperin, David. Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1997: 62.

Halperin.David. ‘The Normalizing of Queer Theory’. Journal of Homosexuality,

45 (2003): 339-343.

Hutcheon, Linda. The Politics of Postmodernism. New York: Routledge, 1989.

Jagose, Annamarie. Queer Theory: An Introduction. New York: New York

University Press, 1996.

Kosofsky Sedgwick, Eve. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: University of

California Press, 1990.

de Lauretis, Teresa ‘Queer Theory: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities’. Differences: A

Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 3 (1991): iv.
 Stefano Ramello xv
__________________________________________________________________

de Laurentis, Teresa. ‘Habit Changes’. Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural

Studies 6 (1994): 296-313.

Rogoff, Barbara. The Cultural Nature of Human Development. New York: Oxford
University Press, 2003.

Shogan, Debra. The Making of High-Performance Athletes. Toronto: University of

Toronto Press, 1999.

Warner, Michael. ‘Introduction’ to Fear of a Queer Planet, edited by Michael

Warner. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press: 1994.
 !"#$%%%&$
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 Queer Junk

Ladislav Zikmund-Lender
Abstract
The contribution deals with a specific type of artistic production, which is different
from classically shaped queer representation or tracking sort of queer code in the
visual arts through cultural history. This kind of visual art can be found in artistic
production of last two centuries and it is outside categories of artistic or aesthetical
values. This production belongs to popular culture and is based on ‘iconisation’ of
queer stereotypes, such as a sad young man on Jean Hippolyte Flandrin’s painting
Figure d’Etude, which has been homoerotically re-interpreted during the whole
20th century and we can find its quotations, copies or reproductions in
contemporary pop culture in both post-Western even post-Eastern European
countries. This popular production is focused on queer recipients and its function
was short erotic excitement and representative sign of queering their homes. The
contribution deals with short introduction to this material, its classification and
searches for its historical background.

Key Words: Queer, art history, visual studies, popular culture, gay art, gay
stereotype.

*****

1. Introduction
In this contribution, I would like to present some aspects of the field of visual
arts, where strategies use commercial potential of queer consumers and therefore
we cannot label them as qualitative artistic production.
The scope of this material we are dealing with is very wise, we can include
cheap plaster copies of classical masterpieces of gay iconography, such as
Michelangelo’s David, placed in queer flats, but we can also include artistic
production (photographies, paintings, drawings, sculptures) exhibited during
various queer events and their further retail or other replications.
In my contribution, I deal mostly with Czech cultural field, where I come from,
and I will try to suggest some relations with Western production, where different
historical and political experience surprisingly does not matter.
As Whitney Davis wrote:

In so-called queer formations in representation, agreement does

obtain, as it must in all gender, between referent and inflection,
but inflection itself may differ among district context-bound
mentions of the same referent, among different referents, or
among different ‘speakers’ or ‘viewers.’ 1
100 Queer Junk
__________________________________________________________________
Michelangelo’s David, which is a profane icon for market with gay
iconography today, has not been labelled this way ever since. In different times, it
was reflected among contemporary cultural climate, and differently by homosexual
viewers in their own social category and cultural status have been changing. And
finally, queer inflection of Michelangelo himself was known and perceived in
different times with different intensity.
The present situation, which is more or less friendly to queer culture, has
searched for these objects in art history, they could have been transformed into gay
icons. It has used them to increase its historic status. An utility to create new icons
as continuation of this status from this practice emerged, but replication,
reproduction, copies, quotation or fakes of the old ones has continued as well.
These icons are supposed to speak to us directly, in contrast with their original
patterns in art history. 2

2. Genesis of Figure d’Etude

It was the increase of print which had the greatest influence on creation of these
cultural gay icons at the end of the 19th century until the invention of the Internet.
An ideal example is a painting Figure d’Etude from French painter Hippolyte
Flandrin. At the time of its portrayal in 1846 it was not identified for queer
consumerism, but it has represented a type of sad young man since then. In
groundbreaking book Gay and Lesbian Studies in Art History from 1994 Michael
Camille writes that Flandrin’s Figure is nothing more than ‘neo-classical academic
exercise, the formal emptiness of this picture meant that it could be re-invested and
reinscribed with new meanings and new titles at every turn.’ 3 In 1906
advertisements for cheap reproductions of Flandrin’s Figure emerged in magazine
Der Eigene, black-and-white ones cost 3 Marks, coloured ones were eight. James
Saslow illustrated by pointing this out a huge rise of homo-erotic market with
reproductions, which was initiated by thematic magazines at the turn of the 19th
and 20th century. 4 Michael Camille proves rise of Flandrin’s popularity in this
time by a well-known case of German artist Hans Thoma, who was accused of
plagiarism, when he painted a very similarly seated young male nude at the sea-
side with his head helplessly fallen on bended knees in 1899. 5 According to
Camille, definitive homo-erotic content in Flandrin’s iconography brought
quotations of homo-file photographers Wilhelm von Gloedon and Fred Holland
Day. Flandrin’s Figure was reinterpreted by many queer artists during the whole
20th century. The most established interpretation is probably Robert Mapplethorp’s
photograph called Ajitto (1981), but the painting is well known thanks to pop-
cultural media like photograph by Maria Sorrenti called Yves Saint Laurent Rive
Gauche (1998), or thanks to modern Internet photo galleries, such as Flickr or
Picassa, but also thanks to anonymous self-stylization of users of Internet dating
sites. Flandrin’s Figure also has its parodies, but most of them void the obvious
queer content, such as sitting Superman with New York on the background. 6 It
 Ladislav Zikmund-Lender 101
__________________________________________________________________
misses political content we obviously see today as well, because it was painted
before 11-09-2001. Finally, today’s quotations, paraphrases or parodies separate an
abysmal difference in their quality from Mapplethorpe or Gloedon, which is given
by their purpose and their emphasis on mass reproduction by their instant and
direct utterance.

3. Origins of Queer Junk in Czech Lands

Popular homo-erotic illustration in magazines and other periodicals, which
primarily targets homosexual viewers, is present in Czech lands in its open manner
has not been present until the first magazine for homosexual minority was
published – Hlas sexualní menšiny (Voice of Sexual Minority), followed by
magazine Nový hlas (New Voice). A writer contributing under a nickname ‘sigma’
deals here with junk genre for homosexual audience. She writes, for example, that
its pathetic narrative is supposed to ‘satisfy readers [or viewers] abject curiosity.’ 7
She separates homo-erotic subjects and pornography in an interesting way – she
writes, that pornography uses a fixed type based on heterosexual relations and
that’s why homo-erotics is ignored here. 8 Finally, urnic literature [as she meant
homosexual] ‘deals with the problem of sexual inversion.’ 9
We can interconnect all three quotations and define queer popular junk as a
non-pornographic genre, although it is supposed to fulfil viewers curiosity and
sexual inversion in some point of a narrative process to mention. In the era of
‘receptive art history’, the narrative can be read as sexually inverted only by
viewer’s eye submitting the relation between ‘to see’ and ‘to be seen’.
We can use very interesting conclusions in the article Erotics and Friendship in
Art (Erotika !"#$%&'(%)*!) +,-.*/ in the same source. Although the author does not
directly deal with the visual arts directly, his fight against stereotypes in
representation is valid in all artistic forms: ‘Usual love [meaning heterosexual] will
not save theater. Nowadays it does not afford theatricality.’ 10
He suggests that a homo-erotic code brings exceptionality, daintiness, sensation
and calls for removing inappropriate queer representation to artistic production –
‘decadent disrupted types involved in wild night live’ and calls for presentation of
homosexuality through ‘passion and friendship of characterful, strong people’. 11
However, we cannot find many practical examples of notions on a shape of
homosexual art in the Voice of Sexual Minority. One year of this periodical was in
a very acrimonious graphic and visual form, free of any illustrations. Only one
illustration on an advertisement page can be interesting. It has been repeated in
!"!#$%& ' (! & )#*+*,'-.& /! ,$(#$-,& 0$ '-*& '-& ,1!& 2!3-4& ,#!!,& '-& 5#$.(!6& 71'ch
offers ‘serenade of two closest friends’. 12 After one year the journal changed its
name to Nový hlas (New Voice) and also its format with visual supplement.
Especially the second year (1933) offered several homo-erotic illustrations.
It was a photograph 8#*+& 94:%$"& ;#<=$& :$%%!>& Under Southern Sun: Motive
from Greece which presents a naked boy collecting fruit from a tree at the sea-side
102 Queer Junk
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and is very similar to homo-erotic compositions by Wilhelm von Gloedon and Fred
Holland Day. Another illustration comes 8#*+&2* !8&;#$ ':=?&$->&',&7$ &)(@%' 1!>&
in 1932. It shows a seated male nude. Reproduction created by drawer, etcher and
former co-founder of Veraikon +$.$A'-!& *#& B(# (+& $#,' ,':& .#*()& 2$-& ;*-C)!=&
(1883–1950) accompanies a review of the book Two Friends written by Georges
Duhamel. This reproduction comes originally from this book published in Czech
lands by publisher Josef Hladky. Originally, it was a second part of a five-piece
novel Vie et aventures de SalavinD& ;*-C)!=’s illustration represents two
fashionable men warmly greeting each other above a city panorama. The last
illustration is an allegoric drawing of Youth by academic painter Ladislav Vlodek
(1907–1996). Vlodek was also a well known author of interwar comics he had
learned during his visit to the U. S. Vlodek’s most popular comics was a narrative
with the main character Adolf published in inter-war magazine Koule (Orb). 13
Vlodek’s nude in the New Voice +$.$A'-!& 8*%%*7 & 2'EF& ;$#4 !=’s type of a
decadent soul, uncertain with his gaze, questing his psyché.
The New Voice magazine distributed a reproduction of a wood-engraving by
G#$-,'<!=& ;*@%'1$& Hlas ticha (Voice of Silence) 8*#& ', & (@ :#'@!# D& ;*@%iha’s
%$(>$,'*&,*&,1' &*))*#,(-',H& 7$ &7#',,!-&@H&1' &8#'!->&2'EF&;$#4 !=6&71* !&@**=&*8&
)*!,#H&7$ &'%%( ,#$,!>&@H&G#$-,' !=&;*@%'1$D&;$#$ !=&7#',! &1!#!I&

No dreaming reader cannot understand him. It is a symbol. This

young man, this ephebe, who asks questions about his destiny,
who can speak with his silent lips, who loves with Oscar Wilde’s
‘love that dare not speak its name’, he represents homo-erotic
path. 14

J1!& '+)*#,$-,& ,1'-.& ' & ,1$,& G#$-,' !=& ;*@%'1$& +$>!& ,1' & 7**>-engraving
directly on Hlas magazine’s demand.
In the Hlas magazine, we can find certain parallels with sort of fetishization of
famous dancers like very feminine Vaslav Nijinski. It has happened more privately
in Czech lands. In second issue of 1932 a photography of a dancer with nickname
Marcel Ferrari was published there, who had won a mask competition at a ball
organized by homosexual, or at least a homo-file group 0#$%&'(%)* (Friendship). 15
Historian Jan Seidl argues in his article devoted to gay masculinity in 1920’s and
1930’s that publishing of this photograph meant explicitness by contemporary
!>',*# & %!>& @H& 9*K,L:1& M!#-?& ,*& "$#'$,'*- & *8& $-& !N,#$"$.$-,& *#& (@"!# '"!& $->&
androgynous image of queer representation. 16

4. Stereotype of Sad Young Man

Talking about some sort of gay iconography, we must mention existence of
several stereotypes constructed by different artistic or pop-cultural strategies.
However, there is no point in searching for some final list. Let me remind you in
 Ladislav Zikmund-Lender 103
__________________________________________________________________
this context that ‘there is nothing about gay people’s physiognomy that declares
them gay, no equivalents to the biological markers of sex and race.’ 17 Gestures,
expressions, gazes, all of that are secondary cultural signs usable only then, when a
holder intends invisible to make visible. Longer or shorter time imparted types,
stereotypes or archetypes are more or less valid, surpassed or topical, serving
different purposes. They can be used by searching for ideal date (‘I am looking for
this or that type’, ‘sorry, you’re not my type’), or simply orientation in relatively
complicated system and strategies of non-heterosexual representation.
The most frequented gay stereotype is probably ‘a sad young man’. A sad
young man is ‘the way a stereotype can be complex, varied, intense and
contradictory, an image of otherness in which is still possible to find oneself’ 18 In
other words, it is enough coherent to stay universal. Richard Dyer finds several
icons he can connect this stereotype with – such as Self-portrait of Cedric Morris,
Saint Sebastian by Antonio Moro or Chatterton’s Feath by Henry Wallis. Dyer
constructs the stereotype on the basis of correlations between physical appearance,
emotional capacity and gender identity. 19 He briefly mentions Freudian aspect of
‘dangerous narcissism or excessive closeness between mothers and boy children
and his designation of homosexuality’. 20 In the relation to Czech context, we can
mention the most psycho-analyzed painting 1&2.3!4&5&26!(Black Lake) and obvious
androgyny or homosexuality contextual to the archetype of the Great Mother
projected by the main male nude character. 21 22
The most sententious definiton of ‘a sad young man’ stereotype offers Richard
Dyer at the end of chapter devoted to this phenomenon: ‘If at one extreme it
represented a warning of misery, which a gay man could have laid at the door of
his ineradicable pervertedness, at the other it offered an image of holy sensitivity,
stunning good looks, overwhelming erotic experience and escape from the
dreariness of real manliness, for all of which a gay man may have felt that some
unreasonable, socially induced suffering was a small price to pay’. 23 Dyer offers
further explanation of his sadness: ‘his relationship ti masculinity is more difficult,
and thus sad’. 24
Flandrin’s Figure has reached in his queer variety in many and many
replications, reproductions and quotations. Let’s see those emerging in Czech
cultural climate. We can find them mostly between the production called gay
popular art or ‘living-room junk’. Although their authors are very famous, well
sold and exhibited during several queer events, the first series of such shows was
7*#&.* (Whirling) organized in 1998–2002.
Looking on Czech contemporary gay popular art, we can find many quotations
of Flandrin’s Figure even before 1989. The most popular is work of drawer and
!,:1!#& O':1$%& G*#!,-F=& P*1964). In his drawings created by special technique
composed by pointing or hatching we meet exact Flandrin’s male nude. However,
Foretnik has changed it, so we may see directly to models face. Primary we can
104 Queer Junk
__________________________________________________________________
immediately recognize boy’s sad look and secondly, author gives him not only
chance to be seen, but to see as well.
Q(=4<&5EF3'-$&P*1963) is another Czech artist using stereotype of a sad young
man. He openly sources this position in his engraving Hamlet, where he has
doubled the figure – first one seated in classical Flandrin’s position and second one
depicted as a hero crumbled on floor with necessary property of man skull.
Another artist is a photographer who exhibits under his nickname JANSI
(*1957). His work is literally based on a stereotype of a sad young man. JANSI
uses the term melancholy, muse, diving in model’s soul for this concept. As Freud
suggested, melancholy is separated from sadness by its incausality and is a much
more serious state and can lead to a suicide. JANSI himself thinks that a moment
of visible melancholy differs erotic (gay) art from pornography. 25
A side glance of a sad young man is his typically represented sign. It differs
from a direct gaze into the objective, which is considered to be pornographic. A
side glance is qualified as a ‘verified pose’ or a ‘beautiful nude’. This verified
strategy of (erotic) manipulation by the viewer with the object and by the object
with the viewer had already shaken the artistic scene in the 19th century. 26
We cannot miss the work of one of the most famous Czech homosexual
photographers, Robert Vano (*1948). He quotes Frandrin’s position directly linked
to homosexuality with using presence of another male body in his photography You
and I (1995).
We can find Flandrin’s visual phenomenon repeatedly fulfilled with queer
meanings in work of younger generation of photographer as well. These artists
profiles themselves as more artistic but they consistently stay in the frame of a gay
:*++(-',H6& (:1&$ &O$#,'-&;4+!-&P*RSTUV&*#&W!#1$#>&X4+*#&P*1987).

5. Conclusion
My contribution aimed to present two problems I personally see in visual junk
queer production. First, when this phenomenon rose and what were its original
roots and display, second, what the signs of this production are and what strategies
it uses to speak to us directly. It has obviously something to do with pornography,
so inter-war authors and even today’s artists need to determinate this from
pornographic exposures. On other two examples of Flandrin’s post quotations –
one can be found on the Internet, 27 the other is a version from a photographer Gon
Buurman, – we can see that stereotype of a sad young man, as it was used on
Flandrin’s contentual free but well known and popular painting, can represent any
sort of otherness, queerness in a very wide meaning. In the first image it is sadness
of a contextually monstrous body, in the second one it is sadness of self-excluded
punk existence. A stereotype of a sad young man is therefore an openly queer
concept used since 1900 to be filled again and again by new queer contents and –
last but not least – new commercial potentials.
 Ladislav Zikmund-Lender 105
__________________________________________________________________
Notes
1
Whitney Davis, ‘Gender’, in Critical Terms in Art History, edited by R. Nelson
and R. Shiff (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 330.
2
Richard Dyer, Matter of Images: Essays on Representation (London, New York:
Routledge, 1993), 56
3
Michael Camille, ‘The Abject Gaze and the Homosexual Body: Flandrin’s Figure
d’ Etude’, in Gay and Lesbian Studies in Art History, edited by Whitney Davis, (
New York: Haworth Press, 1994), 161.
4
James Saslow, Pictures and Passions: Homosexuality in the Visual Arts (New
York: Penguin, 1996), 204.
5
Camille ‘The Abject Gaze and the Homosexual Body’, 161-187.
6
http://www.johncoulthart.com/feuilleton/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/superman-
flandrin.jpg, Accessed June 07, 2011
7
SIGMA. ‘X*+*!#*,':=4&%',!#$,(#$’, in 8' (!(&9+$'.*!,&.:;.<!3 (1931): 2.
8
Ibid.
9
Ibid.
10
V. 94"#$6&‘Y#*,'=$&$&)4,!% ,"F&"&(+L-F’, in 8' (!(&9+$'.*!,&.:;.<!5 (1932): 3.
11
Ibid.
12
E. g. advertisement page, Hlas sexualní menšiny 1 (1931): 11.
13
Coll. of auth. Aargh 7 (2007).
14
;$#4 !=&A!&Q"*"':6&2'EFD&‘O' ,#&>E!"*#H,(&G#D&;*@%'1$’, in 8' (!(&9+$'.*!,&.:;.<!
1 (1931): 26.
15
Viz, 8' (! (&9+$'.*! ,&.:;.<! 1 (1932): 40; Jan viz Seidl, ‘O(Z-* ,& K$=*& :,-* ,&
("L>*+-L%[1*& 1*+* !N(4%$& "!& ,E':4,?:1& %!,!:1’, in Theatrum Historiae,
(Pardubice: Univerzita Pardubice, 2005), 288.
16
Ibid.
17
Richard Dyer, Matter of Images: Essays on Representation (London, New York:
Routledge, 1993), 19.
18
Ibid., 74.
19
Ibid., 77.
20
Ibid., 79.
21
Peter Wittlich, 862;56.%<!+,-.* (5#$1$I&;$#*%'-(+6&U\R\), 189.
22
B$+!& >!!)& H+@*%' +& ]',,%':1& (..! , & '-& !-.#$"'-. & @H& GD& ;*@%'1$& 8#*+& ,1!&
cycle 065=-!>!2$.+? @$4!or on the painting 7&A&2.*!%;BC6!@H&GD&X(>!3!=D&Ibid., 180
23
Dyer Matter of Images, 90.
24
Ibid., 43.
25
Excpt. personal interview, 20/8/2010.
26
Linda Nochlin, Linda. ‘Eroticism and Female Imagery in Nineteenth-Century
Art’, in D6, .?! E2%! .=! 06F&2G! E.=! H%C&2! I(( <(, (Boulder: Westview Press,
1988), 136-144.
106 Queer Junk
__________________________________________________________________

27
http://ih0.redbubble.net/work.6498031.1.flat,800x800,070,f.jpg, Accessed June
07, 2011.

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Davis, Whitney. ‘Gender’. In Critical Terms in Art History, edited by R. Nelson a

R. Shiff, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.

Dyer, Richard. Matter of Images: Essays on Representation. London, New York:

Routledge, 1993.

;$#4 !=&A!&Q"*"':6&2'EFD&‘O' ,#&>E!"*#H,(&G#D&;*@%'1$’. In 8' (!(&9+$'.*!,&.:;.<!1

(1931): 26.

Nochlin, Linda. ‘Eroticism and Female Imagery in Nineteenth-Century Art’. In

D6, .?! E2%! .=! 06F&2G! E.=! H%C&2! I(( <(. New York & Boulder: Westview
Press, 1988.

Saslow, James. Pictures and Passions: Homosexuality in the Visual Arts. New
York: Penguin, 1996.

Seidl, Jan. ‘O(Z-* ,&K$=*&:,-* ,&("L>*+-L%[1*& 1*+* !N(4%$&"!&,E':4,?:1&%!,!:1’.

In Theatrum Historiae, 281–292. Pardubice: Univerzita Pardubice, 2005.

SIGMA. ‘X*+*!#*,':=4&%',!#$,(#$’. In 8' (!(&9+$'.*!,&.:;.<!3 (1931): 2.

94"#$6&9D&‘Y#*,'=$&$&)4,!% ,"F&"&(+L-F’. In 8' (!(&9+$'.*!,&.:;.<!5-6 (1932): 3.

Wittlich, Petr. 862;56.%<!+,-.*J 5#$1$I&;$#*%'-(+6&U\R\D

Ladislav Zikmund-Lender, (*1985) is a free lance art historian and curator. He

externally teaches the course Gender in Art at the University of South Bohemia in
M! =[&^(>LK*"':!D
 Ladislav Zikmund-Lender 107
__________________________________________________________________

Fig. 1. Gerhard S. H4mor: Dark Allusion, 2009, © Gerhard S. X4+*#6&U\RR.