If you can say "CONDOM" in English...

Penis Cop (2002) by Art Chantry

I came across this seemingly vintage advertisement for condoms and couldn't stop laughing. I pictured it being distributed to military men, posted in locker rooms, or perhaps in the back of men's magazines. As it turns out, the image appeared in no such places: it's a creation of a modern-day graphic designer named Art Chantry. The artist made it for a 2002 public service campaign about AIDS prevention.

I can't help but to think the number of times therapists and other people use an epistemology of personal revelation. Things are true--are knowledge--because we think they are based on what we feel or think. It provides for a situation where we can be grossly wrong about our understandings of the world around us.

It's not that I'm opposed to an epistemology of personal revelation. It is a powerful way of knowing. By itself, however, it's incomplete. Personal revelation needs to be combined with disciplined observation and hypothesis testing (the scientific method). Both together are more powerful than either alone.

Chantry's poster is a perfect example of the problems with an epistemology of personal revelation. It is easy to see the condom ad as vintage based on color and design. A closer examination of it quickly changes the story. The text transforms the visual impression of a vintage poster into an impression of a more modern day public health message.

The art of David Trullo provides another example of how our revelations are easily manipulated. By manipulating vintage photos with modern technology he turns real scenes into unreal ones--unreal scenes that still look real. He provides another powerful example of how personal revelation by itself can create misunderstandings.

As you might imagine, I have added a new obsession to my collection of all things vintage. Here are a few (real) vintage advertisements for condoms. Watch my Tumblr page for more -- along with a variety of other things that challenge us to see things through the lenses of personal revelation as well as empirical validation.

Photos are Not Always What They Seem

David Trullo/A True History-Alterhistory

While sorting through images depicting men in relationships, I almost passed by this one without a second thought. The picture does not add anything to my collection: there are hundreds of pictures of young men wearing military uniforms that are holding hands. There are scores of images of men from the World War I era.

I expanded the picture to look a little closer at the details. Enlarged, the picture takes on a surreal quality. The lighting and tones are a little off and lends an artificial quality to the image. Something doesn't seem quite right.

This is, of course, because there is something that is not right about the image. There is something unreal about it.

The components of the image are real. Each of the two young boys in uniform existed at some point in history. The background is a real place that once existed.

An artist, named David Trullo, collected pictures similar to the ones I have, manipulated and altered them, and created an alternative history that did not actually happen. While the boys and background were at one time real, they were never real together at the same time.

In his artist's statement, Trullo writes

Vintage Sailors: An Awkward Realization

Photo Credit: Ian Swart

This picture tells an interesting tale. On multiple sites across the net this image is curated on blogs suggesting it depicts two couples on a double date.

It doesn't actually depict any sort of actual dating. 

Lewis Swart is pictured in the front left along with three of his Navy buddies. The image was taken at the Aquarium Restaurant in New York City sometime during the World War II era. 

If you'd like to learn more about "Grandpa Swart" visit his grandson's Flicker page. The images are a wonderful collection of visual history of one family's experiences in World War II.

This photo provides a great example of how an image can take a life of its own. It is easy to see what we'd like: it takes a little bit of research to see what that actual story is.
For more images of vintage men and their relationships (some gay, some straight) visit: Two Men and Their Dog; Adam and Steve in the Garden of Eden: On Intimacy Between Men; A Man and His Dog; The Beasts of West Point; Vintage Men: Innocence Lost | The Photography of William Gedney; It's Only a Paper Moon;Vintage Gay America: Crawford Barton; These Men Are Not Gay | This Is Not A Farmer | Disfarmer; Desire and Difference: Hidden in Plain Sight, Come Make Eyes With Me Under the Anheuser Bush, Hugh Mangum: Itinerant Photographer, Two men, Two Poses; Photos are Not Always What They Seem,Vintage Sailors: An Awkward Realization, Three Men on a Horse, Welkom Bar: Vintage Same Sex Marriage, Pretty in Pink: Two Vintage Chinese Men, Memorial Day Surprise: Vintage Sailor Love, Memorial Day: Vintage Dancing Sailors, The Curious Case of Two Men Embracing, They'll Never Know How Close We Were, Vintage Love: Roger Miller Pegram,Manly Affections: Robert Gant, Homo Bride and Groom Restored to Dignity, The Men in the Trees, The Girl in the Outhouse, Tommy and Buzz: All My Love,Men in Photo Booths, and Invisible: Philadelphia Gay Wedding c. 1957. You can also follow me on Tumblr.

Three Men on a Horse

What are these three men doing hanging out on a fake horse?

Visiting San Francisco, obviously.

Why these three men got up on this horse is lost to history. The where is a little bit easier to find.

The Cliff House (look up  in the right corner) was a popular tourist destination. The original burnt in 1907.

For the curious reader, you can read all you ever wanted to know about Sutro's Cliff House here, here, here, here, here, and here.

For curious reader's who would rather watch a video you might be interested in this one by Thomas Edison that depicts the Sutro Baths.

As for the three men. They were probably friends--or brothers--stopping off in town. Perhaps they were heading off to war? Their image, as many other's that depict vintage men in relationships, often are seen to represent gay relationships. They aren't. These images are largely a reminder of earlier times when men had more freedom to express intimacy as part of a friendship.

For more images of vintage men and their relationships (some gay, some straight) visit: Two Men and Their Dog; Adam and Steve in the Garden of Eden: On Intimacy Between Men; A Man and His Dog; The Beasts of West Point; Vintage Men: Innocence Lost | The Photography of William Gedney; It's Only a Paper Moon;Vintage Gay America: Crawford Barton; These Men Are Not Gay | This Is Not A Farmer | Disfarmer; Desire and Difference: Hidden in Plain Sight, Come Make Eyes With Me Under the Anheuser Bush, Hugh Mangum: Itinerant Photographer, Two men, Two Poses; Photos are Not Always What They Seem,Vintage Sailors: An Awkward Realization, Three Men on a Horse, Welkom Bar: Vintage Same Sex Marriage, Pretty in Pink: Two Vintage Chinese Men, Memorial Day Surprise: Vintage Sailor Love, Memorial Day: Vintage Dancing Sailors, The Curious Case of Two Men Embracing, They'll Never Know How Close We Were, Vintage Love: Roger Miller Pegram,Manly Affections: Robert Gant, Homo Bride and Groom Restored to Dignity, The Men in the Trees, The Girl in the Outhouse, Tommy and Buzz: All My Love,Men in Photo Booths, and Invisible: Philadelphia Gay Wedding c. 1957. You can also follow me on Tumblr.

Stonewall -- 44 years ago today

Sandow Birk

This past week has been a transformative one for our country. With the Supreme Court decisions about the Defense of Marriage Act and Proposition 8 in California, we've made a significant step toward viewing all gay and lesbian people as equals.

We have a long way to go.

We've come a long way already.

In our culture that dwells in the now and the future, we tend to forget about the past and where we've been. Forty-four years ago, in the early morning hours of June 28, 1969, a number of spontaneous and violent demonstrations erupted between the nascent queer community and the New York City Police Department.

HIV has decimated our community of elders. There are few here now that hold memories of what came before. We shouldn't forget the sacrifices these brave men and women made for us all.

Empirically Supported Protocol Based Psychotherapy

Necessary, but not sufficient.

Mondays with Alan: The Cosmos

Hope/Pandora's Box #13

Andrew Junge, Pandora’s Box #13, 2009

Life Grows in Improbable Places

Mondays with Alan: The Bible

Welkom Bar: Vintage Same Sex Marriage

Visit the Welkom Bar/For the Young and Old

This spring I came across some vintage images of a same sex marriage in Jet Magazine. I wrote about the marriage of Harry Rietra and Jean Knockaert in a previous blog post.

Kathy van der Pas, the current owner of the building that Harry and Jean once owned, was kind enough to write me. She shared her knowledge about this history of her art gallery. She wrote:

The Mill Girl

Gravestone of Louisa Maria Wells

Early yesterday morning I headed to the Lowell Cemetery for a morning walk with Maggie. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places since 1998, the cemetery was founded in 1840 and dedicated on June 20, 1841. At the time of the cemetery's opening, there were no public spaces in the city of Lowell. The cemetery's website writes that that it "soon became a place of refuge for outdoor pleasures such as strolling and bird watching amid shrubs and flowers close to the city."

Off along the edge of the cemetery I found this sculpture which serves at the tomb stone for Louisa Maria Wells. The inscription reads, "Out of the fibre of her daily tasks/she wove the fabric of a useful life/Louisa Maria Wells/Died February 20, 1886."

That got me thinking about what kind of useful life she might have had. As it turns out, I'm glad I asked. The story that Wells left behind is interesting--and relatively hidden.

Wells, born in Vermont on October 8, 1815 and died on February 20, 1886, spent most of her life working in the Lowell Mills. From the June 30, 1936 edition of the Lowell Centennial:

Pretty in Pink: Two Vintage Chinese Men

Two Chinese Men in Matching Traditional Dress, c, 1870s 

While this image of two Asian men does not portray the men as having a particularly intimate relationship, it does show men who usually don't find their way onto websites chronicling intimacy between men. The vast majority of vintage images that bloggers post depicting intimate relationships between men are of white men. It's rare to find images of men from other races.  

This image is also also an excellent example of how our unconscious associations with certain symbols shape the meaning of what we see. This picture on the left of two Asian men with pink robes--they must be gay, right? 


The pink robes worn by the two men in this picture read to many bloggers as something that constitutes gayness. It's not necessarily a signifier of sexual orientation or attraction. Beyond the pinkness, I can't fathom why people listing this image on blogs and Tumbler would see this picture as one that depicts a vintage gay relationship.

The thousands of observations we make about people in our silent and mostly unconscious process of categorizing and stereotyping people into easily understood categories aren't any more accurate that are assumptions about the color pink in this photograph. Our categories and stereotypes are useful heuristics--but they need to be constantly evaluated and checked with actual data.

In all probability, these men are not gay. It's unclear whether or not they even have any sort of relationship (intimate or not). 

Perhaps a reader with knowledge about 19th century Chinese history might come upon this blog and share some thoughts (anyone read Mandarin? The text in the background might say something interesting). 

The men in the image, the story about why they were captured on film, and who the photographer was are currently unknown. It's fairly easy, however, to find out a lot about some basic identifying information about the image. 

This albumen silver print from a glass negative, produced sometime in the 1870s, is owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The image, not currently on display in the museum, is one of 8,500 photographs from the Gilman Paper Company Collection. If you want to do some very deep research on the people who collected this photographs, check out these two articles about the rise and fall of the Gilman family fortune: here and here. 

Beware of what you think you see when you look at photographs. We easily see what we want to see in vintage photographs. It's much more difficult to stand back and let the image tell us the story it has to tell.

This goes for viewing people in your day-to-day life, too. It's always more challenging--and rewarding--to stand back and let a person tell their own story rather than to hear the story we think they should tell.

For more images of vintage men and their relationships (some gay, some straight) visit: Two Men and Their Dog; Adam and Steve in the Garden of Eden: On Intimacy Between Men; A Man and His Dog; The Beasts of West Point; Vintage Men: Innocence Lost | The Photography of William Gedney; It's Only a Paper Moon;Vintage Gay America: Crawford Barton; These Men Are Not Gay | This Is Not A Farmer | Disfarmer; Desire and Difference: Hidden in Plain Sight, Come Make Eyes With Me Under the Anheuser Bush, Hugh Mangum: Itinerant Photographer, Two men, Two Poses; Photos are Not Always What They Seem,Vintage Sailors: An Awkward Realization, Three Men on a Horse, Welkom Bar: Vintage Same Sex Marriage, Pretty in Pink: Two Vintage Chinese Men, Memorial Day Surprise: Vintage Sailor Love, Memorial Day: Vintage Dancing Sailors, The Curious Case of Two Men Embracing, They'll Never Know How Close We Were, Vintage Love: Roger Miller Pegram,Manly Affections: Robert Gant, Homo Bride and Groom Restored to Dignity, The Men in the Trees, The Girl in the Outhouse, Tommy and Buzz: All My Love,Men in Photo Booths, and Invisible: Philadelphia Gay Wedding c. 1957. You can also follow me on Tumblr.