IN 1767, the eleven-year-old Mozart premiered his first opera, Apollo and Hyacinth (K. 38), the story of an allmale love triangle between Apollo, Hyacinth, and Zephyrus. The performance, at the equally all-male Salzburg University, was presented by adolescent boys. The original myth that Father Rufinus Widl’s libretto was based upon presented obvious problems for a conservative Catholic school. Good Father Widl toned down the same-sex love plot. The moral became that “homoerotic attachments are acceptable, provided they manifest within the boundaries of socially appropriate behaviour,” states Andrew Sutherland inQueer Opera, his survey of homoerotic elements in the history of opera. We know that young Mozart’s opera was well received, but history is silent on whether anyone in the audience recoiled at Father Widl’s bowdlerization of the original queer story. What is safe to say is that, since its inception, opera—with its beauty, pathos, spectacle, and willingness to present stories of suppressed and transgressive love—has always found ardent admirers among queer folk. “For centuries,” Sutherland writes, “queer observers have been able to identify with the frustrations of the oppressed, the exhausting obstacles preventing true love and the strength of character to achieve recognition in a society that routinely rejects differences.” While opera has always, to an extent, portrayed queer themes, it wasn’t until the early 20th century that non-stereotypical gay characters began to appear in significant numbers. With Opera, Look for the ‘Sexual Complexity’ The identical studio setting is used to feature a standing female modeling a two-piece bathing suit, blankly gazed at by a trio of men gathered around her, one of whom is the Lynes stalwart, ballet star Nicholas Magallanes. In a photograph shot in 1950, Magallanes stands on a sandy studio “beach” against sunlit backdrop. He presses to him, raised off the sand, prima ballerina Tanaquil Le Clercq, crouched like Flandrin’s ephebe—this, from a sequence in the Balanchine-Jerome Robbins ballet Jones Beach. Finally, in a fourth iteration against a low horizon and sunlit sky, a male model, his back against the ground, clutches his legs to his chest and presents his nether parts to the viewer, his asshole and scrotum delineating the central “canal” between his buttocks. In Mauss’ conception, Lynes has taken a single idea— Flandrin’s jeune homme—and reimagined it in “apparently unrelated photographs spanning fashion, art, ballet, and eros.” Angela Miller’s “PaJaMa Drama” gives us the essential terms of the trio’s practice, which began in 1937 when, said Cadmus, they would end each summer day to go out “when the light was best” and take pictures of one another using Margaret’s lightweight handheld Leica. The resulting pictures were given out at dinner parties “like playing cards.” Miller describes Paul, Jared, and Margaret as “a queer network that experimented with new forms of private life enacted in daily exchanges, and issuing in new collaborative practices.” There was no predetermined end result in their praxis, but rather it was “the act of staging and shooting the photographs” that was the point. The appearance of their bodies frozen mid-gesture gave the images the aspect of performances in medias res or stagings of tableaux vivants. In a single evocative paragraph, Miller provides a résumé of their relationships, given that existing ties between Paul and Jared of necessity shifted after Jared’s marriage to Margaret. Yet the men’s amorous connection was not severed, and Margaret “witnessed daily the attraction between the two men.” Anxieties and accommodation moved in all directions, for Jared was pulled between commitments to both Paul and Margaret. And “Paul’s desire for Jared likewise caused emotional disruption as he was forced to witness his lover’s marriage to Margaret,” an older woman of some means who provided her husband financial support. In a 1944 picture from Fire Island, Miller sees Margaret and Paul “in a latticework of light and shadow, a study in tense deflection. The two—both in profile—face off in a carefully composed study in symmetry. Margaret’s expression is one of strained intensity.” In another picture, “Fidelma, Margaret, and Paul,” she reads Paul’s lowered eyes as a signal of the “shaming or silencing power of Margaret’s gaze, suggesting a withering judgment on him.” Miller credits Margaret’s role as “expressed through her commanding gaze, conveying both appraisal and warning.” But the breadth of their more than ten-year photographic meandering didn’t only focus on the fraught geometry of their emotional triangle. The summer light and the natural elements of the beach—dunes, beach grasses, uncannily torqued pieces of driftwood—became compositional elements in which friends like George Tooker, Monroe Wheeler, and Glenway Wescott coexisted with nature, sometimes nude or partially nude, sometimes draped in a toga-like tunic. The pensive figures retreat from interaction, “adding to the strange sense of suspended time that haunts these scenarios,” but their placement might be fixed near a sculptural piece of standing driftwood, and in these instances their posed stasis denies the urge to imagine a narrative. Reference to the Hellenic world of male beauty seems inescapable, but other images offer up the friends, male and female, in more contemporary gestures of relaxation, sprawled on the sand or sheltering under an umbrella for protection from the sun. Miller’s text engages a fair amount of philosophical rumination, but pertinent to the visual examples under review. Her descriptions are usually quite on the mark, and her analyses, however speculative at times, never seem to emerge from left field. Body Language is an absorbing book for those who take photography and queer representation seriously. PHILIP GAMBONE QUEER OPERA by Andrew Sutherland Lexington Books. 299 pages, $120. Philip Gambone, a regular contributor to this magazine, is the editor of Breaking the Rules: The Intimate Diary of Ross Terrill (2023). March–April 2024 41
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