Three subjects come from the feed this week, and all three concern what men show and what they hide. Today, men on social media show their bodies, their desire and each other openly. Seventy years ago, one of America's most famous writers could not.
Jack Kerouac had sex with men. Allen Ginsberg confirmed their sexual encounters in later interviews. Gore Vidal wrote that he and Kerouac spent a night together at the Chelsea Hotel in 1953. Joyce Johnson, Kerouac's girlfriend and later biographer, called him bisexual: mostly attracted to women, with some sexual relationships with men.
Kerouac wrote his life into his novels, but he left that night out. When he fictionalized the evening in The Subterraneans, the sex was missing. Ginsberg's explanation was that Kerouac was afraid of his mother. Kerouac lived with her most of his life, drank heavily, and died in 1969 at 47. The writer celebrated for telling everything kept this part of himself hidden.
The muscle T shows what Kerouac's generation concealed. The white crewneck began as U.S. Navy regulation underwear in 1913. Marlon Brando wore it tight in A Streetcar Named Desire, washing and drying each shirt repeatedly to shrink it to his body. In the 1970s, the tight white T became part of the gay clone look. It is underwear worn as outerwear, built to display the body.
In the first collage, a man in a muscle T faces a mirrored copy of himself. The second collage places men in the leaves, one covering his face with a towel, while a group stands in the background.
Spilt milk began as a joke. In 2012, students in Newcastle, England, filmed themselves pouring milk over their heads in public places, and the stunt spread online as "milking." In the third collage, milk runs down a shirtless man's chest while a man in white briefs stands under a chandelier and another raises a finger to his lips. The joke has become display.
There is no use crying over spilt milk. What men hid in Kerouac's time, they now post. The Blue Moon and the Jupiter 3, longing and escape, appear in all three collages.
— Behan
Sources
Gore Vidal, Palimpsest (1995)
The Rag Blog, Jonah Raskin, interview with Joyce Johnson (2012)
Mental Floss, "Jack Kerouac Writer Facts"
Mental Floss, "A Brief and Incomplete Timeline of T-Shirt History"
ASKET, "The Rebellious History of the Plain White Tee"
Know Your Meme, "Milking"