Abstract

Against the backdrop of the intense anti-queer Lavender Scare, mid-twentieth-century queer visual culture in the United States centered on practices of concealing and revealing to avoid and work against censorship. These practices epitomize queer men's concurrent desire to see and be seen as sexual subjects and their need for the safety of privacy. Queer absences in archival materials produced by and for queer men suggest, as this article argues, the paradox of censorship: a hyperfocus on queer sex and the male crotch, especially the penis, that is visualized and emphasized across mid-twentieth-century physique photography and magazines, scrapbooks, and drawings. Central to this is the interplay between (self-)censorship and queer agency.

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