say, with hindsight, was adumbrated in the arts by movements such as Cubism, Expressionism, atonality in music and ‘parole in libertà’ in poetry – new definitions of the purposes and uses of photography were to be expected. The 1920s saw photography branching out into the fields of propaganda and social and political agitation, as well as into new artistic experiments with the camera, as an aid to scientific investigations, and as the ideal tool to feed the increasing popular appeal of fashion photography. Amongst artists, photography was also taken up by the Surrealists for the purpose of provocative anti-rationalism, and by others for the expression of greater frankness about sexual matters. During the years of the threat of criminal prosecution under the Labouchère amendment in Britain, magazines and photographs of the male nude found a place in assuaging some of the emotional needs and desires of the homosexual fraternity, and in fact naked male and female ‘artists’ photography models’ were openly advertised as available from, for example, an ‘Art Service’ in Liverpool during the interwar years. 2 Germany had led the way with magazines serving the gay interest, such as Adolph Brand’s Der Eigene (1896–1932) and Otto Bierbaum’s remarkable but short-lived Der Insel (1899-1901). The Swiss Karl Meier, who first wrote occasionally for Brand’s magazine in the 1920’s under the pseudonym ‘Rolf’, had returned to Zurich by 1934, and continued to write for the gay publications Schweizerisches Freundschaftsbanner (1933- 1936) and Menschenrecht (1937-1942), after which he appears to have taken charge of the latter magazine, publishing it under the title Der Kreis from 1943 onwards. These would be the only German-language gay magazines to continue publishing during the Nazi period, though of course not in Germany itself. One should not overlook the circulation, too, of previously commercially available photographs of naked models described below, albeit clandestinely. Several earlier cultural and social developments had also contributed to the possibilities for gay men expressing their sexuality in the 1930s, from which <strong>Vaughan</strong> and other closeted homosexuals may have benefited. In spite of Germany’s criminalization of homosexuality in 1871 3 there were active underground circles which became fairly open in the big cities during the Weimar Republic, especially in Berlin, whose notorious permissiveness up to 1933 was enjoyed by men like Auden, Isherwood, Spender and Bacon. Similarly, the openness of Parisian artistic circles to diversity from distinct coteries around the personalities of, for example, Diaghilev, Picasso, Cocteau and Josephine Baker and, by contrast, the Gleichschaltung of Austrian society to Nazi homophobic ideology cannot have passed unnoticed by <strong>Vaughan</strong> on his visits to Germany, Austria and France in the 1930s. Even in the midst of the war, he would inscribe some of his drawings with quotations from German poetry, which might have risked drawing his fellow soldiers’ attention to his particular sensibility. In Germany there had been a recognized tradition of male bonding in the nineteenth century through the politicized nationalist Burschenschaften and, in a different setting towards the end of that century, through a revived Wandervogel movement – a version of ‘back to [exploring and enjoying] nature’, as an escape from the effects of rapid and widespread industrialization across Germany’s cities. This would give impetus both to the ‘naturist’ movement and to the exaltation of nudity and, through magazines and photography, to a cult of the naked body, to body-building and athleticism, and to mass displays of gymnastics. It would be the pioneering German magazine Der Eigene, mentioned above, that first gave wider circulation to the new style of ‘aesthetic’ nude photographs of languid pubescent Italian youths 30
Two male figures posing at tug of war [P44] printed on postcard paper 8.7 x 13.8 cm Male figure standing beside rowing boat [P46] printed on postcard paper 8.7 x 13.8 cm Len with a second male on beach [P45] printed on postcard paper 8.7 x 13.8 cm A male figure walking down the beach [P47] printed on postcard paper (inverted), with ink marking 8.7 x 13.8 cm 31
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