This vintage candid photograph, hot and sweet, which came up in my Pinterest feed this morning:
A joyful embrace, possibly the prelude to a kiss, with mutual hand-on-body action — from the setting and the men’s clothing, from the US in the 1930s or 40s
A Google images search yielded a ton of repostings of the photo with the claim that it comes from Loving: A Photographic History of Men in Love, 1850s-1950s. This caused me to go through my copy of the book, page by page, three times, hoping to glean some information about the source of the photo. But it’s not there. It’s very much in the spirit of the photos that are there, but it’s not in the book.
Eventually I found a couple of sources that reproduced the photo, with notes that it was a candid of unknown origin. I was hoping to get it fixed in time and place, at least approximately. Of course, what I really long for is to know who these men were and what their story was, how they risked having their sexy photo taken (by whom?), out on a public street, in a time of grave hostility to homosexuality, especially male homosexuality. Was this a fling moment, or a snapshot from their clandestine life together? What were they like, what brought them together, what happened to them?