RG Beefcake and Boyfriends: Joe Canoli's canoli: frontal nudity and erotic promise from the groovy 1960s

Readers were asking about Joe Canoli, one of the random hunks in the Season 2 Gemstone Memes.

Walter Kudzincz, born in 1925, began photographing his well-hung buddies and boyfriends, establishing a catalog of guys in skimpy outfits pretending to be cowboys, pirates, or gladiators, trying to avoid being overtly homoerotic, as was required by the strict censorship and intense homophobia of 1950s society. You could get them via mail order, or in "fitness" magazines like Physique Pictorial and Tomorrow's Man.

In 1952 Walt met Jim Stryker, an 18-year old recent high school graduate, pranking his friend by urinating on him from a tree branch. Stryker became his friend, lover, and the top-selling model in the gay male subculture for the next ten years.

In 1962, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that male nudity was not necessarily obscene, and in 1965, magazines began printing frontal nudity, allowing Walt to challenge the "chaste," closeted gay models of the earlier generation. It was the era of the psychedelics revolution, the sexual revolution, the youth counterculture, and the more open, out gay subcultures that would culminate in Stonewall and the Gay Rights Movement. The modern gay man was willing to admit that he liked to look at cocks as well as muscles.

So Walt's Champion Studio models got naked. Sometimes their photos were campy and cool, brightly colored, "mod," groovy. Sometimes they made fun of the posing-strap cowboys and football players of the uptight 1950s. Sometimes they were unabashedly erotic.

I'm covering a lot about the life of Walt Kudzincz because I have found almost nothing about Joe Canoli. This is the earliest photo I could find, taken between 1962 , when rear nudity was permitted, and 1965, when you were allowed to go frontal.

More after the break

Joe appeared in a short erotic-wrestling film, released by Pleasure Pack Productions as "A Sunshine Beach Film" in 1965. His partner is Scott Manley.

Most of the available photos were taken in two or three modeling sessions in 1966. A few were published in Walt's magazines, but most stayed in the private collection.

During the 1970s, gay erotica became harder, more blatant, the men aroused and even having sex, and Walt found his work increasingly obsolete.

We have one Joe Canoli photo from this era, with rare full arousal.

By the mid-70s, Walt had retired, although he continued to photograph his well-hung friends and lovers to his death in 2016. Retrospectives of his work were published in 1994 and 2005.

"Joe Canoli" is a stage name -- "Canoli" is Italian slang for "penis" -- and there are no records of his real name, at least not among Walt's papers. So he will remain anonymous.

We see a moment frozen in time, a short modeling gig in a life lived through thousands of days, with friends and lovers, Sunday morning brunch, Thanksgiving dinner, bench presses at the gym, watching tv, visiting homophobic relatives, marching in pride parades, all vanished into the abyss of memory.

Maybe a moment is enough.