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

"Difficult People": Billy pretends to be straight, Julie pretends to be Italian, and the guest star's son takes his shirt off

 

Yesterday on the treadmill, I watched Difficult People, a two season sitcom about two jerks, the Jewish Julie and the gay Billy (Julie Klausner, Billy Eichner. below). I've had a file of photos for a long time, so why not write a review?

Julie and Billy are trying to break into stand-up comedy as a pair. We only see snippets of their act, but it seems to involve insulting people.  Plots often involve pop-culture name dropping or the pairs' crazy relatives.  Among the famous guest stars are Amy Sedaris, Lucy Liu, Tina Fey, Mark Consuelos, and Kathy Lee Gifford.

Rounding out the cast are James Urbaniak as Julie's business suit-wearing husband, who works for PBS; Andrea Martin as her yenta mother; and Cole Escola, left, as the swishy queen who works with Billy at his coffee shop gig. 

This episode, "Italian Piñata," begins with the pair walking past the Stonewall Tavern, where the Gay Rights Movement began: queens upset over the death of Judy Garland weren't going to take the police harassment anymore, and fought back.  The Judy Garland angle has been completely discredited.  These were young adults in the 60s. They were into the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, not some singer from their grandparents' generation.

Billy notes that it's National Coming Out Day, when super-hot A-gays who spend the rest of the year snubbing everyone who isn't a Greek god do their public duty by offering to introduce newly-out guys to the culture.  It doesn't even matter if they're ugly or have a horrible personality -- or both, like Billy -- if you're newly out, you're in. 

Julie Turns Italian: On their way to a horrible party that Julie's husband had to plan for his PBS job, in Hoboken, the pair drops into an Italian meat shop, where some ladies like Julie's jokes about "meat in my mouth."  They have big hair, eat everything in sight, carry purses that "fell off a truck," and discuss what they'll do to the penises of boyfriends who betray them.  Julie is in love!  She announces to her mother and husband that she's coming out -- she now identifies as Italian!  The two are horrified.

Mom works as a therapist whose client -- the famous Mink Stole -- has a daughter in a cult.  They discuss deprogramming -- kidnapping the brainwashed girl and yelling at her until she "believes what I want her to believe." Mom thinks this would work on Julie.  

Billy Turns Straight: Meanwhile, Billy and Julie go to a New Jersey gay bar, where he gets the idea of pretending to come out.  He announces that he was straight until today, and Julie is actually his soon-to-be ex-wife.  The gay guys, including bartender Pasha Pelosie, left, all want to welcome him into the gay community.  

More beef after the break

"Stonewall": A movie about the riots that began the Gay Rights Movement, with nice cops, a White Saviour, and some dicks.

The Stonewall Riots of June 28-30, 1969 began with patrons of the Stonewall bar in Greenwich Village fighting back against police harassment.  They ended with the modern Gay Rights Movement and the "minority group" model of LGBT identities. Today there are Pride festivals and parades around June 28th of every year to celebrate that beginning., and queer history, literature, culture, and politics are definitively divided into pre-Stonewall and post-Stonewall. 

Although there have been many books and documentaries, Stonewall (2015) is the first movie intended for a mass audience.  It assumes that you are straight, with little or no knowledge of the riots, an ally but mostly unaware of the closeted, harassed, hounded life of LGBT people before Stonewall (and sometimes still today)

1. Danny Winters (Jeremy Irvine), a clean-cut all-American kid from rural Indiana, gets a scholarship to Columbia, but before his parents can fill out the scholarship papers, they discover that he is gay and kick him out.  His closeted boyfriend, football star Joe(Karl Glusman), refuses to talk to him.  

Bonus Karl Glusman cock after the break

So he goes to New York anyway, where everybody -- repeat, everybody -- falls in love with him.  Well, what do you expect from the focus character?

Danny lives on the street, and works as a hustler (although the look of pure disgust he gets whenever a client tries to go down on him would probably limit his success).

He hangs out and often lives with a group of androgynous gay and transgender street kids led by Ray/Ramona (Johnny Beauchamp). 

2. They are regulars at the Stonewall Tavern, a dive-bar run by Mobster Ed Murphy (Ron Pearlman), who may have murdered Ray's boyfriend. It was illegal to serve alcohol to "a known homosexual," so all gay bars were underground, mostly run by the mob.

3. Meanwhile Danny gets involved with Trevor (Jonathan Rhys-Meyer, left), a middle-class college student,  who picks up twinks by playing Procul Harem's "Whiter Shade of Pale" on the jukebox.  I'm always moved by the line: :She said "There is no reason 
And the truth is plain to see."

Left: Jonathan Rhys Meyer butt

More after the break. Warning: explicit