The Body That Could Not Be Shown
The emerging nudist movement in Britain, formally founded in the 1920s but achieving popularity from the 1930s, could only depict nude bodies in their publications by photographing members and models in strategic poses that concealed sex organs and pubic hair. Where this was not possible, they needed to manipulate photographic negatives to blur genitals out, visually smooth them over, or even paint on underpants.
I want to sit with that last detail for a moment. The solution, when strategic posing failed, was to paint underpants onto the photographic negative. Not to remove the photograph from publication. Not to concede the impossibility of showing what the movement was trying to show. To paint on the undergarment that the photograph’s subject had taken off before the photograph was taken.
The movement for the freedom of the unclothed body published images of the unclothed body with undergarments added afterward in a darkroom. The man in the photograph had removed his clothes. The photograph then clothed him again. What was published, in the naturist magazine dedicated to the proposition that the body without clothing was healthy, natural, and morally improving, was a body that appeared to have no genitals at all.
This is the visual culture that the law produced. Photographic “retouching”, as it was called, was required for male and female genitals to meet the requirements of obscenity law. The magazine could exist. The photograph could exist. The body in the photograph could be unambiguously nude in every other respect. Only the specific portions that the law identified as potentially obscene needed to be removed, blurred, or painted over. What this created, as a visual record, was a strange artefact: images of nude bodies that showed everything except what nude bodies actually look like. Shoulders, chests, backs, legs, feet—and then a void, or a smooth, textureless absence, or painted cotton, where the genitals should have been.
I notice that this was not simply a matter of the law managing what could be seen. It was a matter of the law producing a specific kind of unreality about the body and then presenting that unreality as the acceptable representation of the real thing. The retouched naturist magazine created a version of the male body in which a specific portion of the anatomy simply did not exist. And if you were a man reading that magazine—reading it for the philosophical arguments about health and freedom and the non-sexual appreciation of the body, which some people were—the image you were being offered as evidence of what a naturally living human male looked like was an image from which the most legislatively sensitive portion of that male’s anatomy had been removed.
Alec Craig, an ardent nudist and anti-censorship campaigner, warned in the 1930s: “What may be perfectly innocuous in one set of circumstances may be ‘obscene’ in another. To take an extreme example, nude photographs, quite unobjectionable in normal circumstances, might be held to be ‘obscene’ if circulated in a convent school.” The example Craig chose—the convent school—was not random. It was the most extreme case of contextual transformation he could identify: the same photograph, the same body, made obscene not by anything in itself but by the circumstances of its viewing. The law was not protecting a property of the image. It was protecting the assumed purity of a specific imagined audience from the assumed effect of the image on that audience.
What I notice about this is that the male body, specifically, was in a more complicated legal position than the female body in this period. By the 1930s, female photographic nudes could be found on the walls of photography exhibitions as well as in the pages of art, anatomy and anthropology books, men’s magazines, daily newspapers, photojournalist weeklies and naturist monthlies. The female nude had accumulated enough artistic and cultural permission over the preceding centuries that it could circulate in multiple contexts without necessarily triggering prosecution. The male nude had not. The specific combination of photography—which could not provide the classical alibi of sculpture or paint—with the male genital region remained legally volatile in a way that the female equivalent was not, or not to the same degree. The law was asymmetric in its anxiety, and the asymmetry ran along the same lines: the male body in its full anatomical reality was more threatening to public order than the female body in hers.
The question of why this should be so connects, I believe, to the homosexuality laws that ran parallel to the obscenity legislation throughout this period. Male homosexual acts were criminalised in England until 1967. The Labouchère Amendment of 1885 had extended the law beyond sodomy to encompass “gross indecency,” which was expansive enough to be applied to almost any physical intimacy between men. Wilde was prosecuted under it.
The legal situation that governed homosexuality and the legal situation that governed the depiction of the male nude were not independent. What the law was managing, in both cases, was the possibility that the male body, made visible in its specificity, might produce responses in male viewers that the law considered criminal. The retouched naturist photograph was not retouched because the male genitals are inherently obscene. It was retouched because the male genitals, visible in a photograph, might produce desire in a man who viewed them, and that desire, acted upon, was a crime.
The female nude in a photography exhibition was not held to the same standard because the desire it might produce in a male viewer was not criminal. The arrangement was therefore not about the body’s visibility. It was about the criminality of one particular response to one particular body. The law protecting public decency was also, in this specific respect, the law managing the evidence that might produce criminal desire.
I have been thinking about what this did to the study of anatomy. Naturists had been arguing since the 1920s that public disrobing was physically and morally improving, in the face of an incredulous public and a hostile legal system with strict ideas about decency and obscenity. But the medical study of the male body had itself been operating within these constraints for considerably longer. The anatomical illustrations that had shaped medical understanding from the Renaissance onward had their own conventions of concealment and exposure—conventions that were not purely scientific but were shaped by the same cultural and legal context.
An anatomical atlas of the male body in the Victorian period routinely removed or minimised the depiction of the genitals in illustrations intended for general circulation, reserving fuller depiction for medical texts circulated under specific professional conditions. The body that was being taught as the standard of male anatomy was, in this respect, also a retouched body—a body from which the legislatively sensitive portions had been managed, if not quite painted over.
What this produced, over generations, was a peculiar relationship between the official record of what the male body looked like and the actual range of male bodies as experienced by the men who inhabited them. The anatomical illustration showed the muscle and bone and organ with precision. The regions that the law and the culture had identified as requiring management were depicted with less consistency, or with more convention, or with a specificity that was shaped as much by what could be shown as by what existed to be shown. The men who came to me over thirty years had been formed, in their understanding of what their bodies were, partly by this record. The body they brought into the room was the body as lived experience, complete with everything that had been painted over or blurred or strategically posed out of the official image.
Within the Anglican Church of this period, there were voices arguing for a different position. At the Lambeth Conference of 1930, birth control was permitted for married couples, and the logical extension of this teaching, as Bishop Charles Gore noted, was that other forms of sexual pleasure, including homosexuality, which was increasingly seen as a ‘natural’ condition, might eventually be sanctioned by the church. A small number of progressive clergy attempted to make the argument that the body, including the male body in its full reality, could be understood in theological terms not as a source of shame but as part of what it meant to be human and therefore, in some sense, sacred. The Reverend Francis Kilvert was one such voice—a clergyman who swam naked in the sea and described the experience with evident delight. These positions were not entirely without support in the tradition. The early Christian baptismal nudity, the mystical tradition’s insistence on stripping away all coverings, the strand of Anglican theology that found in the body evidence of divine creation rather than Augustinian fall—all of these offered resources for a different account.
But the progressive arguments did not gain traction. What I can read about why is partial and speculative, and I hold the speculation lightly. What scholars suggests is that the 1930s represented a brief moment of potential movement, followed by the pressures of wartime, followed by the conservative moral climate of the postwar period, in which the attempt to liberalise the church’s position on sexuality in any form became much more difficult.
When the Anglican writer Kenneth Ingram published “Sex-Morality Tomorrow” in 1940, pressing for full homosexual equality, Temple wrote to him personally, asking whether he could consider withdrawing the book. The progressive arguments were not refuted by the institution. They were asked, quietly, not to be spoken at that moment, by a leadership that shared some sympathy with them but could not accommodate them.
This pattern—the sympathy without the support, the private agreement and the public withdrawal—is one I recognise from the room. Men who came to me were, in many cases, men who had arrived at a relationship with their own bodies that was not the one the culture had given them, and who had arrived at it privately, without the permission of any institution, without the support of any framework that acknowledged what they were doing as acceptable. They had found their own way to a position that had no official endorsement. The institutional sympathy for progressive positions on the body, in the Anglican tradition I have been examining, was real but not sufficient to provide the cover that official endorsement would have provided. The progressive clergy remained marginal. The law remained in force. The naturist magazine continued to paint underpants onto the negatives.
And the men who came to me arrived still carrying the absence of that endorsement, not as a conscious grievance but as a quality of their relationship to their own bodies—the faint and pervasive sense that the body in its full reality was something that the official world had not yet been able to accommodate.
The retouching had been internal as much as photographic. The smooth absence where something should have been was, in some of those men, where they had learned to keep the part of themselves the law had not found a way to look at directly.
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