More Vintage Photos of Gay Love

A Short Time Travel: In the autumn of 2020, the second wave of the coronavirus was building up. The first one from the spring seemed to be behind us. Restrictions were loosened, and a little normality returned at first. What remained: death, mourning, the feeling of powerlessness and loss of control. Along with images burned into the collective memory, such as a military convoy in Bergamo transporting bodies. And then the second wave arrived, everything started over, and it grew even worse.

Right at that moment, the photo book “Loving. Men Who Love Each Other” was published: 350 photographs of gay couples from the years 1850 to 1950 in a single volume. A work that was celebrated worldwide; on TheColu.mn it was named “Book of the Year.”
A Healing Effect
“People reached for the book as if it were a lifebuoy in a dark, cold ocean,” recall the collectors Hugh Nini and Neal Treadwell in the foreword to the sequel. They are melodramatic words, yes, but at their core they ring true: the darker the times, the deeper the despair, the more vital the moments of light become.

“Loving” could do exactly that: impressive photographs from the past, filled with love and tenderness, showing that since the invention of photography, male couples could be photographed. We are not a trend. The photo book emitted a healing effect, one that surprised the two collectors.

Holding onto Love, Even Without Faces

Five years later, the continuation arrived. For “More Loving” (Amazon-Affiliate-Link) Hugh Nini and Neal Treadwell selected over 300 more photographs from their collection of more than 4,000 images that they had gathered over 25 years. The most expensive among them cost $2,500, as they revealed during an interview surrounding the first volume.

Only in small ways did they expand the themes for the second volume. If you own the first volume, you’ll find it more of an addition than a progression: now there are a few photographs in which the men appear together, “but for caution they hid their faces,” as the two write. The couples would have known they smiled and were happy. Because the photograph was never meant for others, “it fulfilled only the personal wish to capture their love,” the collectors interpret the face-less love photos.

“They’re Simply Two People Who Love Each Other”
Especially intriguing are a handful of couple photographs in which one person is dressed in traditionally feminine attire: a white veil, a patterned long-sleeved dress, or a floral hat, and a feminine pose.

Great Diversity, Except for Ethnicity
Like its predecessor, “More Loving” showcases a broad spectrum: workers, students, middle-class folks, soldiers and athletes, young and old. Some shots were professionally staged in studios, others are spontaneous candid captures. On close inspection, the romantic or erotic charge rises—such as when you notice one hand resting gently on the other’s hip or reaching under a jacket. Some are modest and precise, others fizz with passion and show long-awaited kisses; a few are sexually charged.

However, the diversity ends at ethnic representation. Most of the men are white. In the foreword, the collectors address the critique raised with the first volume: photos of Black and multiethnic couples are rare and sought after because the era between 1850 and 1950 “in terms of equality, opportunity, and justice” was not a particularly enlightened time in the United States. Yet there are a few that did make it into the volume.

The World Has Been Upside Down Like Never Since World War II

Five years ago the photo book offered comfort in a time marked by collective mourning. And today? “We live in a world that is — perhaps more than since World War II — turning upside down,” the two collectors write.

In the United States there is a Supreme Court poised to roll back marriage for same-sex couples. “They want to push us back into secrecy, just like the people in our book.”

No Hiding Then Either
In just a few years, the world has been profoundly transformed — and not always for the better. LGBTQ rights and achievements have become bargaining chips, and right-wing extremism makes queer people around the world — often successfully — a target.

The love of the past, evident on every page of “Loving” and “More Loving,” offers solace in these times. This love is universal, bridging the moment of the photographs’ creation to the present, and it can also be read as an act of courage: gay couples did not hide back then either.