THEORETICAL NOTES

"One of the things that interests me is the problem of friendship ... You can find, from the sixteenth century on, texts explicitly criticize friendship as something dangerous.
The army, bureaucracy, administration, universities, schools, et cetera - in the modern senses of these words - cannot function with such intense friendships. I think there can be seen a very strong attempt in all these institutions to diminish, or minimize, the affectional relations ...
One of my hypotheses ... is that homosexuality became a problem - that is, sex between men became a problem - in the eighteenth century. We see the rise of it as a problem with the police, within the justice system, and so on. I think the reason it appears as a problem, as a social issue, at this time is that friendship has disappeared. As long as friendship was something important, was socially accepted, nobody realized men had sex together. You couldn't say that men didn't have sex together - it just didn't matter ... Once friendship disappeared as a culturally accepted relation, the issue arose, "What is going on between men?" And that's when the problem appears ... I'm sure I'm right, that the disappearance of friendship as a social relation and the declaration of homosexuality as a social/political/medical problem are the same process."

Gallagher, Bob and Wilson, Alexander. "Sex and the Politics of Identity: An Interview with Michel Foucault," in Thompson, Mark. Gay Spirit: Myth and Meaning. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987, pp.32-34.

Leddick, David. Naked Men: Pioneering Male Nudes 1935-1955. New York: Universe Publishing, 1997, p.21.

Kinsey Institute and Crump, James. George Platt Lynes: Photographs From the Kinsey Institute. Boston: Bullfinch Press, 1993, Plate 78.