(Nearly all these pictures are anonymous, grabbed from estate sales and eBay and the like.) No, this was - at least on the surface - foxhole bonding, of the type we hear about from soldiers going back thousands of years. That funny skinny-dipping photo would just be a punctuation mark, tucked into the album of memories that got assembled back home in ’46. Nobody would try to get away with skulking around, snapping these photos every time the guys stripped down - but one? Sure. The photos, Hanson points out, typically appear in collections of more conventional pictures, and there are only one or two in an album’s worth.
armed forces going back to George Washington’s army, and the Newport sex scandal of 1919 occurred two full decades before this era.) I think it’s fair to say that most of these pictures were made without the least thought of their sexiness, but that the camera’s eye - as in so many things - reveals something true not only about the subject but about the photographer as well.
(There are well-documented stories of gay soldiers in the U.S. But of course a significant number of these guys found themselves at least partway up the Kinsey scale, and had experienced in some way sex with other men, whether just a fleeting encounter or something more permanent. To them, sex was for men and women, end of story, and God knows there are no women in these pictures. It would literally never occur to a lot of these guys that their photos give off sexual heat. Most kids - especially poor kids, but everyone - had far less of a sense of physical privacy than we do. Tenement kids slept three and four to a bed. A soldier from a Kansas farm had spent his youth skinny-dipping in the local pond with his friends plenty of outhouses, and even some school bathroom stalls, had more than one seat city high-school kids showered in an open room with nozzles along the wall, sans curtains or dividers, daily after gym class. “Just grab-ass,” they’d say.Įven outside the service, men of that era probably saw each other naked more than we realize. As Bowers points out, practical jokes that many of us would now consider invasive - slipping a hand down someone’s pants to tweak his penis, say - were within the realm of just-boys-being-boys high jinks. If you served on the field of combat, you saw other men naked a lot more than you might today, even if you go to the gym after work. There’s no privacy in a foxhole showers were rare and often communal, and toilets were open-hole latrines. Moreover, we forget - and are reminded by an essay in the book by a World War II Marine named Scotty Bowers - about the physical closeness that these fighting men lived with. As for the candid nudity, there are too many of these pictures out there in the world for them to have been made on the sneak, and a World War II soldier who carried a camera (and quite a few did there’s a lot of downtime in a war zone, in between the scenes of mayhem) wouldn’t have been able to hide it easily. Some (like the pyramid pose below) were certainly set up for the picture. Well, chances are they weren’t creep shots. Wolf and the moment the boy’s shirt is off, the man reaches into them to massage the tiny gay bottom’s tight hole.Bathing at a spring on Guadalcanal, 1943. Wolf helps Oliver off the examination table and leans down to kiss the boy, who has to crane his neck and stand on his toes to kiss him back while his pants are undone. The boy’s foot is barely the length of the doctor’s hand. He smiles at just how small Oliver’s shoes appear in his huge hands. Wolf says, and begins to help the boy undress. “Let’s get you out of those clothes,” Dr. Oliver’s breath catches in his throat from the sensation of the man’s huge hand engulfing his small waist, and he can’t stop himself from reaching for Dr. The moment after the door closes, his lips are on Oliver’s and his hands are caressing the boy’s small frame.
Wolf dismisses his nurse for the day when he confirms his suspicions about why Oliver has come.
Wolf has a keen mind for reading his patients, especially the boys, and the doctor knows exactly why Oliver made a followup appointment so soon. His tiny butt was still a little sore from their last encounter, but he had to see the big man again.ĭr. Description: It’s been two weeks since young Oliver’s first visit to Dr, Wolf’s office, and he can still barely believe it happened.