GLR January-February 2026

The Kink Issue GLR k

January-February 2026

S ERGIO I NTERDONATO The Power of the Foot M ATTHEW B AMBERG Mapplethorpe’s Gift to America U MAR I BRAHIM A GAIE Reclaiming the Sacred Dungeon C ASPER B YRNE Tumblr Was a Gateway to Kink M ICHAEL Q UINN Cruising with Boyd McDonald

Magnus Hirschfeld’s Moment BY V ERNON R OSARIO

Farmers Are Us, Too BY P ATRICIA A NN M ATHU & T AYLOR H ARTSON Return to Red China BY A NDREW H OLLERAN

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The Gay & Lesbian Review January–February 2026 • VOLUME XXXIII, NUMBER 1 WORLDWIDE

C O N T E N T S

The Kink Issue

F E A T U R E S

J EREMY C. F OX Literary Editor M ARTHA E. S TONE Poetry Editor D AVID B ERGMAN Associate Editors S AM D APANAS P AUL F ALLON M ICHAEL S CHWARTZ Contributing Writers R OSEMARY B OOTH D ANIEL A. B URR C OLIN C ARMAN A NNE C HARLES A LFRED C ORN A LLEN E LLENZWEIG C HRIS F REEMAN P HILIP G AMBONE M ATTHEW H AYS H ILARY H OLLADAY A NDREW H OLLERAN I RENE J AVORS J OHN R. K ILLACKY C ASSANDRA L ANGER

The Power of the Foot 10 S ERGIO I NTERDONATO

As an object of desire, it has a long history in Western art

When BDSM Went Mainstream 13 M ATTHEW B AMBERG Tumblr Was a Gateway to Kink 15 C ASPER B YRNE Reclaiming the Sacred Dungeon 18 U MAR I BRAHIM A GAIE

Robert Mapplethorpe’s art brought it to a whole new audience A sexual free-for-all flourished on the platform in the 2010s Queering the age-old connection between S/M and spirituality Appreciating the queerness of nature comes with the territory His pre-Nazi advances in sex studies are still coming to light Iowa, 1955: Entrapped, institutionalized, and rescued by two saints

Farmers Are Us, Too 22 P ATRICIA A NN M ATHU

AND T AYLOR H ARTSON

Magnus Hirschfeld’s Moment 25 V ERNON R OSARIO 20 Landed in the Cuckoo’s Nest 30 D ANIEL V AILLANCOURT

R E V I E W S

P O E M S & D E P A R T M E N T S I N M EMORIAM — Remembering a Few Who Made a Difference 5 J EREMY C. F OX C ORRESPONDENCE 6 BTW 8 R ICHARD S CHNEIDER J R . A RT M EMO — Cruising with Boyd McDonald 20 M ICHAEL Q UINN P OEM — “Love Song Containing a Diminutive European Deer” 28 R OBERT M C D ONALD H ISTORY M EMO — Herschel Grynszpan, Scapegoat for Kristallnacht 29 H ARLAN G REENE P OEM — “Dream Boy” 32 N ICK G ALINAITIS P OEM — “Prayer” 40 J OE B ISHOP A RTIST ’ S P ROFILE — Portraitist Don Bachardy Tells All 44 C HRIS F REEMAN C ULTURAL C ALENDAR 47 A RT M EMO — The Other “F Word” Takes the Stage 48 J ORDAN S CHILDCROUT Margaret A. Brucia – The Key to Everything: May Swenson, A Writer’s Life 33 P HILIP G AMBONE Adriano Pedrosa & André Mesquita, eds. – Gran Fury: Art Is Not Enough 34 M ATTHEW H AYS Eileen Yuk-Ha Tsang — Unlocking the Red Closet 35 A NDREW H OLLERAN B RIEFS 36 JimWilke— Frontier Comrades: From the Fur Trade to the Ford Car 38 H ANK T ROUT Gerrie Schipske — The Long Beach Gay Trials 39 L ARRY R EYNOLDS Bryan Washington — Palaver: A Novel 39 C HARLES G REEN LanaLin— The Autobiography of H. Lan Thao Lam 40 R EGINALD H ARRIS Sam Wachman — The Sunflower Boys: A Novel 41 M ONICA C ARTER Neil Blackmore — Objects of Desire 42 D ENNIS A LTMAN Agustín Fuentes – Sex Is a Spectrum: The Biological Limits of the Binary 42 J EAN R OBERTA Adriano Pedrosa and Guilherme Giufrida, eds. — Catherine Opie 43 J OHN R. K ILLACKY Elain Sexton — Site Specific ; Liza Flum — Hover 44 D ALE B OYER Pernille Ipsen — My Seven Mothers 46 A NNE C HARLES Benito Skinner, creator — Overcompensating (television series) 49 C OLIN C ARMAN Oliver Hermanus, director — The History of Sound (film) 50 A LLEN E LLENZWEIG

A NDREW L EAR J AMES P OLCHIN J EAN R OBERTA V ERNON R OSARIO Contributing Artist C HARLES H EFLING Publisher S TEPHEN H EMRICK Webmaster B OSTON W EB G ROUP WebEditor A LLISON A RMIJO ______________________________ Board of Directors

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January–February 2026

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Winter Warmer: ‘The Kink Issue’ FROM THE MANAGING EDITOR

T HIS ISSUE marks a bit of a departure for TheG&LR , as we crack open the bedroom door to explore the prac tices and paraphilias that interest or obsess some LGBT people, and the roots of their appeal. Several feature articles delve deeply into why certain kinks turn (some of) us on, and whether we can discern historical and æsthetic rationales be hind these fixations. For some, feet are highly eroticized extremities; for others they’re merely utilitarian or even repugnant. Sergio Interdo nato turns to art history to argue that the foot has long held an erotic charge as the very foundation of the human body, sup porting the weight of our desires and symbolizing strength and physicality. One of the artists most associated with homoerotic æs thetics and with the separation of the (body) part from the whole is the late Robert Mapplethorpe, and Matthew Bamberg contends that he helped to mainstream BDSM by presenting it in a manner both lurid and classical. The famed photogra pher’s work helped bring bondage, leather daddies, and even “piss play” into the general conversation. Not even Map plethorpe could have foreseen the profusion of kink that would follow in the 2010s, as young people in search of community and, ahem, inspiration turned to the online flea market of Tum blr to share their deepest and dirtiest fantasies. Casper Byrne writes that for members of Gen Z like himself, the platform

presented an all-you-can-stomach buffet of sexual roles and gender identities. Both Mapplethorpe’s work and this online profusion of pornography caused controversy, as there are always bulwarks of puritanism seeking to police the pleasure of others. Umar Ibrahim Agaie explores how some queer people are defying the prigs and seeking to reclaim pleasure and bodily autonomy through kink. Michael Quinn rounds out this lurid quintet with an Art Memo exploring the life and work of the libidinous Boyd McDonald. Turning to matters that are more literally earthy, Patricia Ann Mathu and Taylor Hartson, co-recipients of TheG&LR ’s Charles S. Longcope Jr. Writers and Artists Grant, have docu mented how LGBT farmers are plowing their own fields and finding means for queer expression through agriculture. Vernon Rosario steps back a century from these contemporary culti vators to contrast three recent books on pioneering sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld that have divergent views on this seminal figure in LGBT liberation. In a History Memo that overlaps in location and era with Hirschfeld, Harlan Greene explains that the teenager scapegoated for Kristallnacht was almost certainly gay. Finally, Daniel Vaillancourt transports us ahead a couple of decades to mid-20th-century Iowa for a tale of gay oppres sion that turns into one of acceptance and empathy. J EREMY C. F OX

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IN MEMORIAM

Remembering a Few Who Made a Difference I N KEEPING with tradition, we take time to remember a few of the notable LGBT people who died during the pre vious year. —J EREMY C. F OX

writers such as James Bald win, Amiri Baraka, Lorraine Hansberry, and Audre Lorde. In her early career, Giovanni wrote stirringly about racism and formed her own publish ing company because, she wrote: “No one was much in terested in a Black girl writ ing what was called ‘militant’ poetry.” Giovanni also wrote hon estly and humorously about her ambivalence toward rela tions between men and

J ONATHAN B RACKER was a poet who wrote with insight and humor about the natural world, growing up gay in the pre Stonewall era, and in recent years about aging, death, and grief. His poem “A Suggestion for Gays” was published in the No vember-December 2025 issue of TheG&LR . Bracker was born in New York City, grew up in Louisiana

and Texas, and began writing poetry in junior high school. He later studied creative writ ing at the University of Texas at Austin under the poet Fred erick Eckman. He went on to teach at colleges in Texas, Pennsylvania, Indiana, and California, settling in San Francisco in 1973. He was the editor of Bright Cages: Se lected Poems of Christopher Morley (1965) and co-author

women, writing in the poem “Housecleaning”: “i always liked housecleaning/ even as a child … and unfortunately this habit has/ carried over and I find/ i must remove you/ from my life.” She gave birth to a son, Thomas, in 1969 and never publicly disclosed the father’s identity. She taught at Queens College and Rutgers University before being recruited to Virginia Tech by English professor Virginia C. Fowler, who became a scholar of Giovanni’s work, her biographer, and her life partner. They married in 2016. Giovanni died at age 81 from complications of lung cancer in a Blacksburg, Virginia, hospital in December 2024. M ISS M AJOR G RIFFIN -G RACY was among the protesters out side the Stonewall Inn in 1969 and went on to a half-century career in activism for Black trans women, incarcerated trans women, and people with HIV/AIDS. Miss Major moved to New York City in 1962 after being expelled from two colleges for wearing dresses, and soon began performing in drag shows and doing sex work to survive. A year after a cop knocked her unconscious at Stonewall, she was convicted of robbery and sent to a men’s prison. While behind bars, she endured brutal treatment and met a leader of the 1971 Attica prison uprising, which led to her advocacy for trans prisoners. Miss Major provided direct care for people with HIV/AIDS in New York in the early 1980s; founded a home healthcare service, Angels of Care, in San Diego; and later led

of a 1976 biography of Morley. His thirteen poetry collections include Constellations of Clover (1973), Some Poems About Women (1993), Paris Sketches (2005), Civilian Aboard U.S. Navy Ship at Sea (2011), and Love Poems of a Gay Nerd (2022). Bracker died at age 88 at a rehabilitation facility in San Francisco due to complications following heart surgery. A NDREA G IBSON was a genderqueer spoken-word poet, per formance artist, and activist whose work moved audiences across the spectrums of gender and sexuality. Their passion ate, sometimes sardonic, often political poems about gender, patriarchy, love, basketball, and gun control emerged from the traditions of slam poetry, a form that Gibson helped reinvigo rate on college campuses and in coffeehouses across the coun try in the mid-2000s. Named Colorado’s poet laureate in 2023, Gibson toured extensively despite chronic stage fright; published seven books, including Pole Dancing to Gospel Hymns (2008), Pansy (2015), and You Better Be Lightning (2021); and re leased seven albums. After being diagnosed in 2021 with ter minal ovarian cancer, Gibson and their wife, fellow poet Megan Falley, shared their struggle with the disease in the doc umentary film Come See Me in the Good Light , which won the Festival Favorite award at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. Gibson died at age 49 at home in Longmont, Colorado, “surrounded by their wife, Meg, four ex-girlfriends, their mother and father, dozens of friends, and their three beloved dogs,” Falley wrote. N IKKI G IOVANNI was a poet, educator, activist, public intel lectual, and one of the leading lights of the Black Arts Move ment that grew out of the Civil Rights struggle and included

San Francisco’s first mobile needle exchange. She was the first executive director of the Transgender Gender-Variant and Intersex Justice Project until her retirement in 2015 and received the Susan J. Hyde Award for Longevity in the Movement from the National LGBTQ Task Force in 2018. Miss Major died at age 78 at her home in Little Rock, Arkansas. Continued on next page

January–February 2026

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F ELICE P ICANO , author, activist, and frequent contributor to TheG&LR , died at age 81. He was remembered by Walter Hol land in the May-June 2025 issue. E DMUND W HITE , groundbreaking gay novelist and memoirist, died at age 85. He was remembered by Dimitris Yeros, David Bergman, and Leo Racicot in the September-October 2025 issue. R OBERT W ILSON was an iconoclastic theatrical director, play wright, choreographer, and visual artist whose collaborators ranged from Philip Glass to Lady Gaga. Perhaps his most fa mous work, sometimes called his masterpiece, is 1976’s Ein stein on the Beach , an abstract, plotless five-hour opera with music composed by Glass. Wilson and Glass later collaborated Correspondence

on The Civil Wars: A Tree Is Best Measured When It Is Down (1984) and on White Raven and Monsters of Grace (both 1998). Described by The New York Times in 1992 as “[Amer ica]’s—or even the world’s—foremost vanguard ‘theater artist,’” Wilson was less interested in the traditional theatrical fixations of dialogue and plot than with movement, space, and lighting effects. He famously said: “Light is the most important actor on stage.” His extensive credits include two fully silent productions, Deafman Glance (1971) and Life and Times of Joseph Stalin (1973), and productions of Shakespeare’s King Lear (1990) , Wagner’s Parsifal (2005), Brecht’s The Three penny Opera (2007), and Beckett’s HappyDays (2008) . Wilson died at age 83 at his home in Water Mill, New York, after a brief illness.

uality played an important role in the Wanja’s beliefs regarding procreation. Today, homosexuality remains illegal in PNG per the laws implemented by its British colonizers via the Queensland Criminal Code of Australia. Although I was not by any means “out” while I was living among the Wanja people, I never expressed any negative judgments regarding their homosexual prac tices. Indeed, in my deeply held admiration for the life of Christ as I saw he had lived it in the Bible, my abiding goal was to present the love of God in all of my interactions. As it happened, I failed to learn the Wanja language well enough preach the Gospel to them. Thanks to a very long dark night of the soul, I gave up on Christianity and my work in the ministry. Now I am happily married to a man of Canadian First Nation and Filipino descent. Today, I do maintenance work in as sisted living facilities. To those who ask about my previous line of work, I tell them I’ve gone from saving souls to saving bowls, i.e., toilet bowls! Mike Cordle, Bremerton, WA

More on the Origins of “Gay” To the Editor:

My Ethnographic Journey with the Wanja To the Editor: Thank you for your excellent “Ethno graphic Journeys” issue [Nov.-Dec. 2025]. Many years ago, decades before I came out, I worked as a fundamentalist missionary in Papua New Guinea (PNG). For more than five years I lived among the Wanja people, who are part of a language group known as the Anga. It was my assignment to learn their unwritten language well enough to preach the Gospel to them. As with some of the other Anga groups, the Wanja practiced “ritualized homosexuality.” As has been documented by multiple anthro pologists regarding the Simbari and the Baruya people, both being language groups bordering the Wanja territory, the Wanja believed adoles cent boys were infertile. To remedy this, they were required to fellate and ingest the ejacula tion of men who had successfully impregnated their wives. So, in a very real sense, homosex

I enjoyed Hugh Hagius’ essay on the lexi con of homosexuality [Nov.-Dec. 2025]. Per haps I can add a bit of history to “gay.” As Mr. Hagius noted, the word had been adopted by the community by the 1930s. But it was still something of a “secret code” through the 1940s, at times slyly inserted into news copy by hip journalists. (A 1948 item in a Long Beach paper described a scandalous same-sex “mock wedding” as “a gay afternoon soiree.”) Its alternative meaning appears to have first been exposed to the general public on December 2, 1950, by The New York Age , a Harlem-based paper serving the Black com munity, in a shock piece titled “New York’s ‘Gay’ Men: Society’s Strays Are All Alone.” The word reached a much broader audi ence the following year via “The Homosex ual in America,” written by sociologist Edward Sagarin under the penname Donald Webster Cory. (One book reviewer lamented: “What they have done to the word ‘gay’ just shouldn’t happen to the language!”). But the Miami Herald wasn’t paying attention: in 1952, they erroneously reported that “gay” was a code word for drag shows, a source of much angst in Florida at the time. In 1954, San Francisco papers began using the word, in quotes, in their coverage of the police raid on Tommy’s Place, a popular lesbian bar. Meanwhile, Hollywood studios and film crit ics (who surely knew the score) were attach ing it to virtually every lavish musical of the era—though in that case maybe both defini tions were equally valid! In 1958, in the case of ONE, Inc. v. Olesen , the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that material presenting a positive view of homosexuality is not in and of itself obscene. As openly gay media proliferated and found space above the counters of mainstream newsstands over the following decade, the meaning of the word be came clear to all. Denny Nivens, Hermosa Beach, CA

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All in a Day’s Work We’ve covered our share of homophobic clergymen and politicians who got caught engaging in the very acts that they condemn, but there’s always a new wrinkle in the dirty laundry. Take the case of R.J. May, a South Carolina state rep. and firebrand who railed against child porn and what he called “trans-plus sex,” with a special passion for censoring books with LGBT characters. But that was until R.J. was busted for sending over 1,000 images of underage sexual abuse during a six-day period last year. The charges against him included dis tributing images of children as young as toddlers and infants. As of this writing, he was in an Edgefield (SC) County jail facing a federal indictment on ten counts of distributing porn. What’s striking about R.J. is the rapidity with which he toggled between the two pursuits. Just minutes before emailing some of those 1,000 images, he was sending a holy message to constituents that ended with “Amen. Happy Easter.” In such cases, we’ve always assumed that the anti-gay stuff was a cover, or perhaps atonement, for those wicked thoughts and deeds. But this guy was just plain nihilistic, not to mention reckless. BTW

Bes ti es Even if you’re avoiding the news, you probably saw this statue of Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein, which showed up on the National Mall last Sept. 23rd. Now known as “Best Friends Forever,” it was erected under a per

mit issued for “The Secret Handshake.” Twelve feet tall and fashioned out of foam, resin, wood, and wire and painted to look like bronze, the statue was removed by the Park Police the next day, but somehow it was rescued by the anonymous own ers, after which it spent time in a number of locales, winding up in front of Busboys and Poets Café on 14th and V Streets in DC. Clearly the main point is to highlight the close ties between the two men, but it is of more than passing interest (at least for us) that they’re holding hands and dancing. And those back ward kicks they’re both doing—can we tawk? Bedroom Material Let us pause to remark on the fact that an openly gay man has been named People magazine’s “Sexiest Man Alive.” His name is Jonathan Bailey, and he’s the star of the Netflix series Bridgerton , but also starred in the gay series Fellow Travelers , among other mouthwatering roles. Perhaps

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the choice was intended as a provocation—of course it got a rise out of the right-wing blogosphere, which took it as further evidence of moral chaos, the End of Days, etc.—but perhaps there’s an underlying message for our times. Underpinning the current reactionary regime is a resurgence of heterosexual men that seems like a Reconquista, with women and LGBT people among those running for cover. People ’s readers and creators are largely women, and it may just be that for this readership straight men in general just don’t seem quite as hot as they used to. What’s counterintuitive about the choice of a gay man is that “the sexiest man” is meant to turn on some kind of col lective sexual fantasy that a gay man is unlikely to satisfy. Nev ertheless, maybe that sense of longing and frustration is precisely the mood that’s being captured. It Wasn’t a Bitch Slap In a story that began to simmer last sum mer, what caught our eye, and everyone’s, was the report that France’s First Lady, Brigitte Macron, had “bitch-slapped” a

woman for claiming that she (Macron) was actually a man in deep disguise. It turns out the phrase was being used metaphor ically to refer to a lawsuit that Mme Macron had filed against one Candace Owens, an American who’d been making this spurious claim on her podcast. Owens, a MAGA Republican and conspiracy fabulist with a following, had already been dis credited for promulgating patently false anti-Semitic myths. For whatever reason, Owens’ allegations really got under Madame’s skin—maybe it was the claim that the First Lady was really her brother Jean-Michel disguised as a women—so she sued for libel. Long story short: she prevailed in court, and Ms. Owens was ordered to pay €13,500 (about $15,000) in damages. The defense’s argument was not helped by Jean Michel’s presence in court, though the allegation was always an absurdity. Why it was ever invented is anyone’s guess— perhaps in some tortuous way an attempt to take the focus off Trump’s troubles with Epstein while attacking both transgen der people and France’s liberal prime minister.

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ESSAY

The Power of the Foot S ERGIO I NTERDONATO

T HE END OF THE YEAR brings evaluations and ratings in many arenas, including social media: Instagram’s “Recap,” the much-anticipated “Spotify Wrapped,” and of course “Grindr Un wrapped,” a chart showing the state of at least a certain segment of the queer community. As a young Italian gay guy, I always look for what my compatriots are interested in. In 2024, for the second time in a row (the feet statistic was only introduced in 2023), Italy topped the list for foot fetishists. The nation of marble Adonises and Renaissance grandeur is also the capital of #feet. This isn’t just about Grindr stats. It speaks to something deeper—something that may be wired into the DNA of Western visual culture. Feet aren’t just a fetish category. They’re the foundation of how we see, desire, and structure the male body. They’re the most subtly eroticized feature in art history and vi sual culture, from Greek statuary to high fashion, from the cam era angles in porn to social media thirst traps. Why do feet carry such a fetishistic weight? Tracing how this works, and how foot-power has long been tied to visual he donism, may help untangle the kink from its taboo. To answer that, we need to go back to the origins of the male body as an object of desire, sculpted in stone long before it was captured on camera. From the pedestal onward, feet teach the eye what se duction and arousal feel like: weight, balance, contact, the tan talizing line between exposure and concealment. And this is a lesson that survives in every medium. F EETAS V ISUAL A NCHORS F ROM THE BEGINNING of Western visual culture, feet have played a central role in anchoring the male body within space and de sire. Look at The Laocoön Group (c. 40–30 BCE). The twisted agony of the Trojan priest and his sons is famous for its con torted expressions, but the true weight of the sculpture lies else where: the feet. Their feet are planted in a way that grounds the entire movement, making them a critical tension point. Their suffering is all in the upper body, but their feet hold, resist, and bear the weight. Seen closely, their marble toes seem almost bruised by strain; a big toe lifts slightly as if searching for pur chase, the Achilles tendon taut like a drawn bowstring. The ser pents are spectacular, but the drama is clinched where sole meets plinth—the choreography of pressure and letting go that makes the body believable. Or take Polykleitos’ Doryphoros (original bronze, now lost, ca. 440 BCE), the most famous example of contrapposto. The figure’s weight shifts onto one foot, setting off a chain reaction Sergio Interdonato is a Milan-based freelance writer, editor, and cu rator. As an artistic director, he manages press relations for contem porary art projects and exhibitions.

of perfect tension up his body. His sculpted musculature is hyp notic, but where does the gaze start? The stance, the foundation, the way his body negotiates balance through his feet. The foot is not a leftover extremity; it’s the hinge of grace. Nowhere is this sense of the foot as a visual synecdoche for the power of the body clearer than in the Barberini Faun (ca. 220 BCE), perhaps the most explicitly sensual of all classical statues. Here a satyr lounges, legs spread, the entire body an in vitation. His pose is relaxed, almost post-coital, yet his feet— splayed, flexed, visibly tensed—subtly direct the eye upward. He isn’t just resting; he’s exhibiting. His entire body is sculpted for pleasure, and his feet are the first thing that catches your eye. They are neither passive nor rigid—they suggest move ment, readiness, presence. A Renaissance marble that draws on this Classical tradition is the David (1501–1504). We all recognize the poised inten sity of Michelangelo’s masterpiece, his furrowed brow, his im pending action. But his feet are where his body feels real. They are oversized, veined, textured: Unlike the smooth idealization of his torso, his feet are alive. They root him in physicality. They hold that perfect tension of youth and vitality, of a body about to move. Michelangelo’s chisel carves a cartography of veins across the dorsum; nails carry a faint, almost crescent shine; the big toe presses forward as if testing the future—almost crashing us or holding us in place, as Michelangelo precisely studied it

Barberini Faun, ca. 220 BCE.

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to be seen from below. Before sling and stone, before gaze and glory, there is contact. Marble, unlike skin, cannot blush or get warm, so sculptors found ways of eroticizing it through tension and touchpoints. Classical feet are not simply there to keep heroes upright; they conduct the sculpture’s electricity into the viewer. They’re not just anatomical necessities; they’re compositional tools— deeply erotic ones. T HE G AY G AZE R OLAND B ARTHES , in Camera Lucida (1980), introduced the con cept of the punctum: that unexpected detail in an image that in

ing the idea of something always present yet hidden in plain sight, charged with desire precisely because it’s on the edge of exposure, between visibility and the impossibility of being seen—or the forced concealment, almost an imprisonment, of the shoe. Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (in 1975’s Screen journal) famously defined the male gaze—the way women’s bodies are broken down into fragments, eroticized for the straight male viewer. Director Quentin Tarantino, noto rious for his foot obsession, perfectly exemplifies this: his shots fragment the female body, reducing it to fetishized parts. But queer desire plays by different rules. So, what happens when the gaze shifts? Enter the male gayze .

voluntarily arrests the gaze—the thing that hooks you. Feet function as one of the strongest punctum points in art, photography, and film. They blend sensory intimacy with visual power. Positioned at the bottom of the frame, subtly arched or flexed, guiding your gaze up the body, feet direct our eye. This is

In queer desire, fragmentation isn’t about passive objectification—it’s about fixation, about reverence. Instead of centering pene tration or dominant masculinity, the male gayze lingers on unexpected focal points: feet, hands, necks. It finds pleasure in the

In Western visual culture, feet have always played a central role in anchoring the male body in space.

body’s edges, in what is visible but not always noticed. It’s al most a devotional kink: an ethics of attention in which the act is to dwell, to tend, to aspire. The kiss on the heel, the unlacing, the tying back up: a charged and desecrating ritual, not residue. If nakedness is one kind of erotica, opacity is another. Too much light bleaches desire; too little kills it. The sweet spot is half seen, half-felt—the tension between underexposure and over exposure as the hottest foreplay. Fashion designer Tom Ford’s advertising campaigns are a

not incidental. It is visual seduction. Feet are puncta because they arrive as surplus, extras, and then eat the frame from within. If Barthes names the sting, Leo Bersani in The Freudian Body (1990) explains the charge: Sexuality loosens the self, and the fetish, this “partial object,” condenses intensity at the edges where control yields to relation. Put simply: Barthes gives the hook, Bersani, the voltage, defining the practice of attention that relocates intimacy to ankles, arches, heels. Bersani, read along side Freud’s theory of the fetish object, is consistent in explor

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great example. A flexed foot in a high-fashion ad can carry as much erotic weight as a fully nude body because the male gayze is about æsthetic pleasure—hunger, obsession, control. Going further, the sock can be seen as a curtain, and curtains build the aters. What looks like a minor accessory becomes so significant to many: how its fabric holds humidity, retains salt, records pressure. A sock can then be an index of where the body has been and whom it has touched. In queer photographic scenes, whether domestic or staged, the sock works less as accessory than as interface: It translates touch into image. Many of Wolfgang Tillmans’ most beautiful shots make this legible as intimacy studies. Some of these were recently displayed in his solo exhibition at Centre Pompidou, defying the most “vanilla” viewer with a desecrating purity. In these large images, socks and insteps read like weather reports of intimacy—creases, humidity, elastic burns. They isolate heels, ankles, even knees in shallow domestic space—limbs cut from context yet still connected by light, by ribbed cotton. The picture hums with withheld weight, a weather map of bodies that just exited or are about to exit the scene. Tillmans’ point is neither the garment nor his subject but the microclimate of touch it remembers. Johnny Abbate’s Stolen Socks series (figure at right) refuses to let memory stay abstract. The works pair Polaroid images shot from the photographer’s vantage point—his socked feet foregrounding a nude standing at the bed’s edge—with the ac tual socks worn by the model in the photograph sealed into the same frame. The pieces of cloth function then as a relic, some thing that has touched the icon and serves as its replacement— its presence in absence. It’s not just “proof of contact,” it’s an ethics of transmission. It shows how desire circulates from body to cloth to image (simulacra) to viewer. The fetish object isn’t a substitute; it’s a carrier. As Jean Baudrillard would argue, what circulates here is not representation but simulation —a sign that no longer refers to the original body, only to other signs of touch and proximity. The relic doesn’t recall an absent subject; it generates its own pres ence, an erotic hyperreal in which the aura is produced through iteration. The photograph and the sock are not copies but simu lacra that feed each other, performing what Baudrillard called “the ecstatic proliferation of the image.” Queer photography his tory backs it further: Peter Hujar’s tactile plasticity, Robert Map plethorpe’s tough rigidness, Bob Mizer’s beach-body tableaux. Even when feet aren’t the subject, they keep hijacking the scene: a heel digging into sand, a flexed arch redirecting the eye up ward, an ankle that quietly governs the pose. F EET IN C ONTEMPORARY M EDIA I N THE DIGITAL ERA , this fascination has intensified. Fast-for ward from classical sculpture to the Grindr grid, and feet re main one of the most explicitly fetishized body parts. Social media and the amateur porn site OnlyFans have turned foot fetishism into a curated digital art form worth billions. The porn industry has long relied on the staging of feet—angles, lighting, close-ups. The flex of a sole, the point of a toe, the tension of an ankle, especially how they twirl and contract dur ing the orgasm shot, also referred to as the money shot. And let’s not forget the images of accused killer Luigi Mangione’s moccasin-inspired loafers, his bare ankles exposed above the 12

Johnny Abbate. From the Stolen Socks series.

shoes, that circulated all over X and TikTok. Such platforms didn’t invent the fetish, of course, but they’ve have taken advantage of us foot freaks by industrializ ing it. Even celebrities know it—and play with it. Ricky Mar tin has not hidden his use, both as viewer and viewed, of the foot-fetish site wikiFeet, archive and encyclopedia of VIP’s soles. FeetFinder helps connect supply with demand in the cre ator industry. Generative artificial intelligence has recently flooded time lines with feet—sometimes as the butt of a joke (the program in cluded too many toes!), increasingly as erotica. The real story here isn’t “good versus bad rendering,” it’s how AI opera tionalizes the fetish. Make the foot credible and the whole body becomes believable. In Baudrillard’s terms, AI images can be read as third-order simulacra—circulating signs with no privi leged original. It’s kink 4.0: a loop of search, sight, arousal, rat ing, refinement. The platform doesn’t just host the kink; it trains it. Under that regime, the sock’s crease pattern is data; the damp outline on tile is metadata; the “almost-step” is a reusable prompt. The partial object is now programmable. As we have seen, the arc is continuous. Classical sculpture staged the foot as the body’s anchor. Photography showed that the foot could steal the scene through exposure control. Online platforms standardized that theft into genres. AI feeds it back as a set of adjustable sliders. Same device, new interfaces. The erotic power of feet is not an eccentric detour; it’s the spine of an image culture that has always asked us to finish the picture with our bodies. Feet have never really been “just feet”—they’ve always car ried more weight than we’ve acknowledged. They exist between movement and stillness, exposure and concealment, reality and fetish. They are our roots, they move us. From pedestal to plat form, from marble grain to pixel noise, the image plugs in at the foot—and so do we. So let a part stand for the whole and let pleas ure stop asking for permission from identity. That’s the queerest flex: building an erotic world on what holds us up.

TheG & LR

ESSAY When BDSM Went Mainstream M ATTHEW B AMBERG

R OBERT MAPPLETHORPE brought disci plined attention and innate æsthetic precision to the photographic process, exploring the kink of leather men engaged in the paraphilias of S/M in a way that led to greater acceptance of sexual experimentation and of photography as a some times risqué art form. The avant-garde artist did the seemingly undoable—he flustered right-wing politicians with talent and meticulousness by tantalizing the senses with an innovative use of light, shadow, texture, and homoerotic meaning. Mapplethorpe’s photographic innovations were foreshad owed by his interest in the Dadaist movement of the early 20th century, a time when Marcel Duchamp brought a mass-pro duced urinal into the realm of modern art by submitting Foun tain to a 1917 art exhibition. Fountain sneered at the art world’s pieties about technical skill and creativity, leading to the prover bial question of the day (and every day thereafter): What is art? Mapplethorpe discovered this anti-establishment form of sculp ture, known as readymade art, while attending the Pratt Institute School of Art in Brooklyn in the late 1960s, and Duchamp’s iconoclasm would remain with him to the end. The title Duchamp gave the urinal, Fountain , may refer to poses, enormous black and white cocks.” In the San Francisco bar scene of the late 1970s, it wasn’t unusual to see bathtubs in bars used as urinals, with one added dimension: a urine-soaked man reveling in the yellow torrent. This joy in the experience of piss-play is demonstrated in Mapplethorpe’s 1977 photograph Jim and Tom, Sausalito , which features two leather-clad men, one standing and urinating into the mouth of the other, who kneels before him. A decade earlier, the fusion of the talents of Mapplethorpe and Patti Smith, his rocker-performance artist girlfriend, helped catapult both artists to fame. Smith met Mapplethorpe by hap penstance after she arrived in New York City in 1967, finding him asleep when she arrived with her “little plaid suitcase” at the former apartment of mutual friends while seeking shelter. Their spontaneous attraction never abated, though their roman tic relationship lasted only a short time, ending after Smith dis covered Mapplethorpe’s nightly outings cruising men on the Matthew Bamberg is the author of Digital Art Photography for Dum mies and recently published a short story collection titled Coconut Grove Chronicles (KnowNot Florida Press). the stream of urine that flows into the porce lain tank, another connection to Map plethorpe’s later S/M photography of golden showers, part of a series that included what art critic Kieran Owens described in 1997 as “penis mutilation, anal penetration with a bull whip, leather-clad sadomasochistic

West Side piers overlooking the Hudson River. Mapplethorpe would later lure the men to a glossy black room in his apart ment to create his S/M photography. Mapplethorpe and Smith’s fortunes improved when he met Sam Wagstaff at a gallery show in 1972, then became romanti cally involved with him. By this time Smith understood Map plethorpe’s attraction to men. As a wealthy curator and collector, Wagstaff exerted significant influence on the art world. Map plethorpe was 25 and Wagstaff was fifty when they met. The former assisted the latter in fulfilling his repressed kink sexual ity, while Wagstaff, who was connected to New York’s elite, funded both Smith’s and Mapplethorpe’s artistic endeavors. Journalist Jerry Portwood wrote in 2014: “Sam Wagstaff was a handsome, charming high-society figure who could have done anything, but decided to leverage his money and privilege to shape modern American culture and make Mapplethorpe a star.” After Mapplethorpe had participated in and photographed gay kink sexuality for a few years, his knowledge of the sub culture piqued the curiosity of Wagstaff, who was eager to try it out. Mapplethorpe had begun exploring photography using a simple Polaroid Instamatic camera, but Wagstaff bought him a Hasselblad large-format camera that produced big, square neg the S/M subculture and understood the emotions associated with its practices, so his subjects felt comfortable with him. As Smith wrote in her memoir of her youth and her relationship with Mapplethorpe, Just Kids (2010): “Robert was not a voyeur. He always said that he had to be authentically involved with the work that came out of his S&M pursuit.” The second factor is that Mapplethorpe’s photographs featured both men and women, widening their appeal. It was this diversity and dignity that integrated depictions of S/M into his other work—such as the starkly lit images of both flowers and celebrities—and created an immense fascina tion with his photos. Mapplethorpe’s entire portfolio was based on classical beauty, elegant composition, and mastering the ma nipulation of light and shadow. Each black-and-white photo es tablishes a fluid, ethereal motion, whether the image is of Arnold Schwarzenegger flexing, a Black man’s gentle move ment in a blank space, a lone orchid before a high-contrast back ground, or the kink of tough-looking leather men whipping and bending. Mapplethorpe’s S/M performance art simulations cloud the idea that the pain inflicted by the practices shown could vary atives and allowed him to create crisper, more detailed images that could be repro duced at a larger scale while maintaining their visual integrity. Two factors helped Mapplethorpe create public acceptance for his S/M photography. The first was that he actively participated in

Robert Mapplethorpe’s S/M photographs featured both men and women, widening their appeal.

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