Friendship Forever
I was surprised to learn recently that it was common for men in western cultures1 to hold hands throughout the 19th century, and that friendship for both men and women was generally valued much more highly than it is today, a time when people say things like “No New Friends” and this:
Contrast this to:
From the Civil War through the 1920′s, it was very common for male friends to visit a photographer’s studio together to have a portrait done as a memento of their love and loyalty. Sometimes the men would act out scenes; sometimes they’d simply sit side-by-side; sometimes they’d sit on each other’s laps or hold hands. The men’s very comfortable and familiar poses and body language might make the men look like gay lovers to the modern eye — and they could very well have been — but that was not the message they were sending at the time… Because homosexuality, even if thought of as a practice rather than an identity, was not something publicly expressed, these men were not knowingly outing themselves in these shots; their poses were common, and simply reflected the intimacy and intensity of male friendships at the time — none of these photos would have caused their contemporaries to bat an eye.
— “Bosom Buddies: a Photo History of Male Affection”
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Πηγή: secretorum.life
