On Sunday, when I ran a gallery of the late Tim Hetherington’s tender images of sleeping American soldiers on TheDailyBeast.com – they are in a show at Yossi Milo Gallery in New York – I was surprised at the homophobic comments I got just because some of the boys were shirtless. Amazing how images of female flesh are unproblematic, but when pictures of men are at all sexually charged – or even when it’s just some pictures of young guys asleep – discomfort levels go through the roof. What would some viewers say about ancient images of Meleager, or about Michelangelo’s triumphant naked Christ? Actually, they might be right to see them as homoerotic – and wrong, of course, to see that as pernicious.
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