boysbyryan

Andrew the Athlete

Added 2020-10-31 03:01:30 +0000 UTC

A few months ago, I was able to plan out a safe and properly social distanced photo shoot with the gorgeous Andrew Haan. Andrew is a unique beauty; 21 years old, half-chinese, slender but with an extremely chiseled physique that he works hard at while in quarantine in Vermont. He's always joking, grinning wildly and sticking out his tongue at the camera. Unlike the first time we shot, he had no problem stripping down completely, offering his entire body to our shared art. It was a wonderful relief for both of us to be creating again after cooped up at home for so long.

A longtime athlete, Andrew was the perfect model to explore themes of exhibition, power and sexuality found in men's sports. The history of homoeroticism in sports is as old as the first olympic games in ancient Greece. In fact, the original contestants were nude and free, a joyous, voyeuristic celebration of the youthful male form, in time when sexual relations between men did not conflict with masculine sport identity. Today, sport often remains a complicated contradiction of male expression- heightened sensual displays of perfect bodies in close, loving contact-- governed by a modern close-minded idea of masculinity and sexuality, brought on by hundreds of years of puritanical dogma.

"We see this paradox of strength and vulnerability in many aspects of the folk cultures of male friendship groups such as athletic teams. Homoeroticism and the stylized (playful, ritualized) sadomasochism we find in these groups, work to affirm heterosexual masculinity as the “correct” goal. Masculinity studies in the past three decades or so have relied upon feminist reinterpretations of Freud and other psychoanalytic thinking in order to understand the social construction of masculinity in “patriarchal societies”. Most of these theorists accept Freud’s premise that we are all born with bisexual predispositions and that society works hard at creating the “appropriately” heterosexual male and heterosexual female. This notion that heterosexuality is not a biological given but must be socially constructed draws our attention to the precise processes by which a society creates “manly men.” This approach also argues the surprising point that heterosexual masculinity is a fragile construction, despite its some-times brash and confident performance. In part this fragility is due to the unreliability of the penis, the organ men often use as a measure of masculinity. Boys and men always must “prove” their masculinity in tests devised by themselves and others. Initiation rituals can provide a formulaic, more impersonal solution to these psychological and sociological anxieties encountered in everyday life. Male friendship also very often has a homorerotic element, and the nudity found so often in male play simultaneously draws on the energy of that homoeroticism and affirms the players’ heterosexuality and 'manliness'." (an excerpt from this essay here.)

Although I was only photographing one person, I was able to explore these themes by multiplying Andrew into a whole team with some photoshop magic. Technology is especially important to art and storytelling during the COVID crisis.