This was the hottest photo in the gay world in the 80’s

Nahh, still hot to me. I was about 16 when this hit. I couldn't believe his beauty.

Funny how taste changes.

No tats or steroids. The good old days.

The model, Brazilian-born Olympic pole-vaulter Tom Hintnaus, is still alive, and a hot daddy at 62

No, it doesn't.

Meh - I don't recall it being so extraordinary or talked about. There were many other images in the 80's besides this.

IIRC, there was vast billboard in Times Square with this image on it and it blew my tiny little gayling mind every time I remember seeing it.

I think the model's seeming passivity - the sense that he was something purely to be admired - came through as unusual at the time.

[quote] Meh - I don't recall it being so extraordinary or talked about.

Boy, I sure do.

[quote] I think the model's seeming passivity - the sense that he was something purely to be admired - came through as unusual at the time.

I thought since the camera is below him it looked like he was waiting with closed eyes for the viewer to come along and suck him off.

Still hot.

I wonder what the white thing in the background is.

That photo made a splash but it was tres bland. Similarly the Bruce Weber ad snaps of the chisel-chested curly blond whom Calvin built the lap pool for. The model that everyone genuinely had the hots for was "the Solafex guy" aka Scott Madsen, whose later life wasn't so pretty. (see link). It's odd that the true history of gay desire in the late 20th Century has been so quickly forgotten. For example, the most gay-lusted after movie star of the 70s wasn't any of the 'hunks' trumpeted by Hollywood, but rather, Michael York.

The boyish face and body that got a million little gay hearts racing.

I met him once in real life.

Classic more gorgeous in real life.

However, let's just say that not only was he not the sharpest pencil in the box, but he wasn't even sharpened in the first place.

Yes. A few years back someone here posted their adventures with him in his prime, after sitting next to him on a plane. Lucky, lucky, lucky!

I remember that ad.....I blew so many loads to it

The actual Bruce Weber /Calvin Klein ad that first created a stir was one of Jeff Aquilon sprawled on a bed shot from the feet. It was considered in the industry to be 'daring' and 'transgressive' because -- for the first time in half a century - it showed the male as a passive figure, ready to be admired and pleasured, which was a trope that throughout the 20s-60s, was reserved for women. (Not surprisingly, gay artists have always led it.) I can't find the actual ad. Here's another one of Aquilon by Weber.

This was the photo. I found it in a magazine and I couldn't believe my luck...or my eyes. He was the sexiest thing I have ever seen. I mastuirbated in the bathroom,the bedroom. I took him to school and looked at him in the bathroom stalls between classes.

This photo sent so many wishes and desires and just emotions through my head...if I had come across this guy somewhere, I wouldn't have known what to do.

Thanks for posting this.

R10, it is a chevron of Greek vernacular seaside architecture - as extant at the ancient port and later resort of Mykonos, for example.

No idea if the photo was actually taken on site, but the association is with the late 70s/early 80s jet-set socialites and their orbit in the Mediterranean.

In terms of portrayal of the male figure in the 80s, another very neglected figure who is long overdue for revival is photographer Patrick Russell, who did incredible work for Australian Vogue. Most of his fashion spreads, even with women, featured men. The magazine devoted two issues to Russell's immortalising of breathtaking blond male model of those years, Derham Tutton, including a double page spread of his glorious body. American and British Vogue and even the 'gay' GQ of the those years, would never have dared it.

^. Thank you. I found this Mykonos church on Wiki.

I guess Jackie visited there.

A Patrick Russell shot from Australian Vogue. As you can see, the tone definitely wasn't Anna Wintouresque, or that of her predecessors.

was this ad approx 10 years prior? interesting contrast

You're welcome, R20.

I should point out that the chevron, strictly speaking, is associated with the join of an angled roofline. However it has come to mean any triangular architectural treatment. The lights above the elevators at the Chrysler Building are chevrons.

I'm not sure if the one in the photo is structural. Chevrons appear as exterior wall and fireplace/kiln elements in Greece.

The company Chevron takes the shape as its logo.

It was a ground breaking iconic homoerotic image. So much so gay porn copied it with 80's porn god Bill Henson.

In the 60s & 70s there was almost nothing in mainstream advertising for gay men. That's why they used to buy After Dark magazine (whose photography and editorials remain amazing, and who gave Bruce Weber amongst others his first break), and the International Male underwear and leisurewear catalogues, which were then pitched to a gay audience. Switched on gay sophisticates in those years also used to buy German magazines -- I think Twen was one of them -- that featured the stunning photography the late gay photographer Will McBride, who used to snap beautiful fuckable hippies and youths etc. I always used come across copies in the homes of the rich. Here's a famous McBride photo up for auction:

I've said in another thread that photography is way hotter than film in terms of gay eroticism, and R25 is another quill on my bow via-a-vis that argument.

It's intensely erotic but is also beautifully composed.

Not hot

I used to disagree with you, R26, but I am coming around to your view.

I've noticed that elements of an erotic image can repel as much as arouse. And it's easier to control the elements in a still image compared to those in a moving image.

Not so hot now but in the 80's, it was very blatantly homoerotic for mainstream advertising.

Shot before low rise CK were available? Makes a big difference in terms of hotness.

The photographer was Bruce Weber wasn't it?

^ Yes..

Let's not forget the great photographer Kenn Duncan. Unlike Weber, most of America never saw his photography, as it only appeared in After Dark and Dance Magazine.

Weber's photographs of Marky Mark were also hot

Not so hot now but in the 50's some men were embarrassed to expose their navels.

There's a monograph on Kenn Duncan with an intro by Hans Eppendorfer -- whom German DLers will know. (And if you don't, you should hand in your gay card!)

I will not be ignored!

It's so interesting that OP and r11 BOTH claim to speak for the ENTIRE gay world in the 1980s... and yet , somehow, they diametrically disagree!

They must have been each appointed to that position of universal spokesman for all 80s homosexuals in colliding parallel universes!

Jim Palmer, show us your...you know...

The 70s bunch were fucking ugly and creepy.

Zumba with Tom

Does he have a penis?

For all of my 64 years, males of all ages and all body types, when stripped down to plain white briefs, have ALWAYS looked like they were wearing diapers.

Always.

You grew up in Milwaukee, right?

We wear diapers too!

Ahem...

That is an unimpressive package.

Scott Madsen was, for this little gayling anyway, well-nigh faint-inducingly beautiful.

Seems to have been a corrupt asshole in later life, but I appreciate his work in the 80s.

R46 Fred liked his tires rotated.

r11 beat me to it. I was much more taken by Scott Madsen's nuts resting on his Soloflex bench

Let's not forget Ken Haak. Any time we'd go to the mall in the 80s I'd make a beeline for B. Dalton to sneak peeks at this book

No.

It’s a great photo.

Great photo but all cotton white briefs look so dated and unflattering, even on a perfect physical specimen.

eww R22, Pete Rose and his nasty bowl cut. Corrupt man with issues too.

I’d include the great photographer Barry McKinley. He did a lot of work for GQ back in the day.

It's still hot as hell to me.

R51, Kevin looks like Lorenzo Lamas.

Those giant grandad pants were more of an American thing.

Are you sure the hottest wasn't a Jeff Stryker pose?

Girls! Girls! You're ALL unbearable cunts!

Girls, girls, girls!

And THAT right there is the hottest photo of the 80s, bitches!

What porn did Fred Harding do?

I first tingled at the Jim Palmer ads. Such a beautiful body and a great guy!

Jim Palmer was an amazing looking man

Jim Palmer had a great natural body and just the right amount of body hair.

Was that image used as an ad, too, r16? I remember it as part of a photo spread in The Soho Weekly News in 1978. From a 2017 article in VMAN:

[quote]It began in December 1978, when the Soho Weekly News ran a portfolio of images by a relatively unknown photographer named Bruce Weber. His subject was Jeff Aquilon, a water polo player from Pepperdine University. The pretext was an underwear shoot; the subtext was an intimate, erotic reverie that was startling in its narcissistic intensity. If the content wasn’t exactly new (you could find limpid male nudes throughout the century in the work of Baron von Gloeden, Herbert List, and George Platt Lynes), the context was. Until Weber shot Aquilon, male models were men like Joe MacDonald, square-jawed paragons of unambiguous masculinity. Weber proposed a different kind of male ideal—ambiguous, submissive, sensuous—and the unabashed homoeroticism of this proposal flipped the lid on the hidebound way men were depicted in the media. Man as sexualized object was the linchpin of gay porn, not mass culture. Weber legitimized the notion for the mainstream, amplifying narcissism as the soul of male sexuality, gay or straight. And, no question, Aquilon made a stunning poster boy. From the 21st-century vantage point, he looks like the natural evolution of an earlier male pinup, Joe Dallesandro, who insinuated a whiff of polymorphous perversity into pop culture at the beginning of the ‘70s.

I believe this pic is from the same photo shoot.

Warhol working with Joe Dallesandro were responsible for the two of the most compelling images. The poster for flesh with its com on:"Can a boy be too attractive?" (I think the photo was also by Kenn Duncan.) And secondly, Warhol's cover the the Rolling Stones Sticky Fingers album showing the bulge in Dallesandro's jeans. Both absolute classics.