May 14, 2004  |  By: Brian Moylan  | COMMENTS     

THERE IS SOMETHING about a man in uniform that many people can’t resist. So a look through “At Ease: Navy Men of World War II,” a new photo book assembled by gay historian Evan Bachner that contains various homoerotic photos of comely young men, should satisfy the most discriminating gay male appetites.

The book, which Bachner will be discussing at Lambda Rising on Thursday, May 20, seems like another addition to the gay aesthetic — the erotic catalogue that ranges from Tom of Finland’s drawings to modern pornography — and that its author is just another photographer with access to an aircraft carrier and an Abercrombie & Fitch catalogue on his mind.

There’s a photo of a nude Navy gunner behind the barrels of a turret, and pictures of men taking showers and swimming together. In one photo, uniformed men appear to be staring lustfully at each other through the bars at a brig, while in others Navy men are seen having fun in their bunks.

But, after looking at the credits accompanying the photos, it becomes apparent that Bachner is not the photographer, and these photos were actually taken during World War II by the Naval Aviation Photographic Unit.

“I found myself finding at least 1,000 pictures that are figurative,” says Bachner, a longtime collector of photographs and an amateur photographic historian who lives in New York City. “They are people in everyday activities and there is a complete lack of irony. [It’s] different from the Abercrombie & Fitch catalogue, which is all about irony and trying to recapture those feelings.”

AFTER SEEING A PHOTO of the nude gunner in a Brooklyn museum in 1997, Bachner, 47, says he became obsessed with finding out everything about the picture and the photographer, Horace Bristol. The photos didn’t have a copyright, so he assumed Bristol took them for the U.S. government.

Bachner then learned about the Naval Aviation Photographic Unit, formed in 1942 by photographer Edward J. Steichen, had six photographers travel with the Navy and take pictures of military men training, in combat and in their free time.

The photographs appeared in newspapers and magazines during World War II, but most of those published were of men in battle. The portraits and pictures of men at ease, like the 150 in Bachner’s new book, were rarely published or displayed.

Bachner found the collection at a National Archives facility in Greenbelt, Md. The Naval Aviation Photographic Unit photos were included among 400,000 pictures in boxes that were either incompletely indexed or not indexed at all. He spent about 30 days over the next five years going through all the photos and selecting those that appealed to him.

“It’s really just images of men that I found compelling,” he says. “Heroes as ordinary people are just as compelling as a sexy picture, and when you get both, why not use those?”

Because the photographs are not copyrighted and are considered public property, Bachner was free to use them in whatever capacity he saw fit. The result was “At Ease,” his first book, which was published by Harry N. Abrams Inc., a New York-based publishing company.

Howard Bristol took this photo of a naked gunner in the St. Georges Channel, off the coast of Britain, and it sparked photo historian Evan Bachner’s interest in photography about World War II

“Really, the purpose of the book is to honor the men and show them in pictures that are not really the war shots, pictures of men in battle, but as they were, very ordinary people who lived as ordinary a life as they could while on an aircraft carrier during that period,” says Bachner, whose father served in the Navy during World War II.

Bachner, who holds an MBA from Columbia University, currently is working on completing other books from the photo collections, including one about women in World War II.

“The photos are clearly homo-social and I think men felt differently about being close in the ‘pre-gay’ days,” he says of “At Ease.” “To us, they are clearly homoerotic, there’s no denying that. They have a homoerotic content for me. Were they meant that way? I don’t think so.”