Sailors in Erotic Art (NSFW)

Sailors in Erotic Art

Some images are closer to check than erotic, such as this one from 1928 imaginatively titled Sailor and Girl.

Sailor and Girl

Many of these images are of historical scenes, the sailor has also often been the figure of erotic fiction and images, from John Cleland's Fanny Hill in 1740 (and its later illustrations by Edouard-Henri Avril) and Thomas Rowlandson erotiques such through to modern erotic work in drawn or even photographic media.

Untitled print Tomas Rowlandson

Sailors are intrinsically linked to sex and erotic imagery, why I can only guess.

Fanny Hill and the Sailor Edouard-Henry Avril

Then recently while reading Queering the Subversive Stitch, Joseph McBrinn I stumbled across the art of Tom of Finland (Touko Laaksonen, Finnish, 1920-1991), yes I know as I have been told by a good friend, he is apparently huge as a gay icon, but somehow had slipped under my radar. Sailors were very much a key image in his work.

Sailor's Dream

Although from Finland, most of Toms/Touko's work depicts US sailors in homoerotic scenes. His characters typically with exaggerated masculine forms and genitalia, much in the way the satirical artists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries would exaggerate the features of their characters. 

This image from an advert in 1995, shows an original 1945 image of a submarine returning from war, with two modern-day sailors kissing, while not erotic it was controversial at the time.

 

Sailors Kissing

Other advertising from the same a era used sailors to portray gay men also, but in part due to the pun they could use. In the early 1990s the US government had acknowledged that they needed to do something about AIDS having initially ignored it a condition that only affected gay men and drug users, and the campaign for safer sex was rolled out.

 

Semen Kit

1992

The Semen Kit was one such advert, what maybe surprising is that it was just a year before the Don't Ask Don't Tell policy was introduced by the Clinton administration., And while being non-hetrosexual was illegal in the US military.

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