Top Quotes: “The Male Gazed: On Hunks, Heartthrobs, and What Pop Culture Taught Me About (Desiring) Men” — Manuel Betancourt
“It’s hard to overstate the cultural impact The Little Mermaid had when it was first released in November 1989. The Walt Disney Company, which hadn’t animated a fairy tale since 1959's Sleeping Beauty, was taking a gamble with this twist on Hans Christian Andersen’s story about a young mermaid who falls in love with a landlocked prince. For decades, the Mouse House had pivoted away from animated musicals and had found itself unable to recapture the magic that once made Walt’s pioneering productions cultural touchstones. But by the time Ron Clements and John Musker’s adaptation of this beloved classic made it to the big screen, it seemed impossible to imagine Disney animation doing anything else. The animated tale got great reviews and became the biggest box office hit the company had had in a decade. It then went on to win two Academy Awards, thus cementing its arrival as a watershed moment in Hollywood history. The Disney blockbusters that would follow — including Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, and The Lion King — all owe their existence to the breakout success of Ariel and her friends.
What’s striking about The Little Mermaid, a film whose VHS tape I almost wore out growing up, is the way it was underestimated by its own studio. Famously, Disney Studios chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg initially balked at green-lighting the idea and later believed the film, due to it not being a “boys’ movie,” would be less successful than the animated film he hoped would reignite the studios animation roster, an anthropomorphic take on Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist. But Oliver & Company, which starred Joey Lawrence and Billy Joel as, respectively, an orphaned kitten and a carefree mutt, stands now as nothing more than a 1980s curiosity.”
“Sharing the distinction of being some of the few male Disney characters to show off their chests with pride, they echo the kind of titillating “dirty” photographs the Finnish artist known as Tom of Finland used as basis for his stylized and highly masculinized homoerotic fetish art. These weren’t just (animated) men one pined away for; these were men who gleefully invited our gawking gazes, insisting we imagine a less PG-rated type of “happy ending.” Oh, to think what Myra and Tyler would have made of these visions of masculine splendor!
Not coincidentally, all three of these characters (Triton, Caston, and Hercules) were designed and animated by Andreas Deja, a detail that might explain why my younger self was so drawn to these three animated men. Deja, an openly gay Polish-born German American animator, drew inspiration from what he knew best: there were ready-made templates for such parodies of masculinity surrounding him in Los Angeles.”
“There’s something bashful about a man wearing nothing but briefs. That’s why its arrival in advertising campaigns in the 1980s was greeted with such breathless adulation. For, if we are to trust American Photographer magazine, there was a day in 1982 when “the world awoke to find that sex had changed.” This was two years before I was born, so in cases like these, I’m stuck trusting the truthfulness of such a hyperbolic pronouncement if not, perhaps, its accuracy. It was that year that Calvin Klein launched what would become one of the most successful ad campaigns of all time, plastering a sun-licked picture of Olympic pole vaulter Tom Hintnaus on a forty-five-foot Times Square billboard. The Bruce Weber photograph, which featured Hintnaus languidly leaning against a bleach-white wall in Santorini, his bulge front and center in a pair of Calvin Kleins signature white briefs, shocked many a bystander, causing a flurry of controversy that paved the way for the decades-long run of CK ads featuring beautiful male models in little else than tight-fitting, branded underwear. With his eyes closed, Hintnaus’s tanned body did most of the communicating. As curator Diana Edkins told American Photographer in their “10 Pictures That Changed America” feature, “It was the height, the epitome of a sexual liberation, primarily for men,” adding that the photo changed what advertising could be and could show from then on.””
“Originally designed in the 1930s as an offshoot of the jockstrap, boasting the same, ahem, support but with a European twist (inspired, as lore has it, by a postcard from the French Riviera picturing a man wearing a tight-fitting swimsuit), these “Jockeys” went from hot new item to run-of-the-mill apparel in the decades that followed. Hollywood, though, opted for years to still feature the reliable pair of boxers lest those thighs (and bulges) make their films look racier than they’d otherwise be. That is until the briefs went mainstream in the 1980s.”
