Victorianism's preoccupation with masculine ideals, in body and mind, led to innumerable images of naked or near-naked body builders, muscle men, weight lifters, and other athletes. Which is a good thing, because they so viciously suppressed gay erotica that such images provide our only clue that men actually took their clothes off in Victorian times.
Herewith, a sweet classic shot of hot hunks in the gay 90s.
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In 2010 I wouldn't kick any of them out of bed ...
As late as the 1950s, YMCAs banned swim suits in their pools -- something about lint clogging the filters. And swimming nude was an option in the pool at the University of Oklahoma at the time. Male nakedness (among males) was common until the rise of co-ed activities and the increasing awareness of gays began to make straight boys self-conscious. (We had communal showers at public pools and college dorms. Now boys go home after the game sweaty so as not to have to disrobe in front of their fellows.)
In 1972 as a freshman at Indiana University, I had to take a physical education class and chose Swimming. On the first day of class, I was surprised and intrigued that the class would be encouraged to swim nude, because that eliminated the chance that wet swim trunks would be left in the lockers, then forgotten and allowed to form mildew.
I then learned that the Men's Pool had "Open Swim" hours, when all the male students, faculty and staff could come in and swim nude. Since the Phys Ed building was heated generously by steam, this became more popular as the autumn progressed into winter.
That was probably the only phys-ed class in my academic career for which I was given an "A" grade. But a few years later, the university said the men had to wear trunks, because the women had to wear swimsuits at the Women's Pool and the new federal Title IX regulations prohibited a disparity of facility usage rules based on gender. (Of course, allowing the women to skinny dip in their pool was out of the question!)
The back-story: Once the wealthy homeowner was done hand-picking the work crew, he insisted that his new ceiling mouldings be installed using a special adhesive -- but he didn't tell them it was the slowest-drying adhesive he could find.
There is more art in the picture than we might suppose: 2 Guys, 2 Mirrors, 1 camera. That is why the mouldings are cut by the unexpected diagonals near the top of the picture. Despite the way the lighting leads one to see the figures as six different men, the mirror imaging gives the image a surprising underlying unity because we know the figures are repeating in the proposed three dimensional reality.
One might also contemplate why it is that the men are not posed in the standard more or less frontal way typical of Caryatids since Fifth Century Athens. It does appear that Mr. Male Pattern Baldness is a bit taller than the other guy. This could make it difficult to pose them as carrying the cornice on the tops of their heads, but I would suspect that more of what is going on is that the posing and lighting prevent us from seeing their otherwise appealing external genitalia.
Nude swimming with mates was common in the 19th and early 20th centuries in America and Britain, the supposed bastions of Decency. Lithe lads and big bellied elders swam and sunned together, homosocially and happily. Obviously, there must have been a lot of checking and comparing and more than a bit of very discreet diddling, but the ability to see and share nakedness was available in ways that are denied now, and that's a shame and shameful.
Although historically obvious, it bears mentioning that one had to be white in order to participate in such men's club camaraderie.
I wonder if this sort of photograph was the inspiraton for Jean Cocteau's staging of the grand enterance hall to the Beast's castle in the surrealist film "Beauty and Beast" in which the table was supported by kneeling nude males and wall candle scones were mounted to the walls by muscular bare male arms. Lovely to see and erotic to behold. Classic male nude forms are sorely lacking in today's modern society where everything is presented with obligatory overtones of blatant commercial sexualiy.
Jamie O'Neill's novel "At Swim Two Boys" has many scenes of two Irish lads stripping down to swim in Dublin's chilly bay circa 1916.