Joseph Faura

 

I found this image in an online archive three years ago. Recently, I learned it belonged to a series of photographs by Russell Lee, an American photographer for the Farm Security Administration (FSA). Lee was responsible for many iconic images of rural United States during the Great Depression. The more I look at this photograph, the more I try to decode the moment it preserves. The subjects are young adults, talking in front of a bank. However, the title Boys and girls feels like an attempt at distracting potential viewers from the obvious question the image raises: are the two young men embracing affectionately, and, if so, how would this have been interpreted by someone then living in Caldwell, Idaho? The website from which I acquired the image suggests that the boys could have been brothers; it points out their facial similarities and even their almost identical ear shape. Perhaps the boys’ embrace was merely a sibling’s game. One comment on the same website suggest that the young men were pretending to be lovers in order to evade the army draft. What all these assumptions reveal is that physical affection between men—especially that depicted in images of America’s recent past—is considered so problematic that the image captured must have another explanation. However, numerous other photographs from that time depict this kind of intimacy. Is it possible that rural Americans during this time were more open about same-sex affection than contemporary Americans believe they were? Were they freer toward sexuality than we are today?  If so, then what makes this kind of affection so taboo in contemporary society?