By Jude Jones
Greg Laden once said of the Olympic Games, “Everyone knows that the original Olympics […] were all about watching naked men.” Since their inception, the Olympics have been a hotbed of homoerotic expression, whether that be the ancient Olympiads, oiled and naked, wrestling each other with penises in mock erection, to Tom Daley and his endless Instagram thirst traps (his most recent post proclaims, “Six boys, 5 rings 🇬🇧💦” to a photo that would seem more appropriate promoting OnlyFans content on X than Team GB).
In Ancient Times…
If the last decade has seen some unfortunately regressive pushback against LGBTQ+ representation at the Olympics then, namely from Vladimir Putin during the 2014 Sochi Winter Games, this is markedly out of line with the event’s queer origins.
A modern painting of the Greek God Zeus and his boy-lover, Ganymede. The Ancient Olympics were held in celebration of Zeus, the King of the Olympians.
Ancient Greece’s cultural queerness is no historical secret. And the ancient Olympics were entangled in this, intended as a celebration of the young male body. This meant that the events were originally far more than simple sporting games. Rather, they unfolded as a Dionysian celebration of all things debauched, the “ultimate pagan entertainment package, where every human diversion could be found,” as writes Tony Perrottet, author of The Naked Olympics: The True Story of the Ancient Games.
The 530 BCE Euphiletos Painter Panathenaic Amphora depicts a flock of naked men in a running race, a staple of the Ancient Olympics.
Sex, and especially gay sex, was part of this. At the Nemea ruins, the site of some of ancient Greece’s biggest sporting festivals outside the Olympics, graffitied love messages written from one male athlete to another have been found. And, as Perrottet continues, “Pederasty was inherent to Greek gymnasium culture […] you had all these men mentoring prepubescent boys.”
Sexuality and homoeroticism were, of course, part of the sporting activities, too. Men had to meet certain visual beauty standards to qualify and had to compete either nearly or fully naked, essentially turning contests into live soft-core porn. In one case, recorded by classical historian Plutarch, a Spartan athlete was disqualified for looking “too mature” and was only allowed to re-enter when his older, male lover vouched for his youth to the king of Sparta (the ancient Olympics, it seems, were a battle of the twinks).
Wrestling, or “pankration”, was another staple sport and involved two naked men striking, grappling, and choking one another until one of the two submitted. Only biting and eye gouging were prohibited.
Even the great Socrates (who Plato records as having had a string of younger male lovers) was not immune to the homoerotic charms of the Greek sporting space. In one visit to an Athenian gymnasium found in Plato’s Charmides, Socrates allegedly shouted, as a gust blew up one athlete’s robes, “my God! I caught a glimpse of what’s beneath young Charmides’ cloak. I burned. I just couldn’t contain myself.”
Two more ancient athletes wrestling, as depicted on a terracotta vase from 500 BCE. This version also shows a trainer and an onlooker watching the match.
In 393 CE, the Christian Emperor Theodosius I declared the end of the ancient Olympics, along with all other pagan festivals, for being out of joint with his new, prudish religious settlement.
Three years earlier, he had made homosexual acts illegal for the same reasons. “[T]he nudity, the joy in physical beauty, the sheer exhilarating mix of the Games,” writes British art historian Dr. Kevin Childs, “were at odds with his appropriation of a new religion and much too redolent of the old.” It is significant, for Childs, that homosexuality and the Olympics were banned around the same time; it was “as if to reinforce the link between the two.”
… and in Modern Times, Too
A poster for the 1912 Olympic Games in Stockholm, featuring plenty of naked young men.
… And the same for the Paris games twelve years later.
The modern Olympics were launched in 1894, by the French educator Pierre de Coubertin. Anxious about the declining virility of modern, Industrial-era men, he sought to revive the Olympic Games – which were, in his romanticised mind, the pinnacle of a manly, heteronormative masculinity – as a way to combat this perceived feminisation.
This inherent desire to promote an idealised conception of the male body led to what the Canadian ex-Olympian and sports historian Bruce Kidd has called the “homoerotic era” of Olympic poster art, lasting formally from 1912 to 1924, but extending in lifespan to at least 1952 and possibly beyond.
The images are evocative of those much-memed Soviet propaganda posters of similarly homoerotic subtexts, depicting gorgeous, muscled, and virtually naked men in close proximity to one another. It’s stuff that would make Tom of Finland sweat.
A Soviet propaganda poster celebrating the strength of Russian athletes.
A poster promoting the 1980 Olympic Games in Moscow, with a message of strength and unity.
The inspirations in this oeuvre are undoubtedly (and semi-ironically) classical, chiselled romantically after deified representations of the athletic body inherited from Greek art and sculpture. One famous such example of this classically-transported “body fascism” is Adolf Hitler’s adoration of Myron’s Discobolus, which presents a nude athlete preparing to throw a disk. By 1938, the Nazi leader had become so obsessed that he purchaed a 1st-century bronze copy of the statue, only two years after the Nazi state hosted the Olympic Games in an infamously botched attempt to display the physical superiority of the Aryan body.
The homoerotic Greek “Discobolus” statue featuring front-and-centre in the poster for the 1932 Olympic Games.
Before it makes a return to celebrate the 1948 Olympic Games in London, three years after the end of World War II. Hitler’s fondness for the statue clearly didn’t affect its global reception.
In 1932, the conservative American Saturday Evening Post promoted that year’s Los Angeles Olympic Games with a front-page illustration of glistening, muscle-clad men courtesy of J.C. Leyendecker, who at the time lived with his same-sex life-partner, Charles A. Beach. Later, in the 1960s, gay German artist Jürgen Wittdorf produced his Youth and Sport print series, circulated in government-run youth movement newspapers and depicting Olympians and other sportsmen in various “friendly” scenarios.
Jürgen Wittendorf’s linocut print “Under the Shower” was installed in a Leipzig gymnasium in 1964, then disseminated by the GDR government in youth magazines.
Wittendorf’s portrait of young German sports students from the same year is no less erotic.
Even David Hockney had his go, producing posters displaying lean young men in abstracted swimming pools for both the 1972 Munich and 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games. By then, the first openly gay Olympian, English figure skater John Curry, had won his barrier-breaking 1976 gold medal. Although his outing by German tabloid newspaper Bild-Zeitung caused a minor press scandal just before the 1976 games, the news was generally disregarded by the press and public, opening the way, if only tentatively, for a more inclusive Olympics.
Gay British artist David Hockney’ designed a poster for the 1972 Munich Olympic Games, featuring his favourite swimming pool motif.
Four years later, the British figure skater John Curry became the first openly queer man to compete at the Olympics and took home a gold medal.
Yet, if the Olympics has lost its “gay soul,” as Kevin Childs proclaims, the recent success and public visibility of queer athletes at the fames is gradually winning it back. This year, at least 144 LGBTQ+ athletes are competing at the Paris Olympics, including a record number of out male athletes and of nonbinary participants. We are entering the era where Olympic visual culture can, at last, be openly queer, one Tom Daley thirst-trap at a time.
Jude Jones (@jude_j0nes2002) is the Managing Editor at GAY45 and specialises in writing on fashion, music, and art.
– – –
GAY45 is committed to publishing a diversity of articles, prose and poetry. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. And here’s our email if you wanna send a letter: [email protected].
– – –
When we learn of a mistake, we acknowledge it with a correction. If you spot an error, please let us know.
– – –
ONE MORE THING… EXCLUSIVE CONTENT.
For your dedication and support, we offer subscriptions including fresh exclusive content every week, access to THE9 newsletter before being published, and more. For our weekly premium newsletter subscribe to Substack.
We have a printed, signed and numbered collectable edition of the magazine. Look for it here.
GAY45. SUPPORT. WE NEED YOU.
Support GAY45’s award-winning journalism. We need help for our mission.
You can donate to or support our Queer Journalism Campus on PayPal. You can also buy our merchandise.
We appreciate it. Thanks for reading.
