Wednesday, May 2, 2007

Dennis Farnon and his Orchestra - Caution! Men Swinging (1957)


The 50s were a bad era to in which to be a homosexual. Subtlety had to be used when writing about or otherwise depicting homosexuality without being labeled one yourself and thus having your life ruined. This album cover seems to fail on almost every count. Aside from the blatantly obvious name and its implication of gay swingers having a good time, we see blatant phallic imagery in the clarinet and how happy its player seems to be. There is the fact that the clarinet player is straddling a sawhorse in such a way as to make his crotch extremely prominent. And then there's the guy in the foreground, creepily fantasizing about the whole thing. I don't know what the significance of the ladder is, though. I think it's just a ladder.

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