UCLA Center for the Study of Women

What is the relationship between dance and pornography? Can we trace a genealogy of gay pornography? How has the notion of the pornographic been deployed in the queering of male dancing bodies? How has the body of one male dancer been reappropriated and reinscribed within queer sexual iconography?

In May of 1912, the world’s first male ballet star, Vaslav Nijinsky, launched an assault on the proprieties of Paris’ cultural elite. For three years, Nijinsky had garnered international acclaim for his unparalleled virtuosity and dramatic ability. He had also earned a degree of what queer scholar Kevin Kopelson has termed “lilac-hued notoriety” for a rather public affair with his director, Serge Diaghilev. But with the premiere of his first choreographic endeavor, Afternoon of a Faun, Nijinsky’s queer eroticism began to outstrip his technical prowess in the public imaginary. For in this performance, he abandoned the familiar pirouettes and grand jetés for which he was famed and simulated masturbation on the stage of the Théâtre du Châtelet.

In the ensuing decades, Nijinsky’s body became a metaphor for ambiguous sexuality, mobilized and molded for various creative ends by queer observers who read in his autoerotic gesture a refusal of the heteronormative strictures of ballet. His image—often conflated with his legendary turn as the Faun—inspired homoerotic productions in painting, photography, literature, dance, and film. Focusing on boudoir-style photography of male dancers and the first widely-distributed gay pornographic film, Wakefield Poole’s Boys in the Sand, I trace the erotic legacy and lineage of Nijinsky and his Faun.