(There are well-documented stories of gay soldiers in the U.S. But of course a significant number of these guys found themselves at least partway up the Kinsey scale, and had experienced in some way sex with other men, whether just a fleeting encounter or something more permanent. To them, sex was for men and women, end of story, and God knows there are no women in these pictures. It would literally never occur to a lot of these guys that their photos give off sexual heat. Most kids - especially poor kids, but everyone - had far less of a sense of physical privacy than we do.

Tenement kids slept three and four to a bed.

A soldier from a Kansas farm had spent his youth skinny-dipping in the local pond with his friends plenty of outhouses, and even some school bathroom stalls, had more than one seat city high-school kids showered in an open room with nozzles along the wall, sans curtains or dividers, daily after gym class. “Just grab-ass,” they’d say.Įven outside the service, men of that era probably saw each other naked more than we realize. As Bowers points out, practical jokes that many of us would now consider invasive - slipping a hand down someone’s pants to tweak his penis, say - were within the realm of just-boys-being-boys high jinks. If you served on the field of combat, you saw other men naked a lot more than you might today, even if you go to the gym after work. There’s no privacy in a foxhole showers were rare and often communal, and toilets were open-hole latrines.

Moreover, we forget - and are reminded by an essay in the book by a World War II Marine named Scotty Bowers - about the physical closeness that these fighting men lived with. As for the candid nudity, there are too many of these pictures out there in the world for them to have been made on the sneak, and a World War II soldier who carried a camera (and quite a few did there’s a lot of downtime in a war zone, in between the scenes of mayhem) wouldn’t have been able to hide it easily. Some (like the pyramid pose below) were certainly set up for the picture. Well, chances are they weren’t creep shots. Bathing at a spring on Guadalcanal, 1943.

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