Gay biker images
It was a sunny weekend in when photographer Sylvan Rand hopped on the back of his friend’s motorcycle and headed for a sequestered farm in the New Jersey countryside. As the hours passed in a haze of food, cigarettes, love, and bikes, he joined in the festivities of an unofficial motorcycle run, where gay men gathered to enjoy each other’s company in an insulated, utopian setting.
The group was composed of ordinary men, men who worked hard throughout the week and made their sanctuary away from the hustle and bustle of metropolitan life. The pervasive image of the motorcycle enthusiast of the era was defined in enormous part by the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club, but the photographer stresses that these were not in fact the “tough guy” bikers of popular culture; the beauty lay in part in the proof that they were just regular people relishing their days off.
Rand was not himself a part of the group but an outsider, allowed into the inner circle for a few days. He came in knowing hardly anyone, but in those terminal weekend hours, the men had become
Motorcycle Leathers and the Construction of Masculine Identities Among Homosexual Men
The following sheet was presented as part of a panel discussion on the role of motorcycles in American accepted culture, held at the Annual National Conference of Popular Culture Association and American Culture Association held in Atlanta, Georgia in April
The leather-jacketed male on his motorcycle has been an archetypal image in American culture since the release of the movie The Wild One in [1] Marlon Brando’s character, Johnny Strabler, in white t-shirt, leather jacket and Harley cap, immediately became synonymous with offensive masculinity and disregard for social norms (below, highest left). Subsequent films, including EasyRider and Chrome and Hot Leather, perpetuated the image of the biker as a free-spirit, an outlaw, and a renegade.[2] More recently, Arnold Schwarznegger re-popularized biker macho and its associated attire in the Terminator movie series. Bikers were and are stereotyped as overtly masculine, hard-fighting, sometimes hard-drinking, ‘real’ men. And almost as soon
.
.