Virilizing and Valorizing Homoeroticism: Eugen Sandow’s Queering of Body Cultures Before and After the Wilde Trials

When the art of posing was exploited by Oscar Wilde and bodybuilding performer Eugen Sandow, both achieved worldwide notoriety. While Wilde fashioned but concealed his body as the effeminate aesthete, Sandow fashioned and revealed his body as a naked Herculean god for both camera and stage. Yet after the Labouchère Amendment, when Wilde was persecuted as a poseur and prosecuted, Sandow was not censored, even though his homosexuality and homosexual following were a well-known public secret. Amidst the homophobic panic unleashed by the Wilde trials, Sandow’s posing was reframed as Sandow’s Physical Culture, repackaged as a patriotic strategy for achieving imperial manliness and National Efficiency, while providing licit new rituals for intense homosocial interaction with bared male bodies lauded by Uranists and Unisexuals. In the battle of virility over effeminacy, this article reveals how the queering of Sandow’s body cultures facilitated their circulation as multifarious signs, simultaneously aspirational and erogenous, edifying and homoerotic, permissive and perverse.