Just as the female body has been exalted in Western painting from the Renaissance on, so has the male body played a prominent role in the history of photography. Despite the homophobic moralism of the dominant culture, male eroticism has been a frequent theme of photographers, from the 19th-century pioneer Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden up to the current work of Bruce Weber. Clearly, a great deal has changed since the semiclandestine circulation of the baron’s photos—indeed, Weber’s unabashedly admiring images appear in fashion magazines these days with great regularity—but a veil of alibis still