Heavenly Bodies: Mormon Male Homoerotics in the Sacred Art of Arnold Friberg

A tan, bare-chested man stands in the foreground to the right, half turned away from the viewer. His right foot is perched on a rock, causing his studded leather kilt to hike up, exposing a hairless and muscular thigh. His vascular arms and neck are taut, and in one leather-cuffed hand he holds a sword. He turns to look at an oncoming enemy. His sword creates a visual barrier to the flock he protects, and his light skin acts as a visual metaphor of righteousness in stark contrast to the darker skin and hairy body of his foe. This man is the embodiment of male virility and physical prowess, the protector of a nation in peril.This striking tableau is one of many painted by Arnold Friberg depicting a scene from the Book of Mormon. Titled Ammon Defends the Flocks of King Lamoni (fig. 1), this 1952–1955 painting references a story about the hero Ammon from Alma 17. Friberg's art has been widely utilized by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for much of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in devotional materials, official publications, and decorations for the walls of church buildings. His most frequent subjects are men in action; his religious paintings depict heroes from scripture while his patriotic paintings showcase Canadian Mounted Police and the Founding Fathers of America. But a Friberg man is always identifiable by his square jaw and broad shoulders atop slim hips. And despite the ancient Israelite origins of the characters in his Book of Mormon paintings, Friberg consistently whitewashes his subjects, depicting men who would be more at home in Venice Beach than Zarahemla.1Friberg's work gained prominence in the early to mid-twentieth century, during a transitional period in American culture, and the carved physiques of Friberg's subjects highlight a fascination with the male form, celebrating hypermasculinity by exaggerating sexual difference: hard versus soft, active versus passive, and male versus female. Friberg created male figures who not only adhered to but superseded Western standards of male beauty and virility.2 In her foundational work Epistemology of the Closet, Eve Kofsky Sedgwick deconstructs the strict binary of hetero and homo with regard to sex, gender, and sexuality. Not only, she asserts, are these categories shifting and unstable, but they exclude or marginalize the multitude of other ways in which homo- and hetero-eroticism and desire exist in the human experience. While homoeroticism can include sexual acts, it is reductive to think of it only in relation to sexual activity. Sedgwick argues: “It is a rather amazing fact that, of the very many dimensions along which the genital activity of one person can be differentiated from that of another (dimensions that include preference for certain acts, certain zones or sensations, certain physical types, a certain frequency, certain symbolic investments, certain relations of age or power, a certain species, a certain number of participants, etc. etc. etc.) precisely one, the gender of object choice, emerged from the turn of the twentieth century, and has remained, as the dimension denoted by the now-ubiquitous category of ‘sexual orientation.’”3 It is not my intent to argue that the gender of object choice, as Sedgwick puts it, is unimportant, but rather to agree with Sedgwick that undue emphasis on creating homo and hetero binaries erases the multitudes of other categories of desire and erotic potential. While Friberg's art is not explicitly sexual, it conveys explicit eroticism. Friberg's paintings idealize the brawny male body, thereby evoking the fantasy and desire within an imagined male viewer that he too might achieve such masculine mightiness. This is a desire of sexual mirroring, a desire to be like rather than to have or possess. This form of homodesire is not based on a desire to have sex with the object of admiration necessarily; rather, it is a combination of admiration and attraction for an aspirational and idealized representation of masculinity. However, this does not make it less sexual, as the desire is intimately tied into a sexed and gendered male body. Friberg's depictions of men are specifically homoerotic in their careful and loving detailing of the male body within that context. They are erotic in that they explicitly convey sex and desire, and in that they elicit desire in the viewer.Historians of Mormonism have often identified the period directly after then-prophet Wilford Woodruff declared an end to the practice of earthly plural marriage as an important era of transition.4 This period of approximately thirty years, from 1890 to 1920, is a period of confusion and realignment wherein members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints had to find new balances between mainstream acceptance and religious peculiarity. This era of transition, which sociologist Armand Mauss identifies as a period of (sometimes uneasy) assimilation, includes Utah Territory joining the Union in 1896 and broader Mormon participation in national politics. Mauss notes that while religious movements must occasionally shift course as a means of survival, this does not necessitate full assimilation to the dominant culture.5 Instead, for cognitive consistency, believers will bring their ideals and values into line with their adjusted religious beliefs, finding ways to incorporate these adjustments through communal identity and history.Religious studies scholars Amy Holt and Sara Patterson suggest that a key challenge for Church members in this era of transition was shifting understandings of marriage, family, and sexuality. How could one maintain gender peculiarity and difference outside of the practice of plural marriage? According to Hoyt and Patterson, other “peculiar” doctrines such as the dietary law known as the Word of Wisdom substituted for plural marriage, aligning Mormon masculinity with other perceived American ideals. “The new Mormon male,” they argue, “was fit, spiritually and physically, and ready to engage both the religious and secular worlds. His body represented the new Mormon image of an ideal American citizen—a prosperous economic being, a physically able and monogamous man, and a worthy member of the church.”6 The “peculiar” sexuality of Mormon men in the late nineteenth century as it relates to plural marriage was, according to Hoyt and Patterson, a key factor for defining masculinity and gender for Mormon men. That demonstration of sexuality was integral to their self-understanding of their gender and how they presented as masculine to the world. Removing that practice then caused a reevaluation of gender and what it meant to be male and Mormon when one had to be monogamous.In many ways the Mormon struggle with gendered identity mirrored broader American trends of the time. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, American society underwent rapid changes due in part to shifts associated with industrialization and westward expansion and imperialism. These seismic societal changes created aftershocks that were felt throughout American culture, and they forced a reexamination of seemingly inherent traits and values. Protestant Christian religious leaders in America implemented efforts to shore up religious and cultural identities against these shifting norms, particularly with regard to gender. Rapid industrialization caused large-scale migration to cities, changing the structure of both work and family life. The mythic figures of the American pioneer and cowboy, representing a more rugged, masculine ideal, seemed in danger of going extinct. The muscular Christianity movement emerged, according to Hoyt and Patterson, as “an antidote to the perceived sissification of America's men.”7One must question how a trait such as gender, which is perceived by these groups to be natural and innate, can simultaneously come under such an existential threat. The answer to this question is debatable. On the one hand, muscular Christianity emerged as a movement that sought to bring men back to church (at a time when male attendance at Protestant Christian services was on the decline) while also reasserting so-called masculine ideals such as strength and athleticism, political involvement, logical thinking, and economic success.8 As historian Richard Kimball explains in his work on sports history and muscular Mormonism, “Historians debate whether an actual ‘masculinity crisis’ existed, but there is evidence that many Americans perceived a problem and responded by creating a masculinization programme that would reinstate manliness in an effort to maintain traditional male superiority.”9 The muscular Mormon movement, as a cousin to muscular Christianity, reacts to the public ridicule of Mormon men immediately before and after the 1890 manifesto ending the practice of plural marriage by pivoting from peculiarity to all-American brawn.This perceived crisis in masculinity and the Mormon era of transition also aligned with the emergence and availability of new media such as comic books and film, which offered new models of masculinity for public consumption. The introduction in the 1920s and 1930s of (sometimes literally) larger-than-life comic strip heroes such Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, and Superman began a new visual shorthand for constructing American masculinity. Historian of popular culture Jeffrey Brown explains: “Classical comic book depictions of masculinity are perhaps the quintessential expression of our cultural beliefs about what it means to be a man. . . . One of the most obvious and central focal points for characterizing masculinity has been the male body. As an external signifier of masculinity, the body has come to represent all the conventions traditionally linked to assumptions of male superiority.”10 The body provides the inscribable surface onto which society can write gendered norms, and these new action heroes provided a template for such cultural inscriptions of masculinity.In short, Friberg was not alone in his ideological construction of masculinity. Friberg's contemporary, Finnish artist Touko Valio Laaksonen, who published his work under the pseudonym Tom of Finland, created art featuring similarly outsized hypermasculine subjects. Unlike Friberg, Tom of Finland's art was explicitly sexual, depicting men with exaggerated bulges and outsized muscles (see fig. 2). However, his work shares many ideological points with Friberg's. Both Friberg and Tom of Finland are engaged in acts of ideological gender construction that seem, at first glance, to be rebelling against normative or mainstream culture from the position of an outsider (Friberg as a Mormon and Tom of Finland as a gay man). But under closer examination one can see in both of their work a devotion to upholding hegemonic cultural ideals of masculinity. Hunter Scott presents an intriguing critique—not of Tom of Finland's work, necessarily, but rather how it is culturally situated and understood within homonormative dialogue.11 Scott explains: “Although it is true that Tom's ‘dirty drawings’ may invoke subversive meanings, their subversions do not prevent the same images from recycling oppressive discourses. . . . Undoubtedly, Tom queered masculinity. He forged a new aspirational identity and a set of visual codes for gay men that challenged conventional understandings of homosexuality as effeminate by embracing hypermasculinity while simultaneously denying masculinity's full hegemonic implications. In doing so, however, Tom continued a fascist legacy of idealizing a masculinity understood to be white.”12 Like Friberg, Tom of Finland used art to construct desirable and idealized men who, in their abundance of brawn and secondary sexual characteristics, upheld hegemonic standards of beauty and health.Norman Rockwell's illustrations for magazines like the Saturday Evening Post throughout the early and mid-twentieth century have become iconic idealized representations of American culture and society. Unlike Friberg's, Rockwell's commercial work has maintained its mainstream popularity, although it is no less ideologically driven. His work from the 1910s through the 1950s depicts an America that is almost exclusively white and middle-class.13 Rockwell is similarly concerned with sissification. A recurring theme in his work is the “fop” or “sissy” contrasted with the “real boy.” Eric J. Segal, in his analysis of Norman Rockwell and masculinity, explains that “the sissy, then, can be understood as a stigmatizing term, explicitly coercing conformity to normative masculine identities in terms of nationhood, middle-class unity, and gender. . . . The sissy is a denigrated figure repeatedly deployed to differentiate the proper and acceptable from the degenerate and Rockwell's first Saturday Evening Post from (fig. this a man in a with a and a in his a as he is by It is a in The are and in against the who is and with a less activity than Rockwell's work throughout this particularly his illustrations for the of the same that the muscular Christian and Mormon this period of fascination with the masculine form, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was in the of its to into mainstream American culture, and Arnold Friberg's men the of would not be of in Friberg's the of to sexuality and gender in Mormonism, the that Mormonism, gender is a that must be and with and cultural In Mormon gender is Church to the he that gender is not and has throughout church history a of it has always been understood as or at the very this of Mormonism and gender, one can Friberg's particularly that by the Church for official as part in that art of Arnold Friberg has been used by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to an idealized muscular Mormon man that on the muscular Friberg's men are painted from a male the of male as he it the of his As notes in his of Latter-day depictions of Jesus images as a and of and devotional art turn the of religious devotion and into both the and cultural ideals of a religious on this and the foundational work of and that there is no or body that outside of cultural that there is no or but rather a strip of inscribable to new as asserts, it is only through what the other is that to a of and that there is no body or that outside of cultural for who are members of a religious then or devotional art not only the of a religious but also acts as a through which and ideals are the However, the is not is not into and but is a a inscribable then Friberg's does not a about the Mormon but creates a new for the and of are and and movement the of the creating and the body is almost always in and cultural inscriptions as by Friberg's the by which our outside to and visual These understandings of the and the of the a to the of and by about his work, Arnold Friberg the of that it was to do for and to the that muscular characters are to physically the of the men he Friberg that he was his subjects from the onto of the figures in the Book of he painting the the the of what he painting a man who like he could do what In this Friberg is in a of in which the is into or the and body the same but not As such he imagined that he was depicting of through an idealized physical a spiritually figure that is not a muscular man. As points when Friberg's paintings include are as as their It is the of and with who both Friberg's and the they bring to as Friberg his depictions of men were meant to their and of what can then about his in depictions of Friberg's must be as it is his and secular can Friberg in a line of religious and who the and in of cultural His work is creating that can the of gendered into and that that to be and cultural have used their as of to binary sex and gender, this and In this they are engaged in acts of and constructing to the of sex and gender. the that sex and are and gender and culture are that all cultural are as and the fact that and the body is always a is and of the body. In must and all construction within a cultural context. 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It depicts a scene from the book of a key figure in the Book of Mormon. 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It is meant as and for the male viewer. 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