April 4, 2008 | Arts / Entertainment

Photographer Mel Roberts paved the way

Famous photographers like Bruce Weber, Tom Bianchi and Herb Ritts owe a lot to Mel Roberts.  Risking persecution, and prosecution, he was one of the fathers of modern gay erotica, capturing the seldom explored world of male nudes in the 1950s and 1960s.

His models were average men. They were young, often no older than 25. And they were never the muscle queens or Marlboro men appearing in physique magazines at the time.

And though the models were paid, many of them started as friends or lovers. "I could never just come right out and ask them to model. So very often I'd invite them over for dinner. They'd meet my friends and become a part of the 'family' before I'd take my first picture of them. When we did ultimately go out into the field they felt so comfortable with me and so relaxed it was reflected in my work." [more]

One writer called Roberts the 'Hugh Hefner' of the gay world. "I always had four or five guys living with me at one time. They had no prohibitions, no guilt about having sex with guys, even though most of them had girlfriends." If only that were still true today...

But there were challenges. Photographing naked men could mean jail time for the photographer. When Roberts forwarded transparencies for processing by Eastman Kodak they were returned with holes punched where cocks should be. Roberts was even forced to build his own color lab to process his images.

"I knew I was taking a chance. But I thought, I live just a few blocks from the Playboy Mansion, and here's Hefner showing nude women, so what's wrong with me showing nude men? I never thought there was anything wrong with being gay."

He was ignored by the authorities for many years, somehow keeping a low enough profile to avoid prosecution. But in 1977 the LAPD turned their attention on Roberts, claiming he had been photographing underage models. With warrants in hand the police took possession of his cameras, negatives, and mailing list. "We stood in the driveway in handcuffs from 10:00 in the morning to 6:00 at night as they loaded everything into a truck. I couldn't even return the money my customers had sent me because I didn't have their addresses."

No charges were ever filed, but it took over a year before his property was returned.

AIDS took hold. Gay pornography became more commonplace. And the man who had only ever used two Rolleiflex cameras to take an estimated 50,000 photographs decided it was time to retire. The innocence of his art suddenly seemed out of place in this new world.

Years later his work would re-emerge. The charming simplicity of his work felt warm and welcoming; not contrived like the photos in male mags like "Inches" or "BlueBoy." Mel Roberts' Classic Males, a video compilation of his pictures, was released. Three more videos followed.

Fotofactory Press would eventually publish a collection of his images in two books: "California Boys" in 2000 and "The Wild Ones" in 2001.

Roberts passed away August 8, 2007, one day shy of his 89th birthday.