.jpg "Royale Studio - Sailor tied to Rigging (Basil Clavering)") |
| Royale Studio - Sailor tied to Rigging |
Besides conventional, beefcake photos of male body-builders, Royale and its associates specialised in 'storyettes' - narrative sequences of 12-36 photos featuring gay, male stereotypes - Military men, Sportsmen and Bikers, dressed in tight fitting clothes (see above). The plots generally revolved around domination, punishment and combat with spanking, bondage, wrestling often featured.
Royale never did frontal nudity, but the storyette models were provocatively dressed and simply placing them in proximity together allowed the images to be filled with subtle (and not so subtle) innuendo and erotic constructs that, at the time, breached the strict UK decency laws and censorship rules. They also attracted adverse attention due their practice of openly claiming that their models were serving members of the armed forces wearing realistic and sometimes genuine uniforms (or parts of them).
This reportedly attracted repeated Police raids and seizures of material but there only seems to be little documentary evidence of this or of any formal prosecutions. The threat of confiscation and prosecution could be directed not only against Royale directly as originators of the offending material but also against any magazine that printed them, any organisation that handled or sold the magazines and anyone who bought them. Some British magazines resorted to printing in the USA and (I believe) secretly importing them through less repressive European countries like Holland and Denmark.
Hussar Studio split from Royale in 1961 for reasons that are unclear (see Studio names) but both ultimately closed down ca.1963. In the late 70's the concept was briefly revived by some of the original team as the 'Guys In Uniform' Studio. They produced some very similar material, once again drawing on genuine military sources for models, but it suffered the same fate.
In common with other male photography studios of the 50's/60's, Royale sold its photos direct to customers by mail order, advertising them in Body Building magazines which were permitted under the law if they had a self-improvement, health or sporting purpose. Wholesome, in other words. In the 50's, these were joined by beefcake magazines with more erotically flavoured imagery and texts that were more artistic than educational.
In the UK, the Wolfenden report, published in September 1957 (after 3 years of review) had (grudgingly) recommended the decriminalisation of homosexuality because it was exposing (prominent) people to blackmail and causing suicides. It was not actually made law until 1967 but Wolfenden signalled the beginning of liberalisation of institutional attitudes towards gay men and Royale seems to have been founded in the wake of that momentous event.
Despite this, the British Police continued to vigorously pursue gay publishers using obscenity and decency laws. As a result, much of Royale, Hussar and Dolphin's original material seems to have been lost apart from that which reached the public domain through the beefcake magazines. Private collections and individual photographs do turn up from time to time, notably the 'Originals' Collection of Sailor Al much of which was published on the internet a few years ago (see Sources article).
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In 2010, the gay artist, Mitchell pubished a series of articles at his mitchmen blog listing some of the Royale 'storyettes' with examples of the imagery and attempting to unravel some of the mysteries that had grown up around it over the years. In 2021 he began revising and extending the original articles and adding new ones. He also announced his intention to establish a public open archive of all the material he had accumulated regarding Royale for posterity.
The mitchmen Royale Studio Open Archive is currently located on Google Drive and is still under construction. It differs from other internet collections in that it is not a random collection of juicy images but organised into sets/storyettes which is how they were originally published and contain all the available images, good and bad. It also cross-references them to the models which have been largely unknown hitherto. This blog publishes new additions to the Archive as they become available through a linked Royale Gallery site. It also complements the Open Archive with comment, news and information. The hope is to formally preserve some at least of the work and knowledge of the studio which represents an important segment of British Gay Liberation history.
If you have any other Royale images from this or previously published groups and would like to include them to the mitchmen Open Archive please contact me via my profile page link.
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Read more about the Organisation of the mitchmen Royale Archive
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