Palatinus Potatoes and Beans

Well after a brief stay in the hospital, your friendly neighborhood slave is back with more culinary delights for you to prepare. This hearty potato and green beans makes a wonderful one dish meal! It is named to honor a LGBT Hero John Palatinus. A brave photographer in the 50's that forged the way for a community to be started and selling “beefcake” photos.

Fresh green beans, red potatoes, and onions jazz up a great potato Au Gratin. Be sure to read the short story after the recipe.

Ingredients

• 2.5 lbs red potatoes
• 1 onion
• ¼ lbs loose sausage
• 3 tablespoons butter
• 3 tablespoons flour
• 1 teaspoon dry mustard
• 2 cups warmed milk
• ¼ cup gouda or gruyere cheese
• salt & pepper to taste

Instructions

Preheat oven to 400 degrees F. Coat an 8-in. square baking dish with cooking spray.

Heat the milk.

Rinse green beans and snap the ends off.

Cook the ¼ lbs loose sausage in a medium skillet as you prepare the potatoes and onions.

Wash potatoes and slice into 1/8' thin slices. Slice onion as thin as possible.

Layer potatoes and onions in little stacks. Place stacks in the casserole dish. Cover with plastic wrap.

Microwave on full power for about 10 minutes (be careful, it will be hot when removing the plastic wrap).

Meanwhile sprinkle the four into the sausage in the skillet and melt butter Stir and cook 1 minute. Add seasonings and warmed milk. 

Stir over medium heat until thick and bubbly. About 3 minutes remove from heat.

This by the way is now an excellent sausage gravy if you ever need some!

Spread the stacks out in the dish and add the green beans. Stir until mixed. 

 

Spoon the sauce over potatoes. I sprinkled the Gouda cheese as a light thin topping.

Cover with foil (sprayed with cooking spray) and bake 45 minutes. Remove foil and check to see if the potatoes are cooked and done. Uncover and bake an additional 15 minutes or until lightly browned.

Important to let this “rest” for 10 minutes before serving. This allows the sauce to be pulled back into the potatoes.

NOTES:

• Yukon gold potatoes (or red potatoes) have tender skin and don’t require peeling (they hold their shape well).
• Use a mandolin to make these slices

Serve as a one dish meal with perhaps some crusty bread.

For our music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkunqvDT4kY&list=PLAIV0dLl8IN-gZzwSnKh4R9pNspXrQ1d8&index=70

So honored to serve this to my Master Indy

socialslave

To satisfy and restore.

To nourish, support and maintain.

To gratify, spoil, comfort and please,

to nurture, assist, and sustain

…..I cook!

Please buy slave's cookbook:

The Little Black Book of Indiscreet Recipes by Dan White 

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00F315Y4I/ref=cm_sw_r_tw_dp_vAT4sb0934RTMvia @amazon

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John Palatinus

John Palatinus was noted for his male physique photography which appeared in numerous magazines that catered to the interests of a growing gay male population in the 1950's.

It might be hard to remember how things were before the widespread internet.

The Forties and Fifties were especially guided by society's push to erase any depiction or even mention of homosexuality. Gay did not exist. Young gay men and women had no where to turn to find others in some instances to even know others existed. Teens hid underwear advertisements to fuel their growing sexuality.

In this environment, photographer John Palatinus in northern Indiana, dared to showcase the male physique as a form of beauty and desire. His images frequently depicted men posing in straps or nude. They were published in “Tomorrow’s Man” and other bodybuilding magazines popular among gay men. They sort of defined the physical archetype, which later became iconically gay.

Artist and author Tom Bianchi said, the images had an validating effect on these lives.

“For kids like myself, who were isolated the photos were the only window into the possibility that there might be a world where gay people could be.”

Born on July 6, 1929, Palatinus grew up in Indiana. It was after his military service in 1954 that he began photographing male bodybuilders, who were usually friends who wanted to document their bodybuilding progress. Early on, he said he realized the images had a “certain amount of art in there.”

John Palatinus was one of the few leaders in the fight for the freedom to disseminate gay photography and art during the 1950's and 60's. He was a legendary photographer from an era now called the Golden Age of Physique Photography. At that time in America, it was illegal to send even semi-nude photographs through the U.S. Mail.

Physique photography was about appreciation of the male form. Palatinus began by photographing one bodybuilder and quickly word spread.

“There was a whole group, a small community of dedicated people who wanted to show their progress.”

Initially only for the models, the pictures began to be published in physique magazines of the time like Tomorrow’s Man, published across The United States. In homophobic McCarthyist America, these magazines were to serve a second purpose- tacitly uniting many closeted homosexual men, who began collecting the images from photographers using the details printed with the pictures.

Later on in the nineties and beyond, Vintage Male Physique (VMP) photography was to become a collector’s business.

Palatinus was gay but most of his models were not.

“People always ask me: ‘How many of your models did you have sex with?’ and whenever they ask me that I say: ‘none of them’. I don’t think you should violate that covenant as a photographer. If you’re gonna make love to them, you do it through the lens.”

In 1954 Palatinus moved to New York, and set up in Greenwich Village, taking male physique photographs and distributing them to eager collectors. In 1958 he began to photograph nudes.

“Before then everything was covered or we would do poses so that the genitalia were not showing. It was a little bit soft core because you could see the outline of the genitalia, but nothing was exposed. It was always of one person, there was no sex involved so I didn’t think it was salacious or readily erotic. I decided: ‘Well I have these beautiful people why don’t I photograph them nude?’ Again I didn’t photograph with erections, there wasn’t any sort of sexual side to them.”

That was left to the roaring imaginations of the viewers.

However, Palatinus’ work was being intercepted by the US postal service, leading to his arrest in 1959. “The police came in to my studio and they took everything, they did a clean sweep, my camera, my lighting equipment, negatives, money, everything. The negatives ended up in the police department. I never saw them again. This was a very difficult time in America, it was the end of the McCarthy era and gay bars were being closed and they would say ‘these premises have been closed because they have been frequented by undesirable people or homosexuals.’

“They would close the bar and they would put the names of the people at the bar in the newspaper, ruining their lives forever. It was a very repressive time. It is representative of the puritanical America of that period and there are still vestiges of that today.” 

 

Using his own name and daring to photograph men for the appreciation of other men, Palatinus was taking a high risk. Alan Harmon, a VMP collector and curator, says it was rare for photographers to identify themselves so openly. 

“A lot of people didn’t use their real name when taking these photographs, Unless you got into their inner circle of buyers, you never knew who was taking these pictures. Then you got the rebels like John who used their full, real name. He was pretty fearless.”

Palatinus was one of many Male Physique photographers who was persecuted for his practice. Bob Mizer, another photographer, was imprisoned in 1959, the same year that Muscle Beach, a prominent setting for physique photography was closed down. “I did not expect it to come crashing down the way it did. It meant starting over at life again because at that point I didn’t have a day job anymore, because I was doing so well with the photographs. After that happened I really had to start my life over again and go back to doing something I did before.” 

 

He was arrested and put on trial in 1961. Palatinus was found guilty but allowed to go free because he had spent a night in jail at the time of his arrest.

He was so shaken by the experience that he turned away from physique photography as a career and focused on styling various commercial shoots for his peers and other creative outlets. But half a century later, renewed interest in his photographs fueled an unexpected career resurgence.

Palatinus began showing his work again in 2009. It was greeted with enthusiasm from galleries and festivals. His photographs were featured in exhibitions from Los Angeles and San Francisco to Paris, France, and Berlin, as well as in numerous magazines.

A 2011 show at Savage Gallery in Palm Springs drew a huge turnout, as Palatinus was honored that year with the Stonewall Lifetime Achievement Award lifetime achievement award. 

 

“When I was in court in 1959, the judge said: ‘by today’s standards it is considered pornography but who knows? In 50 years’ time it may be considered art’ and that really is true.”

 

In September 2014 after a brief illness, John Palatinus passed. He was precede by his life partner of 48 years, Jack Alexander.