The Times Square Alliance sponsored a 62nd Anniversary Kiss-Off to commemorate the most famous kiss in American history, which took place in Times Square during V-J Day in 1945. It’s too bad that photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt never captioned the picture that “is said to be Time-Life’s most requested (and reproduced) image, an instantly recognizable icon.” Although the image itself is beyond famous, the identities of the kissing sailor and woman are still up for grabs despite evidence to the contrary:
“[A]forensic artist in Houston claimed this month that she had conclusively determined that the sailor in the photograph is Glenn McDuffie, 80, of Houston, a North Carolina native who played semiprofessional baseball and worked in construction and for the Postal Service.”
This supposedly confirmed kisser has shined doubts upon the frontrunning female hopeful kissee:
Edith Shain, long thought to be the woman in the famous V-J day photograph of a nurse and a sailor kissing to celebrate the end of World War II, reasserted Tuesday that it was in fact her in the picture.
Monday, Glenn McDuffie, an 80-year-old Houston retiree, cast doubts on the true identity of the woman, telling amNewYork, “I know the woman I kissed, and she ain’t it.”
Nonsense, she insisted. “This latest man, no way. I ask all of the men who claim it was them what was going on around us, what they said to me, and this one didn’t know.”
Despite the cases of mistaken identity, the V-J Day kiss still carries that aura of romance. In the leftmost picture below is a temporary statue of the mystery slut kissers. Next to the statue, Capt. Benjamin Summers kisses Elizabeth Booher, who had just agreed to his marriage proposal. This is so fucking romantic that I want to swoon and puke at the same time.
