Physique Mags Helped Usher in the Gay Market

One never knows what treasures they might find in an attic.

David K. Johnson, associate professor of history at the University of South Florida, was researching his first book in the attic of a 1960s gay rights activist, looking for typewritten correspondence in the 1950s and 1960s documenting the federal government's Cold War purge of suspected homosexuals as threats to national security, when he discovered copies of magazines called Drum, Physique Pictorial, and MANual, full of images of nearly naked men.

This was in the 1990s and, at first, he disregarded them as commercial entertainment, not seeing them as historically important, but soon galleries and museums had retrospective exhibitions.

In an email interview with the Bay Area Reporter, Johnson, 58, explained what then inspired him to write a book on this subject.

"I saw a disconnect between how gay men appreciated the works of 1950s physique artists and photographers and how most scholars studying the history of the LGBT movement dismissed them," wrote Johnson, who is gay. "Art houses like Taschen published increasingly lavish coffee-table books of their work, Bob Mizer and Tom of Finland got their own nonprofit foundations, and yet academics only saw evidence of racism, self-loathing, or the closet. I thought these pioneering gay artists and photographers deserved a closer look.

"The new field of the history of capitalism provided the perfect lens for this examination," he continued. "I decided to look not just at the images they created but the businesses they sponsored. And I soon discovered that they were enmeshed in a larger consumer culture network of gay merchandise, books, and clothing all available through magazines and mail-order catalogs."

By the end of that decade, a few scholars began taking these physique magazines seriously as historical artifacts, even though LGBT community historians had minimized their significance. Part of the problem was gaining access to them as only recently have academic and community-based libraries began collecting them.

"Many early historians of the LGBT movement, with roots in a gay liberationist ethos that was explicitly anti-capitalist, viewed for-profit enterprises such as physique publishers with skepticism, considering them peripheral to movement politics ... favoring homophile and nonprofit publications over commercial ones," Johnson wrote.

Finishing his book, "The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government," Johnson traveled around the country researching the idea of a "gay market" that existed a decade before Stonewall. He discovered that "with a circulation rate ten times that of their homophile competitors, physique magazines were the primary gay media outlet in the nation such that by 1963, domestic sales of physique magazines topped nine million per year," he wrote.

Johnson realized that "by making gay desire visible, by marketing it to the masses and defending it from government censorship, physique entrepreneurs helped create a sense of a national gay community," such that consumer culture played a pivotal role in shaping gay male cultural life and later political engagement.

"They created a sense of a virtual or imagined community," Johnson wrote. "Gay men throughout the country, in small towns and big cities, could find these magazines on their local newsstands or subscribe to them through the mail. Through these magazines, they knew there were tens of thousands of other 'physique enthusiasts' like themselves out there. Grecian Guild went further and offered membership in a fraternal order, complete with regional conventions, pins, chaplains, and local chapters. Others started offering pen pal clubs and gay book clubs. They would print letters and photos from customers, often including their mailing address. The magazines became increasingly interactive – offering customers opportunities to connect with other customers, a kind of analog version of what today we call social media."