Physique magazine
During their heyday in North America in the 1950s to 1960s, they were presented as magazines dedicated to fitness, health, and bodybuilding, with the models often shown demonstrating exercises or the results of their regimens, or as artistic reference material.
However, their unstated primary purpose was erotic imagery, primarily created by and for gay men at a time when homosexuality was the subject of cultural taboos and government censorship.
They were available in cities and even towns across the United States and by subscription, and popular titles such as Physique Pictorial served as an early nationwide cultural nexus for bisexual and gay men.
[2] At the same time, depictions of the bodies of muscular athletes and weightlifters, including stars such as Sandow and George Hackenschmidt, became increasingly common in the popular press and as fodder for postcards (which experienced a boom between 1900 and 1920).
[5] Gay physique photographers working during this era included Edwin F. Townsend, Earle Forbes, Robert Gebhart, Al Urban, Lon Hanagan, Lou Melan, Barton Horvath, and Dick Falcon (all but the last operating in New York City).
[6] A new generation of bodybuilding magazines began to appear in the 1930s, most notably Bob Hoffman's Strength & Health in 1932, and various publications from the Montreal-based Weider brothers, Joe and Ben, such as Muscle & Fitness.
Full-frontal nudity was generally not depicted until the late 1960s when obscenity enforcement was loosened and physique magazines began to give way to overt pornography.
Physique Pictorial began as a venue for selling Athletic Model Guild photo sets by mail, as had previously been done through the back pages of Strength & Health.
Though editors were careful to deny it, the photos sold by mail were often more explicit than those featured in the magazine, including frontal nudity or posing straps which were merely "inked on" and could be rubbed away by the consumer.
[22][23] Though largely created by and for gay men, physique magazines initially avoided overt references to homosexuality, using a number of pretenses to explain their content.
Some, such as Tomorrow's Man, relied on the pretense of promoting health and fitness, including short articles on diet and weightlifting, reporting on bodybuilding competitions, and commentary on models' muscular development.
For example, a 1954 issue of Physique Pictorial claimed that the magazine was "planned primarily as an art reference book and is widely used in colleges and private schools throughout the country.
When accused, as some of them have been, of catering only to homosexuals, they act shocked; editorially they protest that they are eminently "cultural," devoted to "esthetic appreciation of the male physique," no naughtier than The Atlantic Monthly...[25]Adherence to these alibis became more relaxed over time.
One early example cited by Kenneth Krauss is a 1956 announcement of the marriage of famed physique model Glenn Bishop in Body Beautiful, which joked that "The Broken Hearts chapter of the GLENN BISHOP FAN CLUB will sponsor a mass drowning at Fire Island"—many gay men in the 1950s would have understood this as an inside joke, given the status of Fire Island as a gay hotspot.
[30] Drum, published by Clark Polak from 1964 was an example of a hybrid format combining physique photography with editorial content devoted to the homophile movement.
[42] Both producers and consumers of physique magazines in the US faced frequent legal challenges, particularly from the US Post Office, which, at the time, took an active role in preventing the circulation through the mail of what it deemed obscene materials, under the Comstock laws of 1873.
The determination of obscenity in the United States originally followed the Hicklin test, which applied to any material which had the tendency to "deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences" (typically taken to be children).
The Hicklin test was replaced following the Supreme Court case Roth v. United States, which established a narrower standard of being "utterly without redeeming social value".
[43] According to David K. Johnson, "almost all" photographers and publishers associated with the physique magazine industry faced arrest and trial at some point, with many, including Bob Mizer, Lynn Womack, and John Barrington, being jailed as a result.
A pattern which continued through the era of the physique magazine was that the photographer or publisher would usually ultimately succeed at trial (sometimes after one or more appeals), but bore a significant financial burden in fighting the case.
As a result of the scandal, one of the seven, Newton Arvin, an esteemed professor of literature at Smith College, was forced out of his teaching position and subsequently hospitalized for suicidal depression.
[46] According to Thomas Waugh, there were "well over one hundred" pre-Stonewall physique magazines in the English-speaking world, and many more non-English publications originating from northern Europe.
