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You're a gay man in the forties or fifties, living in a medium-sized town in a fly-over state. Doesn't even have to be a Manhattan or a Los Angeles. How about a Chicago suburb, or Detroit, or Kansas City? Access to images of your heart's desire, much less the real thing, is rare and often fraught with outright danger. In a time when what you desired was illegal, where did you get information, much less a chance to rub one out to a glossy young guy staring at you from a magazine? You scoured bookstores and found publications like Adonis, Tomorrow's Man, Physique Health, and other titles ostensibly for the purpose of promoting a healthy lifestyle. But with a wink and a nod, they knew their target audience was the closeted gay man. A new book by writer and photographer Vince Aletti, titled simply Physique, published by MACK, collects some of the best of these photos with an essay of his own.
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The mid-century publications didn’t need to announce themselves as gay, even if they had been able to. Their readers understood the necessity of balancing discretion and seduction.
In a recent New Yorker essay, Aletti describes the thrill of discovering these publications and their importance on gay culture. They were a lifeline for some at the time, when male desire and the "gay gaze" were a thing to be hidden and despised. But there they were, out in the open. I can remember sneaking peeks at Playgirl in my local discount store growing up in suburban Cleveland, but this was in the seventies, after Stonewall, in the midst of the sexual revolution. I can't imagine the excitement and fear of picking up such a homoerotic treasure a few decades prior!
Such publications go back to the late nineteenth century, when Eugen Sandow's Physical Culture and Bernarr Macfadden's Physical Development both appeared in 1898. The photographs, using aspiring models, actors, or simply well-built military men, often from the LA area where they might be stationed, never showed genitals, but everything else was a go. They built their brand around ancient statuary, and in some of the best examples, the use of lighting and shadow evokes those marble and bronze gods of yore.
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One of the more popular models was Steve Reeves, pictured in an IG post above. He would go on to moderate fame using his body in cheesy Hercules films and others. You may remember Rocky Horror's Frank-N-Furter singing about taking in "an old Steve Reeves movie."
Aletti explains the cutting-edge eroticism of such publications:
Obscenity laws, most aggressively enforced by the U.S. Postal Service, attempted to keep (blatant sexual) excitement within bounds—no uncovered or obviously aroused penises, no affectionate or suggestive physical contact. Pushing those boundaries gave the best physique work a subversive edge. Although these were hardly outlaw enterprises, the liveliest of them had a rock-and-roll sensibility: rules were made to be broken.
There was touching, maybe even hand-holding, but there was nothing overtly sexual in what you were looking at. But there didn't need to be; the viewer filled in the blanks. "...the images, at once innocent and repressed, still retained a weird power." Following decades of openly gay porn content available everywhere in all manner of mediums, Aletti says this about lookign back on this content to create his book: "Yet looking at physique images again, after so much time had passed, I saw their artfulness, their playfulness, and their sincerity."
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Physique photographers may not have considered themselves outsider artists, but for years these photographs remained private—shared among a population of men who were just beginning, against all odds, to frame a public identity. Now, long after the original images have been appropriated as club flyers and campy greeting cards, I can’t help seeing them as souvenirs and mementos. The past they represent is a queer utopia, a safe space for erotic fantasy. (Aletti)
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