Buying Gay

How Physique Entrepreneurs Sparked a Movement

David K. Johnson

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780231548175
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

In 1951, a new type of publication appeared on newsstands—the physique magazine produced by and for gay men. For many men growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, these magazines and their images and illustrations of nearly naked men, as well as articles, letters from readers, and advertisements, served as an initiation into gay culture. The publishers behind them were part of a wider world of "physique entrepreneurs": men as well as women who ran photography studios, mail-order catalogues, pen-pal services, book clubs, and niche advertising for gay audiences. While such businesses have often been seen as peripheral to the gay political movement, in Buying Gay David K. Johnson shows how gay commerce was not a byproduct of the gay-rights movement but an important catalyst for it.

Offering a vivid look into the lives of physique entrepreneurs and their customers, and presenting a wealth of illustrations, Johnson explores the connection—and tension—between the market and the movement. With circulation rates many times higher than the openly political "homophile" magazines, physique magazines were the largest gay media outlets of their time. This network of producers and consumers helped foster a gay community and upend censorships laws, paving the way for open expression. Physique entrepreneurs were at the center of legal struggles, especially against the U.S. Post Office, including the court victory that allowed full frontal male nudity and open homoeroticism. Buying Gay reconceives the history of the gay movement and shows how consumer culture helped create community and a site for resistance.

1

EMERGING FROM THE MUSCLE MAGAZINES

Bob Mizer’s Athletic Model Guild

There is a world-wide fraternity of men interested in [male] nudes, but it is so loosely organized that one cannot easily find his way around it.

—Manuel boyFrank, 1944

When twenty-four-year-old Bob Mizer began marketing photographs of men in posing straps in 1946, he was already on a crusade.

He was tired of police harassment in Pershing Square—a well-known meeting spot for gay men in downtown Los Angeles—where he socialized with friends nearly every day during high school. They gossiped about their fellow Pershing Square regulars—the effeminate belles, the butch trade, and some in between. But in 1940 he wrote in his diary of a crackdown: “vice clean up is tightening … Lillie is really serious about cleaning up the city,” using a slang term common in gay circles for the police.

He also made weekly visits to the nearby Los Angeles Central Library and was tired of reading psychology books on the danger posed by “sexual variants” such as himself and his friends. “Anything you could read anywhere showed how pernicious a thing this was … [how] you would deteriorate into a mass of trembling flesh if you did these things,” he later complained.

He was also tired of arguing with his Mormon mother, who vociferously objected to his transgender friend Rodney—later known as Daisy—who was bullied at school for wearing pink girls’ slacks and having plucked eyebrows. Delia Mizer called Rodney a “pansy” and labeled his sexual proclivities “against all the laws of nature.” Her son responded angrily, using a very different vocabulary, one that drew on notions of legal equality and civil rights: “Most people are just obeying their impulses,” he retorted. “Should they be denied the right to fulfill their instincts?”

As a young man, Mizer had already identified the many ways society looked down on “temperamental people” like him and his circle of Pershing Square friends. More important, he was also clearly determined to do something about it—to confront the legal, medical, and religious prejudices that so viscerally affected his life.

One Sunday night in March 1940 he was on the telephone listening to Rodney describe his sexual exploits from the night before. Someone else on his party line was also listening in—a common occurrence at a time when only the rich had private telephone lines. Using vulgar language, the eavesdropper expressed his contempt for such people. Mizer had had enough. He channeled his anger into his diary that night: “My aim in life will be to create tolerance among mankind and especially to vindicate the decent, spiritual Urning,” using a nineteenth-century term for men attracted to other men. He was beginning to articulate the sense of defiance that had been building up inside him. Soon his rudimentary efforts to create tolerance made it into print. “This week I made my column risqué,” he noted of his writing in the Polytechnic High School newspaper. “All of my gay friends are included.” Even as an eighteen-year-old high school student, Mizer demonstrated a willingness to defy convention and assert his desires. He had also developed the ability to publicly affirm his gay friends—if in a coded way that perhaps only they would understand.

Mizer’s ambition was to be an author. He was not just a columnist but an editor of his high school’s award-winning newspaper—considered one of the top ten in the country by the Columbia University School of Journalism. He had begun creative writing in grammar school and published several short stories. He was also a voracious reader, checking out popular psychology and sexology books like Outwitting Our Nerves and Sexual Power on his weekly runs to the Los Angeles Public Library. He so identified with Boris Barisol’s biography of writer Oscar Wilde, subtitled The Man, the Artist, the Martyr, that he labeled his own 1940 diary “Bob Mizer: The Man, the Thinker, the ?” One of his teachers suggested that his skills at writing, shorthand, and typing would easily land him a steady job as a court reporter. But Mizer wanted to write his own book. He would call it “How You Can Help the Homosexualists” and would target younger gay men whose worldview had not yet formed.1

Although he never published such a book, writing would occupy much of his life, as he penned hundreds of feisty editorials denouncing censorship, puritanism, and prejudice for his magazine Physique Pictorial, which he published for over twenty years. Not unlike the book he hoped to write, Physique Pictorial offered help and comfort to tens of thousands of gay men in Cold War America. As the editor of the first large-circulation American magazine targeting gay men, Mizer found a way to help the community he had found at Pershing Square. In the pages of his path-breaking magazine, Mizer honed the skills he first tried out in his high school newspaper—thumbing his nose at the authorities while speaking up for his friends (see fig. 1.1).

In postwar America, a commercial network of gay physique photographers and magazine publishers emerged from the contests and magazines surrounding the physical culture movement. Bob Mizer was neither the first nor the only gay man to capitalize on his community’s interest in physique photography. But he became the center of a network that served to connect, inspire, and politicize that subculture. He drew on an older tradition of gay photographers marketing their products through an underground market or in the back pages of mainstream fitness magazines. But with the founding of Physique Pictorial in 1951, he opened this tradition to public scrutiny and a new level of visual and discursive engagement. He was joined by Irv Johnson, the owner of a gym in Chicago, who began publishing Tomorrow’s Man in 1952, and by Randolph Benson and John Bullock, a gay couple who met at the University of Virginia, who began publishing Grecian Guild Pictorial in 1955. Together they created a new genre of small magazines that would help serve and unite gay men throughout the country.

FIGURE 1.1 Bob Mizer started his physique photography business in 1946 soon after he graduated from high school. A few years later he launched Physique Pictorial, the first magazine targeting a gay male audience.

Courtesy of the Bob Mizer Foundation.

The social world Mizer constructed with his gay high school friends at Pershing Square was central to his budding role as a pioneering gay entrepreneur. “The number of faggots cruising around here is legion,” remembered the writer Hart Crane. But the number of available sexual partners was only part of the appeal. “Here are little fairies who can quote Rimbaud before they are eighteen,” he observed, suggesting how the space also offered an education in gay cultural codes. It was through connections made there that Mizer not only discovered a sense of community and a sense of oppression but also learned about a central feature of gay male culture: photography of the nude male.2

While still in high school, Mizer went to a party at his friend Sydney Phillip’s place, where three gay friends posed in the nude for “artistic studies” that the host photographed. “It was terribly cute to see them rush to hide in the bathroom whenever a knock was heard at the door,” Mizer noted of the models’ skittishness. Featured in one of the first entries in his 1940 diary, the night clearly made an impression. A few months later Mizer himself posed for another gay photographer and became “enthused about barbell exercising.”3

Weightlifting led Mizer to another formative influence: Strength & Health, the preeminent physical culture magazine published by Bob Hoffman in York, Pennsylvania. Mizer began reading the magazine in high school when he started lifting weights—he purchased his barbells through its back pages. He enjoyed the bodybuilding photos and articles but was particularly intrigued by the monthly “S & H Leaguers’ Page,” a pen-pal service for those who wanted to exchange letters and photographs. Members often described their hobbies and interests, which included not only bodybuilding and physique photographs but often music, ballet, and theater. In April 1945 Mizer placed the following notice, hoping to connect with other leaguers; he included his home address, which would become the legendary home of his physique studio: “Bob Mizer, 1834 West 11th St., Los Angeles, Cal. is interested in photography and creative writing, and promises an immediate answer and exchange of photos to all who write. He uses a York barbell and other training appliances and hopes that we will allot more space to the league notes, as he enjoys reading this department and writing to other leaguers.”4

The response was overwhelming—Mizer received over three hundred letters from fellow S & H Leaguers, some of whom remained lifelong friends. Others leaguers reported similar responses from their notices. One received such a flood of mail—but to the wrong address—that the Post Office requested he issue a correction immediately. Mizer later praised this service for allowing “lonely bodybuilders and others” not only to correspond but also to form “long-lasting and fruitful” friendships. His positive experience with the S & H Leaguers’ Page offered a pivotal lesson, demonstrating to Mizer the desire of men who enjoyed physique photography to connect with each other.5

After high school graduation he worked as an office clerk and typist for the Texas & Fort Worth Railroad, but in his spare time he also began to help out at various Los Angeles photography studios, learning how to pose models, position lighting, and develop film. In the summer of 1945, during the final days of World War II, Mizer was full of excitement as he made plans over the establishment of what he was already calling “my business.” He was honing his craft by apprenticing at Frederick Kovert’s Hollywood studio. “I am helping him in my spare time in order to decide whether or not to come into the studio to work.” Kovert was a former silent movie actor who had become one of the more daring and well-known photographers of nude men. Mizer was one of numerous young men working for Kovert, doing much of the photography that bore his name. Mizer often brought models there, used his darkroom, and even posed himself. He could do none of this at home, since his mother, who ran a rooming house, did not approve of his interest in photographing nearly naked men. Still, he found Kovert to be controlling and difficult to work with.6

Soon he bought his own camera and started to frequent Muscle Beach and bodybuilding competitions to find models. Muscle Beach in Santa Monica—not far from the home he shared with his mother near downtown Los Angeles—was the center of the postwar interest in bodybuilding and beefcake. It was the perfect place to meet bodybuilders who were anxious to be photographed. “I modeled for Bob Mizer in 1947, ’48,” Ben Sorensen remembered. “Bob came down to Muscle Beach and just talked to people, you know? He invites us up. Of course everybody’s interested, when they’re bodybuilding, in getting some free pictures.” It was Bob McCune, another bodybuilding champion Mizer photographed, who convinced Mizer to submit his photos to Strength & Health. Editor John Grimek, himself a well-known bodybuilding champion, encouraged Mizer to submit more work. “Yours are as good as others,” Grimek told the budding photographer when they met at one of the bodybuilding competitions in Los Angeles.7

Mizer called his business the Athletic Model Guild (AMG) and offered his first advertisements in Strength & Health in 1946, where they competed for attention with similar advertisements from other gay photographers, such as Alfonso Hanagan, know as “Lon of New York.” Hanagan had first become interested in physique photography when he became enthralled with images of bodybuilder Tony Sansone, who marketed his own photographs. After moving to New York in 1936 to pursue a career in music, he met Sansone and began to socialize with and photograph him and his friends. By the 1940s his physique photographs were being featured on the cover of Strength & Health and bodybuilders began seeking him out, hoping to appear on a magazine cover. As payment, the magazine gave him free ad space in the back of the magazine. It was this mutually profitable world of photographers, bodybuilders, and magazine publishers that Mizer would enter, then help to transform.8

When Mizer began marketing physique photography to a gay audience, he joined a field with deep roots in gay culture. The taking, sharing, and selling of such images had been central to gay culture for well over a half century by the time Mizer discovered it. Wilhelm von Gloeden began selling photographs of nude young men he posed in classical staging in Taormina, Sicily, in the 1890s. He developed a large following in cosmopolitan circles, especially among cultivated gay men. Some of his more restrained images appeared in European journals that were popular within the Aesthetic movement, while his nudes circulated through an underground market. Oscar Wilde and other gay notables made pilgrimages to his studio.9

In addition to such high art, images of nearly nude men circulated in the context of the physical culture movement, starting with images of Eugene Sandow in the 1890s. By the 1920s nude photos were widely marketed in the back of both art and physical culture magazines. Physical culturist John Hernic offered nude photos in the back of Art Magazine in the 1920s and Strength & Health in the 1930s. “These photos will be a source of inspiration to you in your training for a well developed body,” Hernic’s ad promised, providing a small image of a muscled and oiled young man with a prominent posing strap—a pou...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction
• 1. Emerging from the Muscle Magazines: Bob Mizer’s Athletic Model Guild
• 2. Selling Gay Books: Donald Webster Cory’s “Business with a Conscience”
• 3. The Grecian Guild: Imagining a Gay Past, and Future
• 4. “I Want a Pen Pal!”: Postmaster General Arthur Summerfield and the Adonis Male Club
• 5. Defending a Naked Boy: Lynn Womack at the Supreme Court
• 6. Consolidating the Market: DSI of Minneapolis
• 7. The Physique Legacy
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Notes
• Index