Johnson introduces us to the artists who created physique-adjacent artworks. The proliferation of bodybuilding contests, both local and national, depended on a large gay fan base. The gyms, contests, and magazines surrounding bodybuilding were another such public space that gay men actively, if cautiously, appropriated. “Gay men in the early twentieth century were adept at appropriating urban public spaces for their own purposes, whether bars, public parks, Turkish baths, or the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA),” writes Johnson. Physique magazines, after all, were a byproduct of the turn-of-the-century investment in physical culture, which developed among middle-class men in urbanizing areas, across the spectrum of sexual orientations. Sure, they celebrated an aesthetic that rejected any form of effeminacy.
The most apparent way, for those invested in the visual arts, is his aesthetic analysis of the tropes of physique magazines. While he had to delay falling into these particular rabbit holes to focus on his work in progress, eventually returning to them led him to write Buying Gay, a history of the seminal importance that physique magazines had for the gay community in the United States between the end of World War II and the Stonewall riots.īuying Gay is a thorough, and extremely entertaining read that delights in several ways anyone remotely interested in the subject matter.
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Amid the government documents he stumbled upon at the home of an activist, he also found Drum, Physique Pictorial, and MANual - magazines that unabashedly celebrated the statuesque beauty of the male body. Johnson was conducting research on what would become his book Lavender Scare (now a documentary film ), a history of the conflict between the US government and its homosexual population, which was considered as dangerous a threat to national security as communists.
Johnson’s Buying Gayīack in the 1990s, historian David K.