Letters to ONE: Gay and Lbian Voic om the 1950s and 1960s · OutHistory

1950s gay magazines

The gay men's magaz QQ and Ciao! were unabashedly liberated, but they still tered to an exclive dience.

Contents:

6 DES OF LGBT MAGAZ, INCLUDG THE ADVOTE AND GAY TIM

Daniel Wenger on Bob Mizer, who found the first gay magaze the U.S., Physique Pictorial, and specialized photographg buff young men. * 1950s gay magazines *

This week, ProQut lnched the new LGBT Magaze Archive, a database that clus the backfil of 26 of the most fluential, longt-nng magaz on lbian, gay, bisexual, transgenr and related issu. Bee The Advote is exceptnal pre-datg the 1969 Stonewall rts, spans the history of the gay liberatn movement.

While Gay News was lnched 1972 and is of great historil value.

The Pk Paper was the only weekly newspaper voted to gay and lbian terts when was found and beme a highly important mpaigng vehicle. His notn of gayns was rmed by a “Co of Behavr” that he rerd his high-school diary: “More mascule at all tim. ” Among his mols were the gay and the straight, profsnal bodybuilrs and profsnal beach bums, llege stunts and returne om the European ont.

THE OBSSIVE PHOTOGRAPHER BEHD AMERI’S FIRST GAY MAGAZE

Browse and buy a vast selectn of Vtage Gay Magaz, Includg Art And Photography Books Books and Collectibl on * 1950s gay magazines *

But there’s jt as much reason to nsir Mizer the gay Hugh Hefner—a tirels llector of physil specimens.

In 1951, he found what is generally nsired the untry’s origal gay magaze, Physique Pictorial, and would ntue publishg for nearly four s**. ** In the magaze’s early years he clud no explic referenc to gay inty, though he thored d edorials agast the hypocrisi of the straight world.

ONE: THE FIRST GAY MAGAZE THE UNED STAT

Although gays had long been si-eyeg the emblems of straight masculy, Mizer fed them wh new meang: the very men who had looked stoic and impassive the straight magaz seemed, unr Mizer’s directn, to be havg fun. When David Hurl, the gay pornographer and Mizer protégé, was a teen-ager Ccnati, he glimpsed Physique Pictorial_ _at a newsstand and felt, as he put to Taschen, “stantly clud, as if the men were beckong him to look.

” It appealed, Coat wrote, “to the sick half-world of homosexuals, sadists, and masochists. “Homosexualy was the standard way of life among the gged Greek warrrs, ” he wrote 1960.

VTAGE GAY MAGAZ, INCLUDG ART AND PHOTOGRAPHY BOOKS

” Dpe such objectns, he reportedly ma a fortune the eighti by distributg so-lled “ssn vios, ” rerdgs of photo shoots that then veered to more recreatnal Mizer’s Greek-warrr fixatn, ’s temptg to thk of him as one early source of the “body fascism” for which ntemporary gay-male culture is often maligned. Mizer’s achievement, as a photographer and a publisher, was to take the standards of male bety as they existed and prove that gay men uld satisfy them, and be satisfied by them, too. ONE, Inc., was one of the first gay rights anizatns the Uned Stat.

The followg year Dwight Eisenhower issued Executive Orr 10450, which said gays and lbians were perverts, crimals, mentally ill, and mt be blocked om any kd of feral employment. Come 1953, however, the Post Office oze an issue about homosexual marriage for three weeks before officials Washgton, D.

DISVERG THE “GAY LIFTYLE” THROUGH 1970S MAGAZ

A good example n be found le #5, which said ONE wouldn’t prt “scriptns of homosexualy as a practice which the thor enurag others, or wax too enthiastic about. ’s “strategy for silencg the homophile movement by prosecutg as a purveyor of smut. It’s stunng, now, to have a rource that so plaly documents the spiral and promise of a long fight, down to advertisements om gay European magaz and hts at genue tersectnal support, for example the ocsnal appearance of Marv Edwards, a Black acuntant who was the lover of ONE -founr W.

(Both were nnected to Knights of the Clock, a social club open to Black and whe cis gay men. While some see this se as the first time homosexualy was ever addrsed at that level of the urts, others say wasn’t a civil rights victory, jt a loophole built so people uld keep readg porn. On the first page of ONE’s first anniversary issue, which is also the first edn available through JSTOR, the magaze stated that “ONE do not claim that homosexuals are better or worse than anyone else, that they are special any but one sense.

” This one sense, which ONE is “voted to rrectg” through “scientific, historil, and cril pots of view, ” is that gay people are not cizens. On the whole, ONE do actively work to be tersectnal, but bee s thors were largely whe and middle-class, spe the obv prejudic gay Amerins faced durg the tim particular, there are still some tone-af moments.

*BEAR-MAGAZINE.COM* 1950S GAY MAGAZINES

ONE: The First Gay Magaze the Uned Stat - JSTOR Daily .

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