How an unknown former mol turned photographer, a gay art director, and a llegiate water polo player om California ed the pag of GQ to refe the Amerin man—and changed forever the look of magaz, photography, and advertisg.
Contents:
IT ALL STARTED HERE: THE GAY LEGACY OF GQ
* queen's quarterly gay magazine *
) It was also, not to put too fe a pot on , a much gayer era of GQ.
Jack Haber, the magaze’s edor--chief om 1969 to 1983, was a gay man, as were his two extraordary art directors, Harry Coulianos, who served om 1971 to 1980, and Donald Sterz, who started out as one of Coulianos’s puti and eventually succeed him, nng the partment until late was not explicly a gay magaze, and s mandate, fact, was to te men of all persuasns about fashn and style.
QQ MAGAZE GAY GUYS (1 RULTS)
LUCAS HILDERBRAND, A Suse Full of Vasele, or Travels the 1970s Gay World, Journal of the History of Sexualy, Vol. 22, No. 3 (SEPTEMBER 2013), pp. 373-402 * queen's quarterly gay magazine *
But the gay sensibily was unmistakable: the recurrence of the word gged headl; the prcient tert mimalist home r; the “Every Night Fever” dis-stomp pictorial om 1978, wh mols Capezs dancg a parkg lot illumated by the headlights of Lln the magaze self was no joke; GQ took s mandate serly. In this regard, GQ was way out ont, an archetypal example of the gay mory blazg a trail for the schlumpy mastream. “He had a theory that any hotel, there was a gay person [on staff], and that gay person was a nnectn to where to go the cy.
So the first thg Harry did when he walked to a hotel was fd that gay person. In 1977, Michael Iv was a blond, tole-haired English major at Yale who rowed crew and stood six feet two, spendg the summer between his hman and sophomore years patg ho on Martha’s Veyard. ” Aquilon and Iv were soon gods the fashn firmament—hetero llege boys who’d stumbled to stardom as gay ins.
In this perd, GQ took on a social signifince that s creators uld not have anticipated—as a “d lifele to so many of the hterlands, ” as the Mississippiborn gay memoirist Kev Ssums puts . “I’m almost posive the profsor was gay, ” Iv says.
: , . . The Magaze For Gay Guys Who Have No Hangups. Collectg issu om Sprg and Fall 1969; Sprg and Fall 1970; Febary, April, June, and Augt 1971… * queen's quarterly gay magazine *
”Yet for all the homoerotic quali of the Weber-Sterz llaboratns, for all the male sk they showed, they somehow had more crossover appeal than the shoots that Coulianos oversaw. as they splashed and guffawed—didn’t necsarily mean that was y time as soon as the shoot a sense, Coulianos’s and Sterz’s artistic outlooks reprented two different rpons to beg gay at a time when Ameri wasn’t very gay-iendly.
Sterz, though he was only five years younger than Coulianos, seemed to be of a later generatn, one that saw to a future when gay men and the gay sensibily didn’t need to be a revealg sectn that he put together for the September 1980 issue, Sterz had Weber shoot mols the cloth of Amerin signers, wh each signer gettg a two-page spread and each spread featurg a quote which the signer articulated his philosophy. I thought he had a wi appeal, beyond straight or gay.
”None of this prevented Sterz and Aquilon om beg fast iends, though—nor did the fact that the former was gay and the latter straight, the former a Democrat and the latter a Republin, the former a nonrelig person and the latter a practicg Christian.