Daniel Wenger on Bob Mizer, who found the first gay magaze the U.S., Physique Pictorial, and specialized photographg buff young men.
Contents:
- THE OBSSIVE PHOTOGRAPHER BEHD AMERI’S FIRST GAY MAGAZE
- NEWLY PUBLISHED PORTRAS DOCUMENT A CENTURY OF GAY MEN LOVE
- ELEVEN AMAZG PHOTOGRAPHS THAT TELL THE GAY HISTORY OF TORONTO
THE OBSSIVE PHOTOGRAPHER BEHD AMERI’S FIRST GAY MAGAZE
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.
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**.
NEWLY PUBLISHED PORTRAS DOCUMENT A CENTURY OF GAY MEN LOVE
** 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. 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. ” 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.
ELEVEN AMAZG PHOTOGRAPHS THAT TELL THE GAY HISTORY OF TORONTO
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. "Around three years ago, I was workg on the layout of a book about physique photography wh photos om the 1950s, whose athetics and visual worlds were clearly tend to appeal to a gay dience.
In the urse of this work, I asked myself: what would a book wh ntemporary gay and queer photography look like?