E-Mail This Article to a Friend The barest generation (continued)

Only some of the photos included in At Ease were printed in the popular press, but taken together they are similar to photos published in mass-market glossies like Look and Life. Given how widely such images were disseminated — and appreciated — what we are seeing here is a watershed in the public portrayal of the male body. In some ways, this shift fulfilled the early dreams of the physical-culture movement, with its celebration of the male body’s strength and patriotism. But these photos also revived the long-standing "problem" with physical-culture images: while celebrating "real masculinity," they were also intrinsically homoerotic.

For anyone familiar with gay-and-lesbian history, these photos will come as no surprise. Allan Berube, in his groundbreaking 1990 book Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War Two, details how the war caused a massive geographic and psychological shake-up of American culture. Women and men in the armed forces were ripped from their everyday lives and forced to deal with people and situations they would never have encountered had they stayed close to home. But beyond this, men and women were thrown together in homosocial environments, often under intense circumstances, such as battle and the threat of imminent death, and ended up forging new types of relationships and dealing with emotions they had never before imagined. While only a few of these men and women "came out" — and those who did began to form the first visible gay and lesbian communities in cities after World War II — many, many more learned new ways of relating to members of their own sex.

THE EMERGENCE of the male body as heroic sex object during World War II had major social ramifications after the war as well. The valorized, partially unclothed male body was now part of the American visual landscape and would never go away. It was now okay to go shirtless at the beach or while doing work around the yard. Hollywood began reflecting these changes, exposing more and more of the flesh of new stars like William Holden and Marlon Brando. And the physical-culture movement — which had never completely disappeared — now underwent a resurgence. Magazines such as Strength and Health and Iron Man found a new, far wider readership. Award-winning body builders like Steve Reeves and Mickey Hargitay (husband of Jayne Mansfield and father of Mariska Hargitay, star of Law & Order: SVU) became near-national icons. If being fit and well-muscled, now detached from military prowess, seemed to lose some of its patriotic luster during the Cold War, bodybuilding became a national obsession in its own right.

But the drive toward heterosexual normalcy also hit a few cultural speed bumps. That same old problem of regular guys looking at photos of really well-built, mostly naked regular guys still looked, well, queer. A problem for Sandow and his crowd, this aspect of bodybuilding became even more troubling in the face of an increasingly public, rapidly growing gay and lesbian subculture. Many of those servicemen and -women who decided to come out — why bother going back to the farm in Nebraska when you could move to Greenwich Village with the "buddy" you met in the Navy? — formed vibrant gay communities in large cities such as New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Chicago. The emergence of visible communities brought with it an increasingly visible culture as well.

Prime artifacts of this burgeoning culture were the new crop of physical-culture and muscle magazines aimed specifically at a gay-male readership. While Mr. America and Iron Man surely had gay-male readers, they were ostensibly heterosexual in their presentation: their models often posed with women, and the magazines mixed articles offering weightlifting tips with feature stories about dating and being a "real man." So the emergence of "gay" physical-culture magazines in the early 1950s put the entire field — and indeed American masculinity — into a tailspin.

One telling feature of gay publications such as Physique Pictorial, Tomorrow’s Man, Body Beautiful, and MANual is that they generally didn’t contain information about lifting weights — they just ran photos and drawings of men who lifted weights. Often these images had more to do with exposing skin and looking fetching than with flexing biceps and pumping iron. It’s true that some of these magazines carried articles like "A Healthy Body Means a Healthy Sex Life" and "Vitamins and Eating Right: A Way to Good Health," but basically they were about naked men showing off their bodies. And these magazines were fairly clear about their purpose: they were committed to the appreciation of physical culture, not necessarily its manufacture. Remarkably, the "gay" photos in Tomorrow’s Man or Physique Pictorial look much more like the photos in At Ease — as well as in Look and Life — than anything in the "straight" physical-culture magazines of the ’50s. The kinder, gentler look of men at war, once captured by earlier photojournalists, found clear resonances in the post-war gay muscle magazines.

This overlap between the gay and straight magazines became so blurred that Iron Man, Strength and Health, and other journals began publishing editorials disavowing their homosexual readership, accusing them of sexual perversion, mental illness, and even national disloyalty — often implying that they were Communists or, in an obvious sexual innuendo, "pink." For their part, the "gay" muscle magazines refused to take the bait. An editorial in the winter 1954-’55 issues of Physique Pictorial stated calmly:

Physique Pictorial is dedicated to creating in all people a greater body-consciousness. Almost every religion teaches us that they body is the temple of the soul, and whereas we would never advocate that any person become so pre-occupied with the physical side of life that he neglect the intellectual or spiritual, we feel that the maintenance of a fine healthy physique by those who are able to do so is to pay a greater compliment to our creator who planned for the upmost perfecting in the universe. If we believe that God is perfect and that God created man in his own image, does it now follow that the perfection of our bodies is of next importance to the perfection of our souls?

While gay and straight muscle magazines took swipes at one another for the rest of the 1960s, it became clear that as images of the sexy male body began to proliferate throughout the culture, the gay magazines essentially won the aesthetic battle. And for all the straight magazines’ protests, they weren’t really all that different from their gay counterparts. After all, they often shared the same models, and bodybuilders such as Steve Reeves (who would go on to international fame in the blockbuster 1959 Italian cheapo-epic Hercules) had no problem appearing repeatedly in both. Even up-and-coming film stars were photographed for gay magazines. For example, the December 1953 issue of Tomorrow’s Man featured a young, very cute, Tab Hunter on its cover and an eight-page beefcake spread on the inside. The fact that Tab Hunter was gay (though obviously closeted at the time) and appeared in what was essentially a gay soft-core porn magazine seemingly posed no problem for the studio he worked for. Apparently, the lines between "gay" and "straight" were far less rigid in the 1950s than we have been led to believe half a century later.

The blurring of these lines was, in one sense, the logical outcome of Sandow’s physical-culture movement. What is Tomorrow’s Man but a series of cabinet cards for Tab Hunter and other celebrities? On the other hand, this dismantling of clear demarcations between "gay" and "straight" was the nightmare of heterosexual physical culturists: the homosexual subtext of the physical-culture movement was now exposed and made glaringly public. This marked a major cultural shift whose consequences we still feel today, as the male body has become more and more exposed in art and advertising. That’s because, as the photos in At Ease show, World War II–era Americans learned that men could be strong and vulnerable, heroic and gentle all at the same time. And that they could be sexy as well.

The culture war between the straight and the gay magazines of the 1950s was, in a sense, a war over who "owned" men’s bodies. Iron Man and its ilk insisted that men were the subject — they were strong, commanding, and self-actualizing. Tomorrow’s Man and Physique Pictorial suggested that men could also be objects — ready and eager to be looked at and admired. In these days of ever-increasing male flesh, from the movies to Abercrombie & Fitch catalogues, can there be any doubt that the gay sensibility won the culture war over how to portray the male body?

Michael Bronski’s newest book, Pulp Friction: Uncovering the Golden Age of Gay Male Pulps (St. Martin’s Press, 2003), just received a Lammy Award for Best Anthology of 2003. He can be reached at mabronski@aol.com