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| Ralph Kleiner (Muscleboy Magazine, 1966) |
The kitsch artistry and baggy pouch which Ralph Kleiner was subjected to on the front of Muscleboy in 1996 seems to epitomise the desperate concealment needed for gay magazines to get onto newsagent's shelves back then. However this image does show a romantic side to the male personality, feminine if you like, which wasn't exactly a commonplace statement in the time when men were still men.
On top of that, he's nearly naked (implying sex is in the air) and the object of his rapt attention is a freak flower, a blue (for a boy) rose. You sense he's going to kiss it - or even eat it, God forbid! The fake nature all around him and the blue sky just over the horizon seems to invoke the sense of an optimistic, fantastical journey, just like Dorothy's in The Wizard of Oz.
In it's way it's a very clever, political statement, deserving of it's place in my series of classic, homoerotic images. (click on the label below for others)
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| Glenn Bishop (Vagabond Magazine, 1966) |
Compare that Muscleboy image with this openly erotic display of Glenn Bishop showing pubic hair on the Front Cover, no less, of Vagabond magazine in the same year, 1966. Admittedly, this was the era when liberation from censorship began, but I didn't think it had got quite as far as this! Glenn Bishop was arguably a gay hero, the handsome embodiment of 1950's coy, physique pouch imagery, so the sight of this must have been electric back then, a shock, almost unwelcome, as though someone like Ed Sheeran had suddenly revealed all today to demonstrate that he's just a man after all.
I think freedom came more quickly in the US than the UK and it's possible that the Vagabond issue illustrated above was for postal distribution rather than book shops. In fact I've never heard of Vagabond magazine before so maybe it never made it in into the quivering hands of sex-starved, 1966 gays at all! Not in the UK anyway.
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| Vagabond Magazine No 7 carried ads for gay singles |
Vagabond Magazine also has an interesting link to what might be the first 'openly' gay record album, 'Love is a Drag', issued by Lace records in 1962, which featured a (straight) man singing standards, but re-gendered to be about loving other men. Vagabond No 7 in 1965 carried ads for gay singles from a different label 'Camp', including 'I'd Rather Fight Than Swish', 'Rough Trade' and 'The Ballad of the Camping Woodcutter'. The whole story is told in Subversive Sounds.
The cover of No 7 (above) featured 'respectable', men's, fashion graphics, but they are arranged in such a way as to be looking at each other, the back cover man invisibly reaching out towards another's ass while an onlooker fiddles in his pockets. Such was the meagre, but subtly exciting, fare for gays back then. Little did they know that Glenn Bishop's pubes were about to be thrust in their faces!
The cover for Vagabond No8 openly ditches the ambiguity that men's magazines are about muscle development and physique (an idea that persists in the Muscleboy, Ralph Kleiner image above). Instead it depicts a fairly ordinary young man looking up hopefully in another naturalistic setting, an image which clearly is about him as a person, not his gym programme.
So Vagabond too has a honourable place in gay history.