Challenging the anti-Pleasure league: Physique pictorial and the cultivation of gay politics

Male physique magazines populated the racks at urban newsstands across the nation in cold war America, circulating too through the mails, sometimes openly, sometimes in plain brown wrappers. In an age of heightened national anxiety over bodies, desires, and the national project, nobody embraced the magazines. To the authorities they were often obscene representations of a threatening and deviant homosexual underworld, to be suppressed at all costs; to the burgeoning homophile movement, they were an unseemly blemish invoking too many lurid stereotypes about gay identity at a time when the movement’s primary goal was respectability.