Get a new look at our secret gay history through rare photos from vintage “beefcake” magazines

Forrester Millard and John Miller, 1948 – Source: Bob Mizer, AMG
Photo: Wikimedia Commons

We all have memories from a young age of walking down the underwear aisle in a department store, simultaneously scandalized and stimulated by images on the packaging of buff men stuffed into their briefs.

Do we dare look? What if some notices us noticing? The temptation of the *ahem* package was almost too much to bear.

That feeling was no doubt familiar to closeted men in the pre-gay liberation era when they’d come across the suggestive, body-baring images of “physique magazines,” which purported to be dedicated to health and fitness, but in actuality were barely-coded homoerotica by and for the gays.

With origins dating back to the early 20th century, when interest in bodybuilding and weightlifting was spiking, the first of the proper so-called beefcake magazines emerged in the ’30s, becoming more and more popular into the ’50s and early ’60s, right up until the time when more explicitly sexual editorial content was legalized.

Over the decades, renowned critic and curator Vince Aletti has taken to collecting rare…

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