Blueboy: Life and Erotica

The Lifestyle Formula

Blueboy's editorial formula in its golden years was genuinely distinctive. The magazine combined photographic spreads of the male nude — carefully produced, often with a more overtly erotic register than the physique tradition that still influenced some of its competitors — with fashion coverage, film and television reviews, advice columns, political journalism, and the kind of cultural writing that treated its gay readership as sophisticated adults with interests extending well beyond the erotic.

This breadth was not a compromise or a concession to squeamish advertisers. It reflected a genuine editorial conviction about what a gay magazine should be — what it owed its readers and what those readers actually wanted. The gay man of 1977 who bought Blueboy did not want only erotic photography. He wanted to see himself reflected across the full range of his cultural life, and Blueboy made a serious attempt to provide that reflection.

The magazine's political coverage was particularly notable. It covered the Reagan administration's response to AIDS with a directness that matched its political stakes. It documented the lives of gay men in America with an eye for the social and political forces shaping those lives. It was, in this sense, part of the same tradition as the gay newspapers — the New York Native, the Bay Area Reporter — that were developing simultaneously as the community's journalistic infrastructure.

The Photography

Blueboy's photography was among the best in American gay erotic publishing. The magazine worked with photographers who brought genuine aesthetic intelligence to the male nude, and the results — in the quality of the light, the choice of subjects, the composition — reflected the same seriousness of intention that distinguished the best of the era's gay erotic photography from purely functional content production.

The magazine's photographic identity was less distinct than Mandate's all-American aesthetic or Drummer's leather-community specificity — Blueboy was more eclectic, more willing to range across the spectrum of male beauty and erotic register that the gay male audience actually contained. This eclecticism was a strength and, eventually, a commercial problem: without a single clear identity, the magazine was vulnerable to competition from titles with sharper positioning.

The Decline and the Legacy

Blueboy's decline mirrors the broader trajectory of gay erotic print publishing. The growth of gay lifestyle magazines in the 1990s — publications that handled the cultural journalism Blueboy had developed without the erotic photography — put pressure on the formula that had distinguished the magazine. Competing simultaneously with lifestyle titles on culture and with purely erotic titles on photography, Blueboy found itself without a clearly defensible market position.

The response, as with many of the Mavety titles in their final years, was to move further toward explicit content and reduce the cultural journalism. By the time of its closure in December 2007, Blueboy had shed most of the editorial identity that had made it distinctive and become, essentially, a conventional gay erotic photography publication.

The loss of Blueboy was the loss of something specific: a magazine that had demonstrated, through more than three decades of publication, that erotic and cultural content were not incompatible — that a gay magazine could contain both the photograph and the political analysis, the nude and the film review, the desire and the intelligence, and that its readers wanted all of it.

BoysDo holds the same conviction. The platform is for the viewer who brings both their desire and their intelligence to what they look at — who wants the photograph to be worth thinking about as well as responding to. *Blueboy* knew that viewer. So does BoysDo.