Honcho: The Masculine Standard

The Aesthetic

Honcho's visual identity was distinct from the first issue and remained consistent across its run. The men were older, heavier, often bearded — before the bear subculture had fully articulated itself as a distinct identity, Honcho was producing content for its aesthetic. The photography emphasised mass and masculinity, the specific physicality of men who looked like they worked with their bodies rather than simply trained them.

The erotic content was more explicitly stated than in Mandate. Honcho did not aspire to the high-culture associations of the Playboy model; it aspired to directness, to the honest depiction of gay male desire for the masculine body without the mediation of cultural prestige. This directness made it, for a significant portion of the gay male audience, more honest and more appealing than the flagship.

The magazine's design — heavier typography, darker visual palette, the specific aesthetic vocabulary of masculine gay culture — matched the content it contained. A Honcho from the early 1980s is immediately visually distinct from a Mandate of the same era. Both are high-quality productions; they are high-quality productions of entirely different things.

The Cultural Context

Honcho appeared at a specific moment in the development of gay masculine culture — after the leather scene had established itself as a major subculture within the gay community, but before AIDS had reshaped the culture's relationship to explicit sexuality. The late 1970s and very early 1980s were the years of greatest cultural confidence and greatest sexual freedom in urban gay America, and Honcho reflected that moment with unusual clarity.

The magazine documented not just bodies but a way of being gay — the bars, the baths, the specific social world that had developed around masculine gay identity in cities like San Francisco and New York. Its fiction explored the erotic scenarios that this world generated. Its photography showed the men who populated it. As a cultural document, it is as valuable as its photographic content.

George Mavety's decision to launch Honcho alongside Mandate rather than simply broadening his flagship reflected a genuine understanding of his audience. Gay men were not monolithic in their desires, and a publisher who tried to serve the full range from a single title would please no one entirely. Honcho and Mandate together served a much wider audience than either could have served alone.

The AIDS Era

Honcho covered the AIDS crisis with the directness of a publication that was close to the community hardest hit. The leather and masculine gay community that was Honcho's primary audience was among the first and most severely affected, and the magazine's coverage reflected both the magnitude of the loss and the community's response to it.

The safer sex messaging that Honcho developed alongside its erotic content was part of a broader effort by gay publications to respond to the crisis without abandoning the sexual culture they had helped build. The balance was not always achieved perfectly, but the attempt was genuine and consistent.

The magazine's later years followed the trajectory of the Mavety empire generally — declining print revenues, increasing competition from online content, the eventual folding of the entire group in 2009. Honcho survived longer than many of its competitors precisely because its audience loyalty was exceptionally strong — the readers who had found in the magazine a reflection of their specific desires and their specific community stayed with it until the end.

BoysDo does not replicate *Honcho*'s aesthetic — the platform's photography tends toward the artistic and the erotic rather than the explicitly masculine. But the audience *Honcho* served, and the conviction that their desires deserve a well-made publication built specifically for them, is one the platform shares and honours.