In Touch for Men: The Art-Forward Alternative

The Editorial Approach

In Touch for Men took its cultural journalism as seriously as its photography, developing a reputation for interviews with artists, writers, and cultural figures that extended beyond the gay erotic community into the broader cultural world that its readers inhabited. The magazine covered film, music, and literature with genuine depth, and its approach to gay politics — the legal and social struggles of the 1970s and 1980s — was consistently intelligent and engaged.

This dual commitment to photography and cultural journalism placed In Touch in the same tradition as Mandate and Blueboy, but with a more explicitly aesthetic emphasis. The magazine was not trying to be the gay Playboy. It was trying to be a gay magazine that was also a good magazine — that could be read alongside serious publications without embarrassment, that brought the same standards to its content as publications that did not deal with explicit content brought to theirs.

The Los Angeles base gave In Touch a particular relationship to the film and entertainment industries that Mandate and the New York publications lacked. The magazine's entertainment coverage drew on proximity to Hollywood, and its visual culture was shaped by the specific quality of Los Angeles light and the specific aesthetic of the city's gay community.

The Photography

In Touch's photography was the most formally accomplished of the mainstream gay erotic publications. The magazine's art direction gave images the space and the presentation that serious photography requires — large reproductions, considered layouts, the kind of editorial decision-making about how images relate to each other and to the pages around them that most erotic publications ignored.

The photographers who appeared in In Touch were, in many cases, also showing work in galleries and publishing photography books — practitioners who treated their magazine work as a legitimate expression of the same formal intelligence they brought to their non-erotic work. This overlap between the commercial erotic and the art photography worlds was more extensive than is generally acknowledged, and In Touch was one of the primary sites of that overlap.

The Digital Disruption

Like the other publications of its generation, In Touch for Men did not survive the digital transformation of the 1990s and 2000s. The audience for art-forward gay erotic photography — always smaller than the audience for the Mavety flagship titles — found its specific needs served, after a fashion, by the emerging web culture of gay image-sharing. The specific quality of In Touch's editorial intelligence, its curatorial approach to the images it published, was harder to replicate online, and the magazine ceased without a clear successor.

BUTT magazine, in the following decade, came closest to continuing the In Touch tradition — the art-forward gay publication, the quality of editorial intelligence applied to explicitly gay and explicitly erotic content. The two publications are not identical in aesthetic, but they share a conviction about what a gay magazine should be, and that conviction has a continuous history from In Touch's 1973 founding to BUTT's 2001 launch.

BoysDo is the digital expression of the same tradition — the platform that brings the art director's eye and the curator's intelligence to gay erotic photography, that treats the images it hosts as subjects of genuine formal attention rather than as content to be catalogued and consumed. *In Touch* was doing this on paper fifty years ago. BoysDo does it on a screen today.