The Magazines That Built Gay Visual Culture: From Physique Pictorial to Elska

Before Stonewall: The Coded Beginning

Gay erotic publishing did not begin with Stonewall, though the legal and cultural upheavals of the late 1960s changed what was possible. Before then, a different kind of publication served a different kind of need.

The physique magazines of the 1940s and 1950s — Physique Pictorial, Tomorrow's Man, Vim — operated under the cover of bodybuilding and physical culture. Their content was male nudes, or near-nudes, photographed in the Greek athletic tradition. Their audiences were predominantly gay men who understood exactly what they were buying and why. Their publishers knew this too, and navigated the legal and postal regulations of the era with varying degrees of ingenuity and risk.

Bob Mizer's Physique Pictorial, launched in Los Angeles in 1951, is the foundational document of this tradition and of gay erotic photography more broadly. Mizer ran the Athletic Model Guild from a house in East Los Angeles, photographed hundreds of young men over forty years, and published the images in a magazine that was simultaneously an athletic manual, an art publication, and the most significant archive of mid-century gay male desire in existence. His work is discussed in detail in BoysDo's review of Dian Hanson's The Big Penis Book, where his legacy receives the attention it deserves.

The physique era ended when the legal environment changed enough to permit more explicit publication. The magazines that followed — Stonewall-era and post-Stonewall — could say directly what the physique publications had encoded.

The Golden Era: 1970s–1980s

The decade following Stonewall was the golden era of gay magazine publishing. Legal liberalisation, the growth of an identifiable gay consumer market, and the arrival of offset printing technology that made full-colour magazine production economically feasible combined to produce an extraordinary flowering of gay print culture.

The flagship publication of this era was Mandate, launched in New York in 1975 by George Mavety — a Canadian publisher who built, almost single-handedly, the infrastructure of American gay erotic print publishing. Mavety was straight, by his own account, but he understood his audience with unusual precision and treated their culture with genuine respect. His ambition for Mandate was clear: the gay equivalent of Playboy, combining erotic photography with cultural journalism, interviews, reviews, and genuine editorial intelligence. At its peak, Mandate had a circulation of over 100,000 and a reputation as the most important gay magazine in America.

The success of Mandate funded an empire. Mavety launched Honcho for the masculine/leather-adjacent audience, Playguy for the younger demographic, and Inches for readers with specific preferences. Each magazine was distinct — different aesthetic, different tone, different relationship to the gay culture it was documenting — but all reflected the same founding conviction: gay men deserved serious, well-produced publishing.

Blueboy, launched in 1974, was Mandate's primary competitor and, at its best, its equal. Its name came from Gainsborough's famous painting, and the parodied portrait appeared on its first cover. Blueboy combined erotic photography with lifestyle content — fashion, film reviews, advice columns, political coverage — in proportions that made it feel like a genuine magazine rather than a photography publication with editorial fig leaves.

Drummer, San Francisco's leather magazine, occupied its own corner of the market entirely. Founded in 1975 and gay-owned throughout its history, Drummer served the leather, S&M, and fetish community with a combination of explicit photography and genuine cultural journalism. It was, by any measure, the best-written gay erotic magazine of its era — its editorial ambition consistently outpacing its production resources, its community loyalty extending to a readership that treated it as the magazine of record for an entire subculture.

AIDS, Survival, and the 1990s

AIDS reshaped gay print culture as it reshaped everything else. The magazines that had celebrated sexual freedom in the late 1970s navigated the 1980s with varying degrees of intelligence and responsibility. Some ignored the crisis; some addressed it with a seriousness that gave them a new cultural significance beyond erotic publishing. The magazines that survived the decade did so partly through genuine editorial engagement with what was happening to their readers.

The 1990s brought new challenges. The gay lifestyle press — Out, Genre, MetroSource, Attitude in the UK — developed as a distinct category, targeting the emerging gay consumer market with content that was lifestyle-focused rather than explicitly erotic. The erotic publications found themselves competing for audience and advertising in a landscape that had diversified beyond what the 1970s model could accommodate.

Blueboy responded by moving further toward explicit content, shedding its lifestyle coverage in favour of harder-edged erotic photography. Most of Mavety's titles followed a similar trajectory. By the end of the 1990s, the golden era publications had largely become what they had always partly been — erotic magazines — with the cultural journalism that had distinguished them at their best either absent or reduced to a token presence.

The Digital Disruption and the Indie Response

The internet killed gay erotic magazines in the same way it killed every other print category that depended on exclusive access to content. When photographs could be shared online, the proposition of paying monthly for a magazine of photographs became harder to sustain. Mavety's empire — Mandate, Honcho, Playguy, and the rest — folded in 2009, a few years after George Mavety himself died of a heart attack. Blueboy had already closed in 2007. Drummer had ceased in 1999.

The response from the more artistically serious end of the gay print tradition was not to concede the field but to reinvent the format. BUTT magazine, launched in Amsterdam in 2001 by Gert Jonkers and Jop van Bennekom, was the most significant of these reinventions. Pocket-sized, printed on pink paper, explicitly positioned as "an international faggot magazine for interesting homosexuals," it brought the aesthetic intelligence of the art world to the erotic zine format. Its first issue featured Bernhard Willhelm photographed by Wolfgang Tillmans. It built a devoted readership known as "Buttheads" and ran for twenty-nine issues before going on hiatus in 2011.

Elska, launched in 2015 by photographer Liam Campbell, took a different approach: a city-by-city documentary project, each issue devoted to a different city and the ordinary gay men who live there. Published as a bookazine — a print object with the physical quality of an art book — Elska has published over forty issues spanning every inhabited continent. It is the living heir to the best tradition of gay magazine publishing: genuinely diverse, genuinely photographic, genuinely committed to the idea that ordinary gay men in every city are worth the sustained attention of a serious camera.

The Magazines

What follows is a guide to the publications that defined gay print culture — from Mizer's physique photographs to Elska's city dispatches.

• [Physique Pictorial: The Beginning of Everything](/articles/physique-pictorial)
• [Drummer: The Leather Canon](/articles/drummer)
• [Mandate: The Gay Playboy](/articles/mandate)
• [Blueboy: Life and Erotica](/articles/blueboy)
• [Honcho: The Masculine Standard](/articles/honcho)
• [Playguy: Youth and Desire](/articles/playguy)
• [In Touch for Men: The Art-Forward Alternative](/articles/in-touch)
• [Inches and Torso: The Mavety Niche Titles](/articles/inches-torso)
• [BUTT: The Amsterdam Revolution](/articles/butt-magazine)
• [Elska: The Living Heir](/articles/elska)

What the Magazines Built

The gay erotic magazines of the 1970s and 1980s built something that outlasted their print runs: a tradition of taking gay male desire seriously as a subject for visual attention, editorial intelligence, and genuine craft. The photographers they published — many of them documented in BoysDo's series on the [photographers who made the male body art](/articles/pillar-photographers-male-nude) — developed their practices in the context of these publications. The aesthetic standards they established shaped the studios that followed.

BoysDo is their digital heir — not in format but in conviction. The magazine you lingered over, returned to, kept on the shelf because the photographs deserved more than a single viewing. That quality of attention, translated into a digital platform built for the sustained and honest look, is what BoysDo exists to provide.

The magazines taught gay men how to look at themselves. The platform continues the lesson.

Part of the BoysDo editorial series. Explore the platform at [boysdo.com](https://boysdo.com).