+ info: Hyperallergic.com
Back in the 1990s, historian David K. Johnson was conducting research on what would become his book Lavender Scare (now a documentary film), a history of the conflict between the US government and its homosexual population, which was considered as dangerous a threat to national security as communists. Amid the government documents he stumbled upon at the home of an activist, he also found Drum, Physique Pictorial, and MANual — magazines that unabashedly celebrated the statuesque beauty of the male body. While he had to delay falling into these particular rabbit holes to focus on his work in progress, eventually returning to them led him to write Buying Gay, a history of the seminal importance that physique magazines had for the gay community in the United States between the end of World War II and the Stonewall riots.
