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Physique
Pioneers: The Politics of 1960s Gay Mass Consumption
David
K. Johnson
Department
of History
University
of South Florida
(Estados
Unidos)
In 1963 in Minneapolis, Lloyd Spinar and Conrad Germain
founded Directory Services, Inc. (DSI), a mail order
catalog company for gay male consumers. Over the next
decade, they sold books, records, jewelry, clothing,
greeting cards and other items to thousands of gay men
around the United States and abroad. Their “Vagabond
Club” provided its members with a penpal service, a
credit card for making catalog purchases, and one of the
first directories of gay bars throughout the U.S. By 1968
the club featured plans to open facilities in major cities,
“where club members and their guests can enjoy fabulous
stag shows, delightful dining, and other entertainment.”
But the heart of the DSI enterprise was the publication of
an extensive series of physique magazines featuring the
first male frontal nudes.
With the intent of challenging American censorship laws,
Spinar and Germain were arrested in 1967 and tried on
numerous counts of obscenity. Their vindication by a
federal district court was a landmark obsenity case that
radically transformed the ability of gay men to consume
homoerotic images. Based on archival research and oral
history interviews, this paper will explore the little
known story of these gay pioneers whose mail order
services provided thousands of gay men with a sense of
belonging to an imaged community and whose rhetoric of
freedom and individual rights in their censorship battle
fostered a gay political sensibility.
This is part of a larger project that calls on
historians of gay and lesbian subculture to engage with
the considerable body of work on consumer culture and the
way in which consumption mediates the production of social
identities, particularly in the twentieth century U.S. It
posits that long before there was a gay political
community there was a gay commercial market and seeks to
analyze the historical relationship between these
developments. Whether gazing at a nude male body in a
magazine, buying a gay pulp novel, or ordering pajama
pants through a mail-order house, gay men drew a sense of
their collective identity through mass consumption.
Looking at the production, sale, dissemination, and
consumption of physique magazines, paperback novels,
greeting cards, and other items available for sale through
gay-oriented mail order catalogs in the 1960s, I examine
how these consumer networks fostered a sense of community
long before Stonewall, but also how such a community based
on the ability to consume was necessarily limited by
issues of class and race. I also examine how the community’s
earliest legal victories were for the right to produce and
purchase such commodities, and the role that notions of
sexual freedom and free speech played in these early
struggles. Thus this study will historicize the common
understanding that the movement has declined into a mere
market niche by examining the historical relationship
between gay consumerism and gay activism.
About David K. Johnson
With a Ph.D. from the History Department at
Northwestern University, I have been an assistant
professor of history at the University of South Florida
for 4 years. My book, The Lavender Scare: The Cold War
Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government
(University of Chicago: 2004) won the 2005 Herbert Hoover
Book Award for the best book in U.S. history on any topic
covering the period 1914-1964. It also won the 2005 Randy
Shilts Award for gay non-fiction and a 2004 Outstanding
Book Award from the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of
Bigotry and Human Rights.
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