PHYSIQUE PICTORIAL
ATHLETIC MODEL GUILD:
THE GREAT GAY GRAND-DADDY OF US ALL…
Who’s Who in American Chicken, Veal, and Beef
If you remember where you were when Kennedy was shot, you’re old enough to have come out on Physique Pictorial. PP for years was the “physique” magazine that was black and white and read all over the Closeted World. From the 1950s into the 1980s, Physique Pictorial has weighed, measured, and photographed every young piece of rough trade to ever skid into LA. In fact, PP is to tough boys’ biceps, baskets, and buns what the Sears catalog is to men’s shorts, shirts, and other hardware.
Any curious-green Martian handed only a copy of Physique Pictorial, as a tourist’s catalog upon his first landing, would get the impression that all Earthmales are aggressively muscled young studs who, wearing posing trunks, jockstraps, or construction/military gear, spend their lives horsing around in the full bodycontact of oil-wrestling. And men who aren’t Martian still turn green with envy, beating off at the Wonderful World According to Physique Pictorial–wanting to enjoy some young stud-action themselves.
Physique Pictorial, fathered by Bob Mizer, is the grandfather of American Male Erotica. Long before frontal nudity liberated the male on the U.S. printed page, PP was fighting the First Amendment good fight using the respectable dodge of presenting photos of male models for use by artists and others of esthetic inclination. Get it? Get it? There’s c-o-d-e here. Esthetic used to be a secret word for homosexual. Just like the phrase He’s-a-friend-of-Dorothy’s, they tell me, meant a guy was gay. So for years, men who liked men knew how to read PP’s coded presentation of hot studstuff. PP always delivered the lowdown for highbrows with allusions of sucking and fucking disguised, with genius, as wrestling and boxing and horsing around.
Fans of PP also sent in to the publisher for the “key” to the intricate symbols of arrows/circles/squiggly lines that were often drawn in each model’s picture. The cryptic quality of the symbol code kept the then Moral Majority in the dark while revealing all in its shorthand–to the initiated who had the code-key–everything they wanted to know about what the model would do sexually: active greek, passive french, S&M, etc.
Guys who’ve only been in gay culture since around 1970 have no idea how complex a coded life–far more intricate than todays hankies-n-chains–men had to live in the not-so-far-distant past. So save your current erotica–like SKIN magazine, boys, because the Repression as always will rise inevitably again! Learn your future sex-preference survival from the survivors–like PP- from the past. PP has always had the good grace to master the sheen of respectable sleaze so necessary in the pre-lib days when an All-American beauty rosebutt by any other “esthetic” name was still an arrestable hot piece of suckabilly trade.
PP the Mag is only the tip of AMG the Studio. AMG is the MGM of male sex. Athletic Model Guild has more stars than the heavens of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. In fact, not a few of AMG’s models–fresh to LA–were first discovered, uncovered, and photographed by AMG, and then later went on to success in films and television. If you flip through the pages of Physique Pictorial, you see faces and bodies that later had celeb names like actors Guy Madison, Russ Tamilyn,and Gary Conway as well as legit physique stars like John Tristram and Bill Grant. The true pleasure about AMG is that the studio’s presentation of these guys has always been so adroitly understated that, even years later, their appearance in PP is no embarrassment to them, because the AMG/PP style caused little, if any, compromise of public character. Just because a guy was in the PP pages did not mean he was gay. There are lines like: “His mother/girlfriend brought him to our studio, so proud was she of his body.” The only implication was: if you like the male body, this is a representative type smiling engagingly in the near-nude for your “esthetic” pleasure. AMG Studio, in short, was, after World War II, in a Southern California then teaming with an abundance of freshly drafted, or discharged, young military meat, a major “underground” photo and movie studio. Now with most of the commercially Major Studios sold off for condos, only AMG remains as the stud-studio of longest, hardest standing.
Physique Pictorial is past its thirtieth year of consistent publication. Avid collectors can today buy what remains of Physique Pictorial’s meaty menu of Who’s Who in American Chicken Veal, and Beef. The whole run of approximately seventy copies is available for purchase as well as thousands of incredible b&w prints and color slides indexed by models’ names. PP has always put out a cross-section of American males groomed to the hardon nines. These guys are naturally turned out the way hot, attractive guys developed their bodies and cut their hair for the Best Look of the Fifties, Sixties, Seventies, and now Eighties. Nostalgia sexbuffs, wondering where are the boys of yesteryear, can do some one-handed reading through PP and get their nostalgia nuts off studying successive decades of boys/men attractively turned out, depending on the decade for smooching, necking, or getting it on!
The Sexual-Liberation-First-Amendment struggle is softly mirrored in small editorial asides in the pages of PP. The politics and mores indexed are as important to the pop culture significance of PP as is its changing chronicle of rough American trade. AMG has been hassled by everything from McCarthyism to Born-Againism. Publisher Mizer only occasionally breaks his low-profile to state in very small print that PP exists to inspire, to appeal to the esthetic (and he means it straight-arrow), to provide reference for artists, and to encourage an interest in health.
Today PP appears with frontal nudes and some AMG-Raw special full-color editions. But in the mags the boys and themes remain the same: young roughnecks in butch clothes pleasantly stripped, oiled, and posed in macho gear. The World of AMG is also bigger than the printed page. AMG offers literally thousands of movies of rough-housing, sweating, and full-body wrestling that make a dick spring to an attention most film critics have never experienced. AMG is Stud City all the way.
Currently, AMG’s studio is an interesting back lot: a warehouse of films, prints, and props stored next to the famous cocksoup of the PP swimming pool, where three decades of bare-assed boys have shed their inhibitions and watched their balls and dicks bob up in the warm water and sun of Southern California. The warehouse is full of ghosts of boys long since become men, of spectres of hypocritical morality beaten down by the truth of the flesh.
Today young men who know how to live the hustle of the streetlife still find their way to the Greatest Studio in Hollywood. They hope for a small fee and plenty of exposure. With the right photo seen in the right place, a young man may land a small part in a major film in return for his large part in the film producer’s sack. AMG, make no mistake, is not a cover for a hustling male-whore agency. It’s just that a lot of the streetguys naturally gravitate at one time or another into photographic modeling for studios as legit as AMG.
Bowling Green University in Ohio may, through its Association, publish the Journal of Popular Culture, but nothing BGU’s Pop Cultch Ass puts out puts out as much Pop Ass as AMG. Any man, or scholar, with a taste for contemporary Huck Finns cruising down current American rivers toward LA knows full well the homoerotic import of Leslie Fiedler’s revealing literary essay: “Come Back to the Raft, Huck Honey.”
Everyone hopes, and deep down believes, that the All-American Cleancut Boy-Next-Door is really a Stud with the face of a sort-of-dangerous and very butch Botticelli angel willing to lay his hard body back and have his cock sucked for 25 bucks trade–plain and simple. AMG has delivered this quality promise for so many years that the sophisticated collectors of male erotica have beat (off) a thankful path to their door. (Physique Pictorial, a quarterly, $10 for advance 8-issue subscription, AMG, 1834 West 11th Street, Los Angeles, CA 90006.)
©1981 Dr. Jack Fritscher