I see Roscoe as the precise heir to Tom of Finland. It was in these pages that Tom of Finland would first publish his erotic illustrations. Through his guild he published the first all-male, all-nude magazine Physique Pictorial. After spending nine months in prison for distributing black-and-white photos of bodybuilders wearing g-strings, Bob created The Athletic Model Guild, which created a sort of shield of professionalism under which his pornography could flourish. While it was understood that the market for beefcake publications was mostly gay, they were presented as “fitness and health” magazines, educating readers on the latest exercises.īob Mizer, often said to be one of the pioneers of gay pornography, founded his own beefcake empire.
Between the 1930s and 1960s, beefcake magazines were distributed widely and openly throughout North American pharmacies and newspaper stands. Tom of Finland’s livelihood and popularity relied on the rise of “beefcake” magazines and the steady income which they provided him. Tom’s vision was to create a world where masculine men-usually working class- co-existed together, sexually liberated, characterized by a total lack of inhibition. This ideal was most well-illustrated by Mike’s long-standing crush, Tommaso dei Cavalieri, who, 35 years his junior, was the subject of Michelangelo’s longest sequence of sonnets, all about the burning desire for “shapely arms.”įast forward hundreds and hundreds of years to 1950, when illustrator Touko Laaksonen, otherwise known as Tom of Finland, cashed in on hypermasculinity as sexual fantasy. Michelangelo’s homoerotic dream would help form our notion of ideal masculine beauty for centuries to come. We find chiseled hands gripping rippling biceps, or floating bubble butts thrusting into the faces of other men. Staring up at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, there are swarms of male bodies: bulging, complicated, exaggerated muscle.