The Culture of Male Beauty in Britain by Paul R. Deslandes;

Author:Paul R. Deslandes; [Deslandes, Paul R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HIS000000 History / General, HIS015000 History / Europe / Great Britain, SOC018000 Social Science / Men's Studies, SOC012000 Social Science / Gay Studies, SOC032000 Social Science / Gender Studies
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2021-12-03T00:00:00+00:00

Figure 6.9. A typical sort of cover image for a physique magazine. Man Alive: The Magazine of Britain’s Top Physique Photographers, no. 1 (1958). Courtesy of the Hall-Carpenter Archives, London School of Economics.

This appeal to the past was not always entirely high-minded. Kitschy references to martial masculinity and what some called the “beauties of the modern male” and the “joyous manhood that thrilled the masters of Greece and Italy in the past”120 appeared in a 1957 calendar produced by Weider Publications, a prominent American player in the 1950s physique magazine market with London offices in Soho’s Greek Street.121 A more direct link between past and present was made in an international magazine (produced in Denmark but distributed in Britain) titled Male Models. In 1961, the editors, H. S. Hansson and A. Axgil, published an image by the British physique artist Ronald Wright (see figure 6.10). This relatively simple line drawing is rich in meaning. A classical godlike figure (marked somewhat humorously and contradictorily by both a laurel wreath on his head and anachronistic sideburns) holds, in the palm of his hand, a figure of modern physical perfection (signposted by a decidedly trendy haircut). Clearly intended to invoke the classical tradition of male beauty so common in physique magazines, the knowing glances between the two figures also marks this as a pointedly queer (and cruisy) indicator of desire.

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