Buying Gay at Home and Abroad

In 1967 Lynn Womack, publisher of the Guild Press, won his second major gay rights case before the Supreme Court. In Potomac News Co. v. U.S., the court ruled that male erotica from Europe—Hellenic Sun, Youth at Play, and others—could no longer be confiscated by U.S. Customs. “Danish Nudie Mags Get the Nod” read the banner front-page headline in The Advocate. Using this court case as a starting point, my remarks will examine how gay physique and erotic magazines circulated around the globe (both licitly and illicitly) helping to create a sense of an international gay male community, just as the circulation of such periodicals helped to create a national one in the U.S.

Highlighting the tensions and interactions between U.S. homophile organizations and their more adventuresome physique publishing colleagues, I argue that 1967 was a pivotal, landmark year for the creation of gay community in the U.S.—with two key U.S. court cases allowing full frontal male nudity to circulate through both the U.S. mail and through U.S. customs.

Expanding on the arguments I made in Buying Gay: How Physique Entrepreneurs Sparked a Movement, I will broaden my focus to consider the international dimensions of the consumer culture network that grew up in the 1950s and 1960s, and the varying legal regimes that both inhibit it and eventually allowed it to circulate, with a particular emphasis on the individual activism of physique publishers.