Beefcake: The Muscle Magazines of America 1950-1970

by F. Valentine Hooven III

160 pages. Illustrations throughout.

Genres: Art, Nonfiction, Queer, Gay, LGBT, Erotica

160 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 1995

Reviews

[Oliver Bateman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Atrocious writing (in multiple languages on the same page!!!), but the images are astonishing. Hooven could've done much, much more research. The stuff on Sandow, on early physique pictures...if you've read only slightly more than nothing, as I have, you can start seeing when people aren't carefully checking sources. And that's what I saw here. I also saw some extremely hot photos, if that's your kind of thing.

[Kel · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book could have benefited from some fact checking and citing of sources - it feels largely conjecture and there are some things it claims that are simply not true. Even though it's just a coffee table book I was very disappointed with the information in this book.

[Fabrizio · Rating 5 out of 5]

An archive of erotica and its liberation from absurd laws that punished the beauty of nusism

[Čitalac · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Beefcake by F.Valentine Hooven, III (Benedikt Taschen, ISBN 3-8228-8939-3) is a collection of drawings and snapshots from muscle magazines of America 1950-1970 that had fallen out of the public sight meanwhile. George Quaintance’s Point Loma from 1952 on the front page is a search for lost Arcadia. It vaguely reminded me of North Vancouver as seen from the Stanley Park around the statue of Little Faux-Mermaid.

It is very nice to see that men appeared in print naked or in minuscule G-strings in the 1950s (was that the time of Mr. McCarthy the Evil?), to recognise the clumsiness of a not yet fully routined artist in a couple of early works by Tom of Finland and Etienne.

A majority of the models are muscle boys, terrifyingly similar to modern day gym-freaks. — The terror is, again, quite a personal experience; I cannot accept that nothing really has changed since then. Are we forever entrapped in a beauty ideal of galley slaves? — No sophistication of a Mapplethorpe here: photographers simply documented the looks of certain beefy young men and that’s it. This makes the book hardly erotic at all (since the eye of the beholder has been satiated with a more perfect camera vision), but rather nostalgically pornographic and at the same time somewhat scholarly. Kinky! There is a certain homemade tenderness in this crude authenticity.

The edition is polychromatic (although a majority of the originals is, naturally, b&w) and a paperback. The text throughout is somewhat informative and trilingual — in English, French and German. It is ideal for the coffee table of your fairy godfather, musing on his youth and the passage of time, but it can be used by the young ones who seek their gay roots too."

(Excerpt from "Queer Historical Lust, Space and the Law: Review of three books" by Miodrag Kojadinović, Angles magazine, Vancouver (BC), Canada, January 1996

[Blane · Rating 4 out of 5]

Times certainly have changed!

[Argel Zubiaga · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very illustrative.