 Blueboy cover (January 1978) | |
| Editor | Donald Embinder |
|---|---|
| Categories | Gay |
| Frequency | Monthly |
| First issue | June 1974 |
| Final issue | December 2007 |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Website | https://www.blueboy.com/ |
| ISSN | 0279-3733 |
Blueboy was a gay men's magazine with lifestyle and entertainment news, in addition to nude or semi-nude men. It was published monthly from 1974 to 2007. [1] The Detroit Free Press described the publication as "a full-color, slick gay version of Playboy magazine." [2]
Blueboy was originally a small black and white journal purchased in 1974 by publisher Donald N. Embinder. The former advertising manager for the arts magazine After Dark rebranded Blueboy as "The National Magazine About Men," which became the publication's longstanding tagline. The debut issue's cover parodied The Blue Boy by 18th-century painter Thomas Gainsborough. [1]
Initially sold at adult bookstores and gay bars, the Miami-based magazine secured national distribution by its fourth issue. Regular features included lifestyle columns, celebrity interviews, film and music reviews, book excerpts and articles on politics, gay rights and gay popular culture. [1] By 1978, monthly circulation reached 150,000 issues. [2] Embinder characterized the readership as some of the "most sophisticated and affluent" people in the United States. [3] Notable contributors and interviewees included Andy Warhol, Truman Capote, William S. Burroughs, Edmund White, John Rechy, Patricia Nell Warren, Christopher Isherwood and Randy Shilts. [1]
The publication's additional outreach included the gay pulp fiction series Blueboy Library. Blueboy Forum became the first weekly, live forum from a gay perspective since 25 October 1976, [4] airing on WKID-TV in Hallandale, Florida and as a late-night talk show on New York City's UHF Channel 68. [1]
Beginning in the 1990s, however, with competition from such gay publications including Out , MetroSource and Genre , Blueboy focused much more on overt nude images, and jettisoned most of its non-pornographic content. The magazine's final issue was published in December 2007. [5]
In 2020, the Huntington Library in partnership with the Hammer Museum showcased Monica Majoli's series Blueboys, featuring centerfolds from the magazine by photographer Alex Sanchez. The exhibition included a new interview with Blueboy contributing artist Mel Odom and critical context by Miss Tiger, executive director of the Blueboy Archives and Cultural Arts Foundation. [6]
The Blueboy Archives and Cultural Arts Foundation was founded in 2017 to preserve and contextualize the magazine archives, as well as other historical LGBTQ periodicals, books, films and ephemera. [7] Blueboy will return as an annual magazine in February 2022. [1]
Singer Cyndi Lauper mentions the publication in the first lines of her song "She Bop": [1]
"She Bop" is a song by American singer-songwriter Cyndi Lauper, released as the third single from her debut studio album, She's So Unusual (1983). It reached number three on the US Billboard Hot 100 chart in September 1984. Worldwide, the song is her third most commercially successful single after "Girls Just Want to Have Fun" and "Time After Time", and also reached number 46 on the UK Singles Chart and number six on the ARIA Singles Chart. "She Bop" was Lauper's third consecutive top 5 on the Hot 100. She recorded a quieter version of the song for her 2005 album The Body Acoustic.
Leather subculture denotes practices and styles of dress organized around sexual activities that involve leather garments, such as leather jackets, vests, boots, chaps, harnesses, or other items. Wearing leather garments is one way that participants in this culture self-consciously distinguish themselves from mainstream sexual cultures. Many participants associate leather culture with BDSM practices and its many subcultures. For some, black leather clothing is an erotic fashion that expresses heightened masculinity or the appropriation of sexual power; love of motorcycles, motorcycle clubs and independence; and/or engagement in sexual kink or leather fetishism.
Playgirl was an American magazine that featured general interest articles, lifestyle and celebrity news, in addition to nude or semi-nude men. In the 1970s and 1980s, the magazine printed monthly and was marketed mainly to women, although it had a significant gay male readership.
Screw is a pornographic online magazine published in the United States aimed at heterosexual men; it was originally published as a weekly tabloid newspaper.
Touko Valio Laaksonen, known by the pseudonym Tom of Finland, was a Finnish artist who made stylized highly masculinized homoerotic art, and influenced late 20th-century gay culture. He has been called the "most influential creator of gay pornographic images" by cultural historian Joseph W. Slade. Over the course of four decades, he produced some 3,500 illustrations, mostly featuring men with exaggerated primary and secondary sex traits, wearing tight or partially removed clothing.
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KoreAm, or KoreAm Journal, was a monthly print magazine dedicated to news, commentary, politics, lifestyle and culture published in the United States. It was the oldest and most widely circulated English-language monthly magazine for the Asian American community. The magazine has featured prominent Asian American leaders, politicians, artists, entertainers, athletes and entrepreneurs. It also covered current events related to North Korea, South Korea, Asian Americans, immigrants and communities of color. The magazine ended print issue in December 2015.
The Blue Boy is a full-length portrait in oil by Thomas Gainsborough, owned by The Huntington in San Marino, California.
Men was an American gay pornographic magazine originally published as Advocate Men from 1984 until 1997, when it was retitled Men. It was published by Los Angeles-based Specialty Publications. The magazine contains explicit nude male photography, often featuring popular stars from the gay adult film industry, erotic fiction, erotic comics, video reviews and other features. Notable models have included Zeb Atlas and Mark Dalton. Notable artists include Gerard Donelan who contributed erotic comics to the magazine for eight years. In late 2009, it was announced that all of Specialty Publications' gay porn magazines would be merged into Unzipped.net. The website in question is no longer available and no issues of any of the magazines have been released since.
Physique magazines or beefcake magazines were magazines devoted to physique photography — that is, photographs of muscular "beefcake" men – typically young and attractive – in athletic poses, usually in revealing, minimal clothing. During their heyday in North America in the 1950s to 1960s, they were presented as magazines dedicated to fitness, health, and bodybuilding, with the models often shown demonstrating exercises or the results of their regimens, or as artistic reference material. However, their unstated primary purpose was erotic imagery, primarily created by and for gay men at a time when homosexuality was the subject of cultural taboos and government censorship.
Rites was a Canadian magazine, published for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender communities in Canada from 1984 to 1992.
After Dark was an entertainment magazine that covered theatre, cinema, stage plays, ballet, performance art, and various artists, including singers, actors and actresses, and dancers, among others. First published in May 1968, the magazine succeeded Ballroom Dance Magazine.
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Bara is a colloquialism for a genre of Japanese art and media known within Japan as gay manga (ゲイ漫画) or gei komi. The genre focuses on male same-sex love, as created primarily by gay men for a gay male audience. Bara can vary in visual style and plot, but typically features masculine men with varying degrees of muscle, body fat, and body hair, akin to bear or bodybuilding culture. While bara is typically pornographic, the genre has also depicted romantic and autobiographical subject material, as it acknowledges the varied reactions to homosexuality in modern Japan.
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