The New Yorker:

The mid-century publications didn’t need to announce themselves as gay, even if they had been able to. Their readers understood the necessity of balancing discretion and seduction.

By Vince Aletti

I remember the first time I saw a physique photograph, and I remember being both excited and upset at the sight of it. I was probably eight or nine, a child of the postwar boom, and on vacation with my family at the Jersey shore. We had stopped at a convenience store on the way home from a day at the beach, and I was pawing through the store’s magazine rack while my mother shopped. I don’t remember picking up the magazine, but it opened to a page which stopped and startled me. Two mostly naked teen-agers were posed for a picture titled “Victor and Vanquished,” one slung over the other’s shoulders—the spoils of a heated but not unfriendly war. Both boys were smiling, exhilarated, but I was fixated on their points of contact, especially where the naked groin of the Vanquished touched the Victor’s bare shoulder. What did that feel like? What could that feel like? Thinking about it made me dizzy and more aroused than I realized. When one of my sisters showed up to say we were leaving, I had to cover the tent in my bathing suit, already deflating from embarrassment.

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