The sad truth is that the GQ masthead of the late-’70s era is something of a memorial wall: Many of the people whose names are on it were claimed by AIDS. But he has agreed, in this instance, to do so, because he feels it’s important to pay tribute to those figures who influenced him but aren’t around to speak for themselves. Or Old Town canoes.) Usually, he says, he is not keen on doing interviews about his past.
![gay men magazine cover gay men magazine cover](https://i.pinimg.com/736x/16/b7/26/16b7261c213cfcdefb39c1ae8ac25996--jonas-brothers-magazine-covers.jpg)
Today, Bruce Weber is a brand, his style instantly recognizable, whether he is shooting towheaded Boy Scouts or erotic male nudes. If you’ve ever seen an Abercrombie & Fitch catalog, a Calvin Klein billboard, or a pack of dewy collegians convened on a green in a Ralph Lauren foldout ad… well, here is where all that began. With the guidance and backing of the art department’s Coulianos and Sterzin, Weber and his ilk effectively buffed up and defunkified the American man, trimming off his sideburns, placing him in more salubrious settings, cultivating his handsomeness, ridding him of any and all vestigial ’60s stink and grit. You can witness the American-male self-image changing, the trends of the ’80s and ’90s (and beyond) in inchoate form. Flip through the back issues of GQ as the years progress from ’75 to ’80 and you can see it all happening: the hair getting shorter, the bodies more defined, the vignettes more lyrical. The foremost practitioners of this new style were Barry McKinley, Rico Puhlmann, and a third photographer who started out as the least heralded of the bunch but ultimately emerged as the most influential: Bruce Weber. What was this shift? Put simply, it was a new style of fashion photography that, in one fell swoop, streamlined and modernized the American man.
![gay men magazine cover gay men magazine cover](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/818qISndo6L.jpg)
Gay men magazine cover upgrade#
But Lauren’s comments speak to a seismic shift that took place in GQ’s pages in the latter half of the decade, a quantum aesthetic upgrade that profoundly impacted not only his business but the whole of men’s fashion. The ’70s being the ’70s, the magazine was by no means immune to period folly-the March 1976 cover, for example, trumpeted a newfangled garment called the “One-Suit,” a belted coverall one-piece that made the model wearing it look like the world’s nattiest airplane mechanic. Lauren’s wide-screen-Americana vision was decidedly unswish, as was the designer himself, but in GQ he found a publication simpatico with his desire to make men more attractive-to liberate them from the sack-suit orthodoxy that predominated on one end of the sartorial spectrum and the polyester ghastliness that predominated on the other. It was the only book at the time that had a statement, and therefore it became a leader,” says Ralph Lauren. “ GQ made a strong statement about menswear. But the gay sensibility was unmistakable: the recurrence of the word rugged in headlines the prescient interest in minimalist home decor the “Every Night Fever” disco-stomp pictorial from 1978, with models in Capezios dancing in a parking lot illuminated by the headlights of Lincoln limos.
![gay men magazine cover gay men magazine cover](https://pocketmagscovers.imgix.net/fs-international-magazine-fs149-cover.jpg)
GQ was not explicitly a gay magazine, and its mandate, in fact, was to educate men of all persuasions about fashion and style. Jack Haber, the magazine’s editor-in-chief from 1969 to 1983, was a gay man, as were his two extraordinary art directors, Harry Coulianos, who served from 1971 to 1980, and Donald Sterzin, who started out as one of Coulianos’s deputies and eventually succeeded him, running the department until late 1983.
![gay men magazine cover gay men magazine cover](https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/ZggAAOSwARheb-TW/s-l400.jpg)
(Only the gauche ever uttered the “54” part.) It was also, not to put too fine a point on it, a much gayer era of GQ. It was a time when the magazine had a smaller readership, measurable in the low six figures, and a smaller staff: a hedonistic, tight-knit group whose members socialized together after work, often in a pack, often at Studio. Sometimes, there would even be a woman in the shot. And in the foreground, gorgeous creatures in very small bathing suits, frolicking in the surf, water beading seductively on supple flesh. Can we get a seaplane? Indeed we can get a seaplane! So there would be a seaplane-an expensive prop int he background.
Gay men magazine cover skin#
Everyone’s hair had blond highlights everyone’s skin was fetchingly on t he cusp of a burn. Or if it wasn’t summer, it was at least an occasion to pack up and jet off to some summery locale, maybe Tahiti or Hawaii or t he Caribbean. It was always summer at GQ in the late 1970s.