American Hunks: The Muscular Male Body in Popular Culture, 1860-1970

By David L. Chapman and Brett Josef Grubisic

The "American hunk" is a cultural icon: the image of the chiseled, well-built male body has been promoted and exploited for commercial use for over 125 years, whether in movies, magazines, advertisements, or on consumer products, not only in America but throughout the world.

American Hunks is a fascinating collection of images (many in full color) depicting the muscular American male as documented in popular culture from 1860 to 1970. The book, divided into specific historic eras, includes such personalities as bodybuilder Charles Atlas; pioneer weightlifter Eugene Sandow; movie stars like Steve "Hercules" Reeves and Johnny "Tarzan" Weismuller; and publications such as the 1920s-era magazine Physical Culture and the 1950s-era comic book Mr. Muscles. It also touches on the use of masculine, homoerotic imagery to sell political and military might (including American recruitment posters and Nazi propaganda from the 1936 Olympics), and how companies have used buff, near-naked men to sell products from laundry detergent to sacks of flour since the 1920s. The introduction by David L. Chapman offers insightful information on individual images, while the essay by Brett Josef Grubisic places the work in its proper historical context.

David L. Chapman has written many books on male photography and bodybuilding, including Comin' at Ya!: The Homoerotic 3-D Photographs of Denny Denfield.

Brett Josef Grubisic is author of the novel The Age of Cities and editor of Contra/Diction: New Queer Fiction.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Arsenal Pulp Press
• Release date: Oct 1, 2009
• ISBN: 9781551524658

Book preview

American Hunks

American Hunks

The Muscular Male Body in Popular Culture

1860–1970

David L. Chapman and Brett Josef Grubisic

ARSENAL PULP PRESS

Vancouver

AMERICAN HUNKS

Copyright © 2009 by the authors

Images © the artists

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any form by any means—graphic, electronic or mechanical—without the prior written permission of the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may use brief excerpts in a review, or in the case of photocopying in Canada, a license from Access Copyright.

ARSENAL PULP PRESS

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Vancouver, BC

Canada V6B 1B8

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The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the British Columbia Arts Council for its publishing program, and the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and the Government of British Columbia through the Book Publishing Tax Credit Program for its publishing activities.

Efforts have been made to locate copyright holders of source material wherever possible. The publisher welcomes hearing from any copyright holders of material used in this book who have not been contacted.

Book design by Shyla Seller

Editing by Susan Safyan

Image scanning by David Berryman

All images courtesy of David L. Chapman

Printed and bound in China

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication:

Chapman, David L., 1948-

American hunks : the muscular male body in popular culture, 1860-1970 / David L. Chapman with Brett Josef Grubisic.

ISBN 978-1-55152-256-2

1. Men—Pictorial works. 2. Photography of men. 3. Men in popular culture. 4. Masculinity in popular culture. I. Grubisic, Brett Josef II. Title.

N7626.C43 2009 305.31 C2009-900822-X

Contents

Foreword

Introduction

Flexed for Success: Consumer Goods, Pop Culture, and the Selling of Heroic Masculinity Brett Josef Grubisic

The Pioneers: 1860–1914

Hunks Make the World Safe: 1914–1919

Jazz-Age Athletes: 1920–1929

Depression Physiques: 1930–1940

Supermen at War: 1941–1949

The Age of the Chest: 1950–1959

Muscles à Go-Go!: 1960–1969

Conclusion

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am grateful for the assistance of many people who helped me during the process of assembling the images and writing the text of this book. I wish to single out William Doan of Fort Dodge, Iowa, who gave me permission to use the superb photographs by Al Urban. I am also grateful to Dennis Bell, the current owner of Athleticmodelguild.com, for allowing me to use the photographs of Robert Mizer. Finally, I thank my partner and collaborator David Berryman for his expertise and assistance in readying this book for publication.

FOREWORD

David L. Chapman

Who knows where an obsession begins? It sometimes starts as a little tickle to the fancy, so unobtrusive as to be unnoticed and then slowly grows until it cannot be ignored. At other times it explodes into the consciousness as if one had just stepped on a land mine. My own fascination with the images and history of male muscularity proceeded from a single defining moment that is as vivid in my imagination as any memory that I retain from the murky reaches of my past.

I was eleven years old in 1959, and I wandered into a tobacconist and magazine store in the little southern California community where I grew up. Chula Vista, my hometown, was far enough from the fleshpots of Hollywood and San Francisco that I had little inkling of what was going on in the outside world, but it mustered barely enough urbanity so that the magazine rack held publications that might have been considered immoral in other places. Just about everyone read newspapers and magazines in those days, and the store was well stocked with all the major journals of the time, although it also had a refreshingly wide selection of magazines that catered to what were called back then the baser instincts. There were almost always a couple of nervous, grim-faced men leafing through the issues of girlie and nudist mags, but on this day I discovered that if I traveled a bit farther down the shelf, there were publications that were more to my taste. I don’t know why I had never discovered those thrilling magazines before, yet there they were, all displaying nearly naked muscular men in glorious monochromatic magnificence.

These were the smaller, digest-sized magazines that were never printed in color, nor on glossy paper stock, but when I saw my first issue of Physique Pictorial featuring a guy on the cover with a fabulous physique and smiling, open faced, I knew that I had to pick it up and look at it. What a revelation it was! I quickly discovered that the man on the cover was named John Tristram, and I must have stared in bug-eyed amazement at the picture of him. Inside the seductive cover, there were even more photos of Tristram and someone who was obviously a good friend, as they cavorted in a swimming pool, did handstands, and generally just horsed around doing typical guy stuff. The thing that made it all the more delicious was that both men had very muscular physiques and they were hardly wearing a stitch—just little pouches of cloth attached with a few flimsy strings around their waists and flossing down their butt cracks. I leafed through the rest of the magazine, and none of the other men were wearing much more. Often even less—sometimes the models had turned with their backs to the viewer, and it was obvious that they weren’t wearing anything at all. It was at that point that I decided to become a collector.

I made a quick and furtive look around to make sure that there was no one in the store whom I knew. I then checked my pocket to see if I had the requisite thirty-five cents. By some miracle, I did. There was just one more hurdle: I had to pay for the thing. The proprietor of the shop was blind. Anyone who wanted to buy something had to tell the man behind the cash register what it was, and then the buyer was told how much he had to pay the sightless owner. I waited until there was no one else at the counter, and then I walked up nervously. Somehow even then I knew that good little prepubescent Eisenhower-era boys did not purchase magazines of this ilk, so when the man behind the counter asked what I was buying, I answered with trembling voice, "Physique Pictorial, sir." The man stared past me with his creepy, milky eyes, and I handed him the coins. The magazine was mine.

I walked out of the shop and slipped the magazine into my shirt. I got on my bicycle and headed home. Once there, I discovered that the publication fit perfectly into the cigar box that contained many of my most precious items. I wedged the thing into the bottom of the box so that even if my brother, or worse, my mother found my secret hiding place, they would not immediately see my precious new acquisition. Over the next few weeks, I would take out the magazine and look at the seductive images again and again. As I grew older, I gradually began to understand my attraction to the photos in the little magazine, although I never discussed this phenomenon with anyone. Even so, I became aware of other publications similar to Physique Pictorial; many of them purported to show young men how to build their muscles, but that part of it never interested me too much. Little by little, my cigar box began to be stuffed with one fugitive publication after another, and eventually I needed another container to house all of my secret treasures.

As the years passed, I experienced both a slight improvement in my finances and an even greater curiosity in these seductive publications. Whenever I got a magazine like Esquire or Your Physique, I would first flip to the back where various photographic studios placed ads in which they offered pictures of scantily clad muscular men—always with the implied promise that even more daring views were available for those who sent them cash, money orders, or stamps. As an adolescent, I was always too timid, and I never sent away for these images, but they remained lodged in my imagination, exerting a pull that was as tantalizing as it was dangerous.

After finishing college and graduate school, I finally achieved a measure of financial stability and personal independence, but the memory of those photos that had seduced me in my youth remained embedded in my brain. I have always enjoyed browsing in antique shops and used bookstores, and I slowly began to accumulate the odd photo in this way. In that ancient, pre-Internet world it was far more complicated to get the word out that I wanted more physique photos. In the early 1980s, I put an ad in an antiques magazine asking readers to let me know if they had any old photos of muscle men from the past. By this time I was fascinated with the very earliest years of physique photography, and I wanted to find out more about the most famous bodybuilder of the nineteenth century, Eugen Sandow. The response to my ad was surprisingly rapid and a little overwhelming, and before I knew it, I had a large and growing collection of books, magazines, original photographs, and other items.

Over the years, I have expanded the scope of my collecting to include almost any image of a muscular athlete that was produced between the invention of photography and about 1970. My interest wanes rapidly after that date because bodybuilders began taking steroids and other muscle-building drugs. A man’s aesthetic appeal disappears when he ceases to look naturally muscular rather than a triumph of the pharmacist’s art. Despite this self-imposed limit, there are still thousands of photographs and other images that fit within my parameters.

I became interested in the way that muscular men have appeared not just in the bodybuilding world, but also in the world of popular culture. The present volume is a result of this new direction in my collecting. Hunky men have appeared on movie posters, in print advertising, plastered on container labels, and in other even more unusual spots. Why would anyone put a muscular man on a flour sack, a bottle of bourbon, an ad for wallboard, or an old trade card for thread? Yet there they are.

While my collection continues to grow and to change in subtle directions, it always refers back to my original interest in collecting images of hunky men from the past. I still have an old copy of the issue of Physique Pictorial that first caught my eye half a century ago. It is not the original one that I bought as a curious preteen—that one, alas, became so shredded and dog-eared that I eventually discarded it. Every now and then I look through the mag, and I am instantly transported back to my youth and that first magical moment when I discovered the joys of the American hunk. It’s said that unheard melodies are the sweetest. Perhaps so, but the immortal image is pretty sweet, too. The creator of that old magazine, Robert Mizer, is long since dead, as are John Tristram and probably all the other men in the pictures, but on those pages they are still youthful and beautiful. And the men are just as sexy now as they were back then. So, lucky me: I can eat my Proustian madeleines and have them, too.

INTRODUCTION

David L. Chapman

The American hunk, with his bronzed muscular physique, is today an established part of the cultural scene. It seems that we are constantly bombarded with images of bare chests (not to mention other parts of the male anatomy) on TV, in magazines, and at the movies. Naked pecs are no longer the surprising sight that they once were, and we can thank a number of different forces and social movements for this, from the ever-strengthening women’s movement to the power of gay consumerism. It did not take long for images of muscular men to turn up in the most amazing places as advertisers began to realize that hunks can be valuable marketing tools to sell a variety of products.

Men are gradually becoming more comfortable with the concept of being looked at, admired, and ogled—and it’s getting so that voyeuses are just as common these days as voyeurs. As this has come about, male bodybuilders have put their mark on popular culture, too. A slack and flaccid physique is certainly not acceptable on the television screens and multiplexes of North America these days.

And yet, many heterosexual American men are still vaguely uneasy when people admire their bodies in public. Unlike women, who have been forced to deal with ogling