Showcasing vintage male photography, mostly nude. You must be 18 years of age or older to visit this blog! If you hold a copyright on any material shown on this blog, notify me, and it will be removed immediately.
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Tuesday, December 13, 2022
Clone
Is it just me, or do some of these Playgirl models look like they were cloned? Maybe that's
why I can't come up with names for today's group. That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.
I remember thinking that way back when. I don't know where Playgirl went for its models but ultimately, it was the editor's choice which seemed rather limited.
I also recall following Norman St John Stevas and friend into a gay shop in Paris. It was, I think, in the rue de Milan, up in Clichy, not far from the Gare Saint-Lazare. Norman St John Stevas was a very indiscreet and flamboyant MP on the Conservative benches who made no pretence about his proclivities and thumbed his nose at the Metropolitan Police when we were all still illegal. (He was a self-proclaimed "constitutional expert" and boasted that he had a framed pair of Queen Victoria's bloomers on his drawing room wall.) He made a bee-line for the American videos, whereupon I felt it better to repent of my prurience by pointing out to him over the assistant's poor English, that these had been converted from American NTSC into French SECAME format and he needed to get British PAL unless he had a dual-standard TV, which of course no one did in England. The American films were all marked "Plastique", to give a guide to the French purchaser. To be fair, Jean-Daniel Cadinot, who was the major gay director in France, had an obsession with boy scouts, altar boys and RC priests, but this was understandable, given that France at that time had only just gone to the left, after 23 years of continual right wing government and a political Establishment that was deeply Catholic and, in part, he was undermining this sweeping influence.
But there seemed to be a publisher's regimentation and a conformity in what was deigned "attractive". And so to my point: The photographers up to the mid-1970s, which are the focus of this blog, offered a far wider choice of model, with far greater acceptance of the male form and build - ranging from the skinny, cute twink to bona fide bodybuilders and the occasional alien from Planet Butch. And you could see all three within the pages of one magazine. Playgirl, to me, was over-curated, like it or lump it, himbo fodder which has not particularly stood the test of time - unlike some of the greats from the 1950s and '60s.
At least initially, Playgirl went somewhere market-wise that nobody else did. You have to give them that despite the monotony, and almost 50 years later their pictures are still popular right here on my blog and elsewhere.
I remember thinking that way back when. I don't know where Playgirl went for its models but ultimately, it was the editor's choice which seemed rather limited.
ReplyDeleteI also recall following Norman St John Stevas and friend into a gay shop in Paris. It was, I think, in the rue de Milan, up in Clichy, not far from the Gare Saint-Lazare. Norman St John Stevas was a very indiscreet and flamboyant MP on the Conservative benches who made no pretence about his proclivities and thumbed his nose at the Metropolitan Police when we were all still illegal. (He was a self-proclaimed "constitutional expert" and boasted that he had a framed pair of Queen Victoria's bloomers on his drawing room wall.) He made a bee-line for the American videos, whereupon I felt it better to repent of my prurience by pointing out to him over the assistant's poor English, that these had been converted from American NTSC into French SECAME format and he needed to get British PAL unless he had a dual-standard TV, which of course no one did in England. The American films were all marked "Plastique", to give a guide to the French purchaser. To be fair, Jean-Daniel Cadinot, who was the major gay director in France, had an obsession with boy scouts, altar boys and RC priests, but this was understandable, given that France at that time had only just gone to the left, after 23 years of continual right wing government and a political Establishment that was deeply Catholic and, in part, he was undermining this sweeping influence.
But there seemed to be a publisher's regimentation and a conformity in what was deigned "attractive". And so to my point: The photographers up to the mid-1970s, which are the focus of this blog, offered a far wider choice of model, with far greater acceptance of the male form and build - ranging from the skinny, cute twink to bona fide bodybuilders and the occasional alien from Planet Butch. And you could see all three within the pages of one magazine. Playgirl, to me, was over-curated, like it or lump it, himbo fodder which has not particularly stood the test of time - unlike some of the greats from the 1950s and '60s.
At least initially, Playgirl went somewhere market-wise that nobody else did. You have to give them that despite the monotony, and almost 50 years later their pictures are still popular right here on my blog and elsewhere.
DeleteDavid Haskell, July 1977.
ReplyDeleteThanks!
Delete