Like Marty Muth, the high school English teacher who slid the book The Normal Heart over my desk in 1986 and said, “Read this,” international men know I’m gay. You knew I was gay earlier than I did.
My hidden teenager devoured the company’s men’s clothing catalog in my family’s mailbox in the 1980s.Fascinated by fantasy clothing Things like rope yarn tops and peekaboo lower shorts were a world removed from my fat boy pants. Flipping through the pages of the catalog today, the clothes are strangely masculine, as if Lil Nas X were hanging from their bodies.
according to a new documentary “Allman: The Story of an International Man”” Available streaming service, I wasn’t alone. Through interviews with celebrity fans, catalog models, company employees, and the company’s gay founder Gene Burkard, the film explores how the out-of-the-box menswear catalog has been for nearly four decades. Explore what has become the work of a generation-defining gay chef.
In a recent interview, Brian Darling, one of the film’s directors, said the documentary was an “empowering” discovery, or rediscovery, of catalog peacock fashion and pre-Instagram gay eroticism. He said he hopes he can feel it. it was for him. He had never even seen the catalog until co-director Jesse Finley Reed showed him a copy.
“When I opened the book, especially when I saw the ’80s stuff, I wondered why I couldn’t enjoy it as much now.” Darling said he was gay, just like Reid.
The film traces the rise and fall of a catalog of European-inspired menswear curated by Wisconsin native Burkard, beginning with the first issue in 1976 and ending when the last catalog shipped around 2007. increase. (bar card) died In the intervening decades, the catalog was a multimillion-dollar success, and by the early 1990s was generating approximately $100 million in annual sales.
Editorially, the catalog was not advertised as gay, but many of the tight-knit buyers and art directors are gay men who know how to appeal to gay tastes. and a heterosexual woman. Some male models turned down international male jobs for fear of being seen or identified as gay.
I have never purchased anything from International Male. But for many gay people like me, Gen X, this catalog was formative. It was like gay adulthood, the same as straight friends in middle school drooling over stolen Playboy. Browsing it helped me identify my interest in men, even if I didn’t fully understand it. Most heard about gay men was a torturous perception in the days when they were either clowns or sick people.
I didn’t see myself among the men in the catalog–I was too young, round, and petite–but one day I saw that man I thought they all lived in. I saw myself flirting with them in Arcadia on the beach. I browsed the catalog alone, fearful and excited, and lingered before the shirtless men with the ambitious treasure trails whom Jesus had warned were off limits.
But magazines you could “read” in the bathroom or hide under your bed were pretty much the only sexual arousal material a boy like me had.
Recently, I asked friends if they had similar memories of catalogs and boys. Benjamin remembers nervously buying the book at a bookstore near his family’s home near Columbus, Ohio.
“Imagine a brain teaser telling yourself that you’re a 16-year-old who is very withdrawn, but sure you’re into fashion and want to look good in jockstraps for your girlfriend.” he told me “That’s not gay at all.”
Some friends actually bought clothes. Karl said what looked good on the page looked to him as if he were in a “very, very gay Peter Pan production.” Patrick bought a wrestling singlet of some sort, but it was for one purpose only.
“If you want to go to bed early with a man, wear this and things will go smoothly,” he told me.
What “Allman” doesn’t explain is how the catalog found me. I suspect someone entered my address into a database after I won the picnic basket. Calvin Klein obsession Circa 1986, products were selected in a raffle at the GQ fashion show in a Cleveland shopping mall. Or it could be someone at the venue. columbia house record club I ordered 11 albums for a penny, “God Spell” and “fame” I saw the soundtrack and said, “This mistress is going to buy a man’s panties.”
Or the gay gods look down on me Saidlike the Archangel to Clarence in It’s a Wonderful Life, “A man on earth needs our help.”
