Physique Pictorial in the 50s was an ambiguous and unstable document. There was no surety if the photos of naked men where aspirational as a fitness goal, or as a sexual goal, or both, or neither. There were hand written notes from the editor, scrawls about freedom of the press, and sometimes this freedom of the press hinted at sexual frontiers, but there were also notes on how to achieve these bodies. The homo-social and the homosexual messed together with the political, the social, and the aesthetic. There were no strict goals, and no strict identities.

Physique Pictorial firmed up its ambiguity in the next decade. The copy became cleaner, the lay outs more elegant. The homo-sociality was replaced with a piss elegant camp homosexuality. This firming allowed for the potential of other texts to take over the niche previously held by PP. I want to talk about one of these magazines, explicitly. Butch was published in the mid to late 60s. It was slick, better photographed, better laid out, and better written. They had an attachment to the radical establishment of the time—quoting Ramparts, and It lacked the games of hide-and-seek that made PP so ambiguous. They also used many of the same images, sometimes directly, and sometimes ambiguously.

If one of the markers of identity in a post-information age is how to choose allies, and if one of the strategies of choosing allies is learning how to curate and control how they disseminate information—In this presentation, I hope to use the case study of Physique from the 50s and Butch from the 60s provides several moral lessons: about how information controls identity, how the radical politics of sex relates to other sites of contention, about how the recent debates about authorship and ownership have a long and queer history, and how formal matters of aesthetics and design stabilize collective ideas of self hood.