All Pumped Up and Nowhere to Go

The word itself summarises the perplex of male iconography - have you ever actually eaten beefcake? How would you cook it? What could the mixture of meat and icing taste like? Cheese- cake - that peculiarly unpleasant name given to women as objects of desire - is an all too familiar food: by contrast, beefcake has an air of impossibility but, like peanut butter and jam, could be so disgusting that it's great.

Here is the familiar contradiction: if the normative masculine role in society is active, what does it do to a man to be put on display, to take on the passivity of the adored object? Hence the persistent stain of femininity and, thus, in our archaic gender equations, homosexuality that attaches to most iconic males, which has to be rigidly policed: in all sports, in mens' magazines like Arena, in Jason Donovan's libel case. Or, to quote the text, be prepared to enter a world where a motorcycle is regarded as 'the ultimate in male costume jewellery'.

A long-overdue account of 50s and 60s gay physique shots, F. Valentine Hooven III's Beefcake (Taschen, 1995) reveals a hidden history: the homosexual origin of a language with which we are now saturated - a language of Levis' ads (the favour now returned, with thanks, by this year's Taxi); of boy-zone teen groups; of Hollywood stars; even - whisper it - of sports stars. This is the teenage discourse of youth, sex and death which begins in America's post-war emergence as a world power.

Hooven's text is an unashamed fan letter to physique pioneers like Quaintance, Bob Mizer (American Model Guild, or AMG) and Chuck Renslow (Kris Studio). Rightly so: amongst others, these men were harbingers of a new perception of which we are the beneficiaries. The fact that, in many ways, we can now live easier in our polymorphous psyches is due to the steps that they took into the unknown: as Hooven writes, 'No serious attempt was made to gloss over the fact that these attractive young men were naked to be looked at and enjoyed. Men, naked for the pleasure of others? That, in the fifties, was dangerously radical.'

AMG began in 1948 as a document of a particular West Coast phenomenon: Muscle Beach at Venice, Los Angeles. Selling queer pin-ups mail order, Mizer expanded into the magazine format, and Physique Pictorial became the record of a new aesthetic: covert, masked, incredibly stylised, highly sexual, pagan. The local film industry took note, as here was a language they could use to sell male sex: Tony Curtis posed in AMG model boy style, as did Brando, playing Brutus in Julius Caesar. Apollo model Ed Fury (real name: Edmund Holovchik) crossed over into real films - pictured on set with Richard Widmark, Fury looks just like James Dean.

This aesthetic - the first appearance of camp in the mass media - came from two main sources: Greek kouroi and physical culture magazines dating from the turn of the century. Apart from the work of eccentrics like Wilhelm von Gloeden, these were the only available precedents for the male pin-up. A certain mythological tendency persisted in early gay magazines like Jason, Goliath, Hermes, Mars, Samson, American Apollo - now you know why there are so many Doric columns in pictures from this period. They're not just phallic symbolism (although the penis is all-important) but instant signifiers of the new pagan pleasure world.

This met opposition, of course: as the parallel text to this dictionary of bodies, there is a litany of court cases, imprisonments, and bureaucratic spite. Renslow went to the US Supreme Court in 1958; Muscle Beach was closed down in 1959, and Mizer sent down in the late 60s. The codings necessary to avoid prosecution may begin in kitsch antiquity, but end - in Mizer's 60s layouts - with a bizarre section of runic symbols, used as a psycho-sexual rebus for each model, marking the precursors of today's personal ad puzzles. In 1965, at this moment of ultimate stylisation, the form became obsolete when the first full male nude was published in a magazine called Butch. After this hesitant, anonymous start, the floodgates opened: not that we would experience much of it in the UK, with our stringent censorship laws.

There is much in this book that is archaic - there is now no need for gay marketing to be so covert. These images may very well be sexy because of the repression encoded within them, but then repression is there to be transcended. 'It was more fun when it was illegal' is a familiar trope, but it wasn't: in my experience, the criminalisation of homosexuality resulted in lives shattered by alcohol, guilt, and self-hatred. The disappearance of this kind of publishing, half-bemoaned in the text, was the inevitable consequence of the greater sexual openness - and partial decriminalisation - that occurred in the late 60s. The physique magazines were the victims of their own success.

Yet there is a curious appeal in these images, much of which rests in the persistent idea of the 50s as a golden age: these young men are frozen in a world that is somehow more leisurely and more confident, which has the fresh bloom of a new vision. Hooven makes a coherent case for these pin-ups as embodying the underbelly of Popluxe America, but you can take it further: what they do is give a shadow commentary on the birth of youth culture. It's all here: the recreation of self (Ed became Fury several years before Billy); the willing feminisation of young men; and the self-destruction of life in the fast lane (one spread features models killed by drugs, car crashes and random violence).

It's now clear, despite the weight of exclusion on this subject, that in the creation of a commercialised youth culture, the teenagers and the entrepreneurs who catered to them took much from the psychic and physical spaces occupied by gay men, or, as they'd have had it in the 50s, queers. The 90s return of queer as a magical inversion is an index of how much this simple fact - still barely mentioned in most mainstream accounts of pop - needs to be restated again and again.