Laid Bare: Essays and Observations, Judson, Tom [best self help books to read .TXT] 📗

So ‘round about 5 o’clock, depending on the lineup that evening, the Ladies start to trickle out from the dressing rooms, which are behind my apartment near the stage door. And this is the part of which I’m so enamored: most of these gals sport precariously high heels for optimum dramatic effect. But high heels + gravel doth not a happy marriage make! So I drop my book to my lap and peer over my (2.00 strength) dollar store reading glasses and watch unseen as the queens traipse across the expanse of gravel to the brick paved sidewalk at the street end of the alley. It’s about 50 feet from the dressing room area to the bricks and depending on the heels (and the confidence of the Ladies) the voyage can be tricky or, well, trickier. I hear them as they march confidently up the concrete ramp from behind the theater and step onto the loose stones.

And at that point the pace slows to a crawl. They focus their gaze on the ground ahead. Weight is shifted from the heels to the balls of their feet. Ankles wobble. Hands are deployed to the side--highwire-like--to achieve balance. Some delicately arc one foot in front of the other like great plumed birds. Others glide their feet mere centimeters above the ground. But no matter their individual techniques, they are all Elizas on the ice crossing the river of gravel to the distant brick-paved shore.

And here is the glorious part: the instant those size 12 slippers hit solid ground, these wary creatures (that up to this moment very distinctly resembled nothing but men wearing dresses) swan out into the street as poised, regal, confident, fabulous Drag Queens.

And all’s right with the world.

A Million Men

A million is a vague concept to most people; one seldom encounters a tangible example of just what those seven digits represent. Dennis Bell, who recently acquired the complete assets of the Athletic Model Guild, understands all too well the scope of that number; he’s got about a million men in his storeroom, waiting to be counted.

AMG was (and is) the parent company of “Physique Pictorial,” the publication instantly recognizable for its sublimely artificial tableaux of young men in posing straps engaging in not-so-innocent horseplay. Cowboys and Roman Centurions made regular appearances in its pages, setting the stage—and standard—for gay sex fantasies for decades to come. Primarily a one-man operation (Bob Mizer, its founder, shot every one of the images and each of the thousands of 16mm films and videotapes), the catalog spans nearly sixty years and introduced many a young man to the beauty of the male body.

One of those young men was Wisconsin-born-and-bred Bell, who encountered a discarded stash of Physique Pictorials one afternoon in a ditch on his walk home from school. He, in turn, hid them away himself (presumably the preferred method of most collectors over the years) little imagining what a central role those pictures would come to play in his adult life.

Little Dennis grew up and became a photographer in his own right, making a living shooting, well, naked men. Working for such adult studios as Hot House, Titan and Falcon (which is where I first encountered him) he became adept at adjusting his own style to the needs of the different companies. This, in turn, paid off when producing his own work. Dennis was not only a devotee of Bob Mizer’s beefcake shots, he found he was able to mimic the look and style of those classic images on his own, continuing the tradition without actually trying to recreate what had already been done to perfection.

The success of Bell’s first physique-related website convinced him that interest in physique photos and the Athletic Model Guild had not dimmed in the years since Mizer’s death.

Learning of the availability of the AMG catalog, Bell decided the time was right to introduce this piece of history to a new generation. Surprisingly, the entire catalog—negatives, films, videos, magazines, even some recognizable props—was intact. Bell purchased the lot and found himself with a huge amount of material that needed to be moved somewhere.

The storeroom at the Athletic Model Guild offices resembles a Kodak warehouse: thousands of yellow boxes line scores of shelves containing just under one million negatives. The sheer number took the new owner somewhat by surprise. “As I unpacked the collection, I kept buying more shelving to hold the boxes.” Fortunately for history Bob Mizer was meticulously organized. “Today’s digital photography storage and cataloging systems are way beyond Bob’s system,” says Bell. “He used an alpha-numeric system, starting with A-1, A-2, A-3 etc. When he reached the end of Z, he continued at ZA1, ZA2, …ZB1, ZB2, and so forth. This gives a final image ID number of something like XV23-AS.”

So even though the system doesn’t describe the contents of each image, “the negatives are organized enough that if I have a model name or image number, I can go into the archive stack and find that image within a couple minutes. There is also a card catalog that was kept with every model who was shot, and [whatever images] that model made.”

Some of those models went on to become known in other avenues. Along with Andy Warhol superstar Joe D’Allesandro and Dennis Cole (future husband of Charlie’s Angel Jaclyn Smith), “Arnold (Schwarzenegger) posed for Bob in the AMG compound just about 2 years after the Pumping Iron movie was made in 1973…showing an incredible set of muscles in a leopard print swimsuit.”

Ideally, the AMG staff will eventually include a pair of archivists to catalog and digitize the collection. “Only about three thousandhave been digitized,” in the fourteen months since Bell acquired them, “enough for the new website member section. The entire process could take 3-5 years.” After converting every image, the original negatives will be stored under archival conditions, with the digital files used for