Posted on 11/13/2017 6:32:55 AM PST by servo1969
GQ is a leftwing trash publication.
style
It All Started Here: The Gay Legacy of GQ
BY DAVID KAMP
June 23, 2017
How an unknown former model turned photographer, a gay art director, and a collegiate water polo player from California used the pages of GQ to redefine the American man—and changed forever the look of magazines, photography, and advertising.
It was always summer at GQ in the late 1970s. Or if it wasn’t summer, it was at least an occasion to pack up and jet off to some summery locale, maybe Tahiti or Hawaii or t he Caribbean. Everyone’s hair had blond highlights; everyone’s skin was fetchingly on t he cusp of a burn. Money was no object. Can we get a seaplane? Indeed we can get a seaplane! So there would be a seaplane—an expensive prop int he background. And in the foreground, gorgeous creatures in very small bathing suits, frolicking in the surf, water beading seductively on supple flesh. Sometimes, there would even be a woman in the shot.
This was the GQ of another era. It was a time when the magazine had a smaller readership, measurable in the low six figures, and a smaller staff: a hedonistic, tight-knit group whose members socialized together after work, often in a pack, often at Studio. (Only the gauche ever uttered the “54” part.) It was also, not to put too fine a point on it, a much gayer era of GQ. Jack Haber, the magazine’s editor-in-chief from 1969 to 1983, was a gay man, as were his two extraordinary art directors, Harry Coulianos, who served from 1971 to 1980, and Donald Sterzin, who started out as one of Coulianos’s deputies and eventually succeeded him, running the department until late 1983.
GQ was not explicitly a gay magazine, and its mandate, in fact, was to educate men of all persuasions about fashion and style. But the gay sensibility was unmistakable: the recurrence of the word rugged in headlines; the prescient interest in minimalist home decor; the “Every Night Fever” disco-stomp pictorial from 1978, with models in Capezios dancing in a parking lot illuminated by the headlights of Lincoln limos.
Yet the magazine itself was no joke; GQ took its mandate seriously. It’s hard to grasp now, given the prevailing association of the 1970s with flared-trouser flamboyance, but the Ford-Carter years were actually a much more conservative time as far as the average man’s relationship to fashion was concerned. There was none of our current fluency in designers and grooming products, no societal permission for men to care about what they wore and how they looked. In this regard, GQ was way out in front, an archetypal example of the gay minority blazing a trail for the schlumpy mainstream.
“GQ made a strong statement about menswear. It was the only book at the time that had a statement, and therefore it became a leader,” says Ralph Lauren. Lauren’s wide-screen-Americana vision was decidedly unswish, as was the designer himself, but in GQ he found a publication simpatico with his desire to make men more attractive—to liberate them from the sack-suit orthodoxy that predominated on one end of the sartorial spectrum and the polyester ghastliness that predominated on the other.
The ’70s being the ’70s, the magazine was by no means immune to period folly—the March 1976 cover, for example, trumpeted a newfangled garment called the “One-Suit,” a belted coverall one-piece that made the model wearing it look like the world’s nattiest airplane mechanic. But Lauren’s comments speak to a seismic shift that took place in GQ’s pages in the latter half of the decade, a quantum aesthetic upgrade that profoundly impacted not only his business but the whole of men’s fashion. What was this shift? Put simply, it was a new style of fashion photography that, in one fell swoop, streamlined and modernized the American man. The foremost practitioners of this new style were Barry McKinley, Rico Puhlmann, and a third photographer who started out as the least heralded of the bunch but ultimately emerged as the most influential: Bruce Weber. Flip through the back issues of GQ as the years progress from ’75 to ’80 and you can see it all happening: the hair getting shorter, the bodies more defined, the vignettes more lyrical.
You can witness the American-male self-image changing, the trends of the ’80s and ’90s (and beyond) in inchoate form. With the guidance and backing of the art department’s Coulianos and Sterzin, Weber and his ilk effectively buffed up and defunkified the American man, trimming off his sideburns, placing him in more salubrious settings, cultivating his handsomeness, ridding him of any and all vestigial ’60s stink and grit.
If you’ve ever seen an Abercrombie & Fitch catalog, a Calvin Klein billboard, or a pack of dewy collegians convened on a green in a Ralph Lauren foldout ad… well, here is where all that began.
https://www.gq.com/story/it-all-started-here-the-gay-legacy-of-gq
I’m sure he was a close finalist. It’s tough nowadays for anti-American publications to honor just one traitor and/or anti-American person!
It is a real pickle. LOL!
Robert Bowdrie Bergdahl is on Time’s short list.
Any publication that would do this and claim to recognize the "New American Heroes" on Veteran's Day, are obviously anti-American haters.
Guess it's not that important in the big scheme of things, now is it? I haven't missed a thing it seems.
GQ Magazine and far left idiot Colin Kaepernick! disgraces and IDIOTs!
Who but a homosexual would bother with GQ anyway?
Has anyone ever heard him speak? Is he half intelligent?
And he was paid more in his short NFL career than most Americans will earn in a lifetime. If he was prudent with his money he will never NEED to work again.
I’ve never purchased an issue of GQ. That trend will continue.
It must be remembered that like all the rest, Colin is a jock, even a black jock. The intellect of the professional jock football subculture measured on a scale of 0 to 10 is at best 4. The aggregate were mollycoddled and advanced through the educational syatem soley to play a game.
The jocks are meat and potatoes for the leftist Rat propagandists who sort out gullible and intellectually sub par minorities that can be persuaded to deliver the Ameritrash message
Dumb jocks have become American enemies
NFL owners disagree.
They’re all being used and are too dumb to see it. At least the slaves put in the arena with lions by the Romans knew they were being used for entertainment. Of course they weren’t being paid millions.
His BLM gf Nessa Diab does his talking for him.
http://www.latimes.com/sports/sportsnow/la-sp-kaepernick-ravens-lewis-20170906-story.html
People used to have names, now they have twattle handles.
1)Crapernick for ruining football for millions and keeping the afro uncool
2)Stephen Colbert for calling the President gay, I guess.
3)Gal Gadot for....being hot? Ok.
4)And KDTrey5, sounds like some kind of cream to treat genital warts, oh it's NBA Star Kevin Durant, I couldn't tell you what he did. His team did win.
Every NFL locker room (and college and high school as well) should be required to post that chart a fellow FReeper has provided showing the ratio of killings in which the races of killer and victim are known. It proves that white-on-black murder is a tiny fraction compared to black-on-black killing. And the police killing of blacks is a mere fraction of that! Blow the chart up to 3 by 5 feet and post it.
These high-faultin’ Elites in the sports world, in the publishing world, in the entertainment world, in the business world, in the media and in politics and even in the thousands of our fellow countrymen have revealed the depths of their depravity and hatred for the country at its core. This has been the BEST ELECTION EVER!!!!
GQ Man of the Year is as meaningless as the Nobel Peace Prize. Personally I don’t know any “gentlemen” who wear socks depicting cops as pigs.
I have never purchase the fag rag and for sure now I would not even thumb through one
I have never purchase the fag rag and for sure now I would not even thumb through one
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.