Enterprise & Society

Queer historiography has many gaps when it comes to economic history, which is surprising given that the most-cited pivot of queer history occurred at a business—the riots at the Stonewall Inn in June of 1969—not to mention the acrimonious debates that representations of and engagement in market activity promote in queer activist circles. (Readers might note the competition between the corporate-sponsored Heritage of Pride Parade and the nonsponsored Queer March held simultaneously to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Stonewall in New York City in June 2019.) Likewise, business and economic historians have mostly overlooked queer economics and businesses, which is equally surprising given the astronomical growth of businesses and advertising directed at queer consumers in recent years.

David K. Johnson's Buying Gay: How Physique Entrepreneurs Sparked a Movement, published last year in the History of U.S. Capitalism series by Columbia University Press, provides an invaluable addition to both queer and business historiography. "My hope," writes Johnson in his preface, is that Buying Gay "will lead to a breakdown of the binary opposition often assumed by scholars between the 'commercial' and the 'political' when reexamining" the mid-twentieth century (xiii). Buying Gay is essentially a prosopography of physique magazine publishers in the 1950s and 1960s, and it provides a pioneering history of entrepreneurship for business scholars who have too narrowly framed the entrepreneur as the quasi-heroic captain of industry. Buying Gay deserves to be read alongside the most innovative of these new studies in entrepreneurship, such as LaShawn Harris's Sex Workers, Psychics, and Numbers Runners: Black Women in New York [End Page 993] City's Underground, Josh Davis's From Head Shops to Whole Foods: The Rise and Fall of Activist Entrepreneurship, and Shennette Garret-Scott's Banking on Freedom: Black Women in U.S. Finance before the New Deal, the latter two of which were published alongside Buying Gay in the History of U.S. Capitalism series.

For readers of queer history, Johnson's book stands virtually alone in its monographic treatment of entrepreneurship, although it adds to an ongoing academic and intracommunity debate—dating to the anti-capitalist rhetoric of the post-Stonewall Gay Liberation Front—about whether capitalism is anathema or necessary to gay liberation. Only a few other book-length treatments, notably Martin Meeker's pioneering Contacts Desired: Gay and Lesbian Communications and Community, 1940s–1970s (2006), which covers the homophile publishing boom in the 1950s and 1960s shepherded by the San Francisco-based Pan-Graphic Press, give serious treatment to entrepreneurship's significance to political activity. Johnson also builds extensively on the work of Jeffrey Escoffier's Bigger Than Life: The History of Gay Porn Cinema from Beefcake to Hardcore (2009), although Escoffier focuses as much on issues around labor, marketing, and technology as on entrepreneurship. Myrl Bream's Gay, Inc.: The Nonprofitization of Queer Politics (2018) raises similar questions about nonprofit enterprises, but he focuses primarily on economic institutions and draws fundamentally different conclusions about the effects of capitalism on queer life.

Showing how shrewd entrepreneurs appropriated and profited from a purportedly "straight" body-building cultural niche, Johnson's richest, most deeply researched passages shine through in his profiles of several understudied, historically critical figures in economic history of the queer 1950s and 1960s, namely Athletic Model Guild publisher Bob Mizer, Grecian Guild publishers Randolph Benson and John Bullock, Guild Press publisher Lynn Womack, and Directory Services, Inc.'s Lloyd Spinar and Conrad Germain. In addition, Buying Gay includes a fascinating profile of the enigmatic "father of the Homophile Movement" Donald Webster Cory (a.k.a. Edward Sagarin), whose pioneering book service, founded in 1951, provided an entrepreneurial model for publishers and distributors who followed in his wake.

Any queer historian of this period would recognize these names because they appear in numerous archival collections constructed from the personal possessions and papers of gay men in the Cornell Human Sexuality Collection, the New York...