Grecian Guild Pictorial No.59, November 1966, Male Beefcake Magazine. Pristine condition with the rare Guild Book Service center bulletin inset no.39

Guild Press Founder Lynn Womack (Trim, Grecian Guild Pictorial, MANual, Guild Book Service, etc)

Herman Lynn Womack (1923–1985) was an American publisher, and the founder of Guild Press, a Washington, D.C. publishing house that catered almost exclusively to a gay male audience and played a major role in expanding the legal protections for gay publications against obscenity laws in the United States.

Biography

Born in Hazlehurst, Mississippi in 1923 to tenant farmers, Womack began school at the University of Mississippi, but transferred to George Washington University in Washington, D.C. to complete his degree and to pursue graduate studies. Womack was a heavyset man and an albino.

By 1946, Womack came to terms with his homosexuality and ended his marriage to his second wife. This coincided with the collapse of one of his business ventures, the Howell Academy, a private boarding school at which Womack reportedly was rarely present. After the closing of the Howell Academy, Womack enrolled in a Ph.D. program in philosophy at Johns Hopkins University, receiving his doctorate in 1955. After completing his Ph.D., he became a professor of Philosophy at the George Washington University.

Guild Press

Founding

An investment that he had made earlier in his life paid off and resulted in his becoming the owner of a small printing plant. With this printing press, he developed MANual Enterprises, an earlier incarnation of Guild Press.

By 1960, Guild Press became a profitable publishing enterprise under Womack's leadership as publisher and sole proprietor and was printing physique and art magazines and providing a national mail order business.

Battling censorship: Manual Enterprises v. J. Edward Day

In 1962, the United States Postal Service tried to shut down the distribution of three of the Guild Press's publications: Manual, Trim, and Grecian Guild Pictorial. Womack responded by taking the U.S. Postal Service to court in MANual Enterprises v. Day (1962), which was one of the First Amendment cases that determined that erotica intended for gay males was "not obscene as a matter of law". He ultimately won the case on appeal in the United States Supreme Court, thereby carving out greater freedoms for gay publications throughout the United States.    Wikipedia

Grecian Guild Pictorial

Grecian Guild Pictorial was a more sophisticated vintage gay muscle magazine that hid the fact is was geared for homosexual men. Grecian Guild is a beefcake magazine published in the era of the 1930's through the 1960's.

The main audience of beefcake magazines was gay men. However, Beefcake magazines were designed to appear as fitness and health magazines rather than erotic magazines, because of censorship and homophobia. Typically, the models in a beefcake magazine such as Grecian Guild performed exercise poses in the magazine's photos, rather than explicitly being shown in sexual settings.

Other pocket-size magazines published by Young Physique Publications include Adonis, Art and Physique, Body Beautiful, Fizeek Art Quarterly, Grecian Guild Pictorial, Male Figure, Male Pix, Man Alive, Manorama, MANual, Man's World, Mars, Physique Illustrated, Physique Artistry, Physique Pictorial, Scan, Tomorrow's Man, Trim, and Fizeek.

In December 1945, Gay pornography pioneer Bob Mizer founded Athletic Model Guild, or AMG. Mizer's AMG produced Physique Pictorial, the first all-nude and all-male magazine, and the film Beefcake documents his work and the growth of the Beefcake magazine industry. H. Lynn Womack published magazines such as Manorama, MANual, Fizeek, and Trim and was involved in the U.S. Supreme Court case MANual Enterprises v. Day (1962). From 1964 to 1967, Clark Polak published DRUM magazine.

In the 1960's, the pretense of being about exercise and fitness was dropped as controls on pornography were reduced. By the end of the decade gay pornography became legal, and the market for beefcake magazines collapsed.

Young Physique magazine was a prime example of this genre. It had a centerfold with a young model wearing a posing strap (g-string) with creative sets designed by the well-known gay photographer James Bidgood. Showing total nudity was illegal before 1962, so all models had to wear posing straps. Since Young Physique was widely available in drugstores and magazine stores all over the United States, even in smaller cities and small towns, buying a copy of the magazine is the way most young homophiles in the 1960's made their first contact with the gay world.

In the 1980's and 1990's, beefcake magazines enjoyed a resurgence due to a heightened interest in gym culture as well as the onset of the AIDS epidemic. Numerous titles found success, such as Men's Workout, Exercise for Men Only, and Men's Exercise. These magazines are highly visual-oriented with extensive pictorials in contrast to fitness magazines that focus more on text such as Men's Fitness. Many of the images feature homoerotic or suggestive sexual imagery, such as male models unbuttoning their pants or almost full nudity. Some have included profiles of male strippers and some of the male models have also appeared in Playgirl. 

Bijou

I have been an owner of numerous gay sexual business's since 1969, one of them was the Bijou Theater and sex club that closed in 2015. I have been a manufacture, producer, filmmaker, wholesaler, collector and re seller of gay porn, sexuality, erotica, all things adult since 1969. I set prices for collectible item's based on what I paid, quality, rarity, market value. I cater to collectors, those who give gifts, those who are looking for a specific man, item, article etc. Bijou's inventory is over 35,000 magazines plus thousands of brochures etc.

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