This "Author Meets Critics" conversation focuses on David Johnson's book Buying Gay: How Physique Entrepreneurs Sparked a Movement (Columbia University Press, 2019). Johnson meets with four advertising and history scholars to discuss the following topics covered in the book: what physique magazines were and why there were important after World War II; advertisements in physique magazines; active government efforts to target and discriminate against LGBTQ individuals; important court cases contributing to advances in gay rights; the vulnerability of keeping and joining gay publication mailing lists; the imagined and virtual communities formed through gay publications and pen pal organizations; the market's place in shaping sexual identities; how gayness was defined after World War II; sexual identities' place in advertising and marketing; the international dimensions of physique culture and gay publications; and advice to advertisers, marketers, and other professors based on the reading of this book.
Julie Abraham, Metropolitan Lovers: The Homosexuality of Cities. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. xxii + 344pp. 61 illustrations. \$29.95/£18.50.David Caron, My Father and I: The Marais and the Queerness of Community. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009. x + 267pp. 57 illustrations. Bibliography. £18.95.
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