Courting the Pink Pound: Men Only and the Queer Consumer, 1935-39

Marketing as a response to paradox and norms in the 1960s and 1970s

“…As stated by E.H. Carr (1961), “The belief in a hard core of historical facts existing objectively and independently of the historian is a preposterous fallacy […]” (p. 10). To be sure, historical researchers in other fields have adopted postmodernist approaches (Kent, 1999), textual analyses (Greenfield et al , 1999), and interpretive approaches (Bengry, 2009). Even within the field of marketing, researchers have argued for more interpretative approaches as part of the historical method (Smith and Lux, 1993).…”

Cecil Beaton, Richard Hamilton and the Queer, Transatlantic Origins of Pop Art

“…Men Only, for instance, on the one hand tried to stress its straight credentials whilst, on the other, featuring the occasional slightly racy cartoon of the young pansy about town. 39 The 1937 Scrapbook includes a drawing by Beaton, New York Impressions (fig. 3), the original of which is now in the National Portrait Gallery in London and which bears direct comparison with Just What Is It.…”

The Perfect Man: Fatherhood, Masculinity and Romance in Popular Culture in Mid-Twentieth-Century Britain

“…As Justin Bengry has illustrated, these magazines can also be understood with a homosexual readership in mind, and though editors may have courted this audience, the appeal to heterosexual men was fundamental to success. 70 Popular newspapers realised that discussing women's expectations of a perfect man was an exploitable theme. In the Daily Express in 1946, this was explored through a reader's letter asking for advice.…”