175: Gay Bodybuilding 1

Male narcissism and vanity are terribly dangerous things to provoke and indulge.
If a chap wants to confirm whether he’s good looking then he’s simply got to start eyeing all the other fellows up to see if they’re good looking or not. And once you start eyeing up chaps and start deciding whether they’re attractive, well then, it’s almost inevitable you’ll want to start feeling the other chap’s muscles to compare firmness and vascularity. And maybe slipping into posing pouches to compare builds, and then maybe a shared oiling session. And could a buddy help another buddy by giving a hand?
And then, well, maybe, ooops, oh dear, I’ll get a cloth.
You see the dreadful slippery slope from rugged he-manliness into unspeakable and unnatural depravity. Such a shame.


by Al Jaffee in “Playboy”. August 1966

I’m sure I’ve also seen a parody of those “Charles Atlas” ads, where the wimp of the beach after becoming a muscle-man abandons his erstwhile lady companion to go off for some mutual comparison of vital statistics with his muscley former tormentor.

118: Al Jaffee – Fold-In

in “Mad” April, 1974

And here we have one of the most famous and durable features from “Mad” – a fold-in by Al Jaffee. How you are going to make it work is up to you: if you’re bold and strong enough you could try folding your computer screen, or you could print it out and fold it, or you could cut and past the left and right sections together, or you could use a sheet of paper to blank out the middle section on the screen, or (oh SHUT up!)

A nifty visual gag. Female gestures become effeminate gay gestures, and it’s worth remembering that the hideousness of 70s styles (Cuban heels and migraine-inducing clashes of colour and patterns) can make it hard to identify an actual homosexual.

As part of the public discussion about a place for homosexuality in a modern society, given various social and ecological fears about over-population, arguments were often made that homosexuality’s non-reproductive aspect was actually a contribution to the public good. Gore Vidal used to make this point quite a bit.