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 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 Public Library, the ONE Archive, the San Francisco LGBT Historical Society, and the Archive of the Bob Mizer Foundation, of which Johnson makes extensive use. The photography of Mizer and other contributors to the Athletic Model Guild has recently been the subject of major gallery exhibitions and even a two-volume set published by Taschen, and readers will be fascinated by the careful negotiation of surveillance, repression, and stigma Johnson uncovers in Mizer’s diaries and personal correspondence. Perhaps the most fascinating tidbit contained in his chapter on Mizer is his 1959 editorial in Grecian Guild Press titled “Homosexuality and Bodybuilding,” which elicited an outpouring of reactions from readers, both gay and straight. Johnson also develops the complicated cultural context of the Grecian Guild, which simultaneously engaged body-building culture and the homoeroticism of European antiquity, rejected the gay bar and embraced Christianity as a site of bonding, and inaugurated a debate about the aesthetics and idealization of masculinity among physique publishers and readers alike. Guild Press’s Womack, and DSI’s Spinar and Germain, whose legal troubles with the federal government upended obscenity law in the 1960s, come in for extensive treatment, as well, demonstrating how entrepreneurs fought against the threat of censorship and imprisonment, in part, by fostering a political consciousness among its readers. Those readers familiar with Johnson’s pathbreaking essay “Physique Pioneers,” published in the Journal of Social History (2010), will find his chapters on the Guild Press and Directory Services, Inc., represent a much-anticipated follow-up that expands beyond his focus on consumption and court battles with an eye to business owners' roles as entrepreneurs.

However, it is in this last term—entrepreneurship—where Johnson’s book will require both theoretical as well as archival intervention from other queer business and economic historians. There is no definition of the term “entrepreneur” or what defines entrepreneurial activity, or for that matter much description or analysis of what might reasonably define a market. Johnson also reserves his most insightful analysis for consumption, which he develops as he argues that physique magazines represented a kind of queer province of the “consumer’s republic” described by Lizbeth Cohen in her eponymous book.

For historians of business and economics, the book raises some unanswered questions. Johnson, it should be noted, is one of queer history’s preeminent historians of the state and state repression. The Lavender Scare: The Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government is a masterwork of archival detail and historical analysis of 1950s Washington, DC, and, as Johnson describes in his introduction, this book began with the author’s interest in DC entrepreneur and activist H. Lynn Womack. Womack and most of the other entrepreneurs he describes—especially Spinar and Germain, but also Philadelphia-based publisher Clark Polak—were involved in major court cases. Although Johnson’s narrative feeds us some details about their entrepreneurial decisions and models, most of it focuses on their political activities. This is evident in the structure of the book itself. There are dozens of entries for “censorship” in the index, and not a single entry for “entrepreneur” or “market” (although there is one for “market segmentation”). Even so, for a book focused on censorship and state constraints, it has no engagement with any of the literature of institutional economics, or the ways in which the enforcement of economic norms has shaped entrepreneurship, business, or consumption. Whit Strub’s works on the history of censorship and pornography, Perversion for Profit: The Politics of Pornography and the New Right (2010) and Obscenity Rules: Roth v. United States and the Long Struggle over Sexual Expression (2013), provide readers a more multidimensional picture of the relationship between legal and cultural institutions and sexual commerce.

Although he cites and to a large extent builds on Escoffier’s pioneering work on the gay porn industry, Johnson curiously omits his larger body of work. Escoffier, whose work on queer economics goes back four decades, outlines many of the theoretical issues missed in his pathbreaking essay “The Political Economy of the Closet” (1998). Although Johnson cites D’Emilio’s foundational essay on “Capitalism and Gay Identity,” Lisa Duggan’s The Twilight of Inequality?, and a handful of other scholars working in queer economic and business history, he overlooks much useful queer historiography, and readers looking for analytic depth would do well to discover the old and new works of Escoffier, as well as other works that document a range of entrepreneurial histories not captured by Johnson’s analysis, including Matt Houlbrook’s work on the “Pink Shilling” (Queer London: Perils and Pleasures of the Sexual Metropolis, 2005); Gayle Rubin’s work on queer markets in San Francisco (Deviations, 2011); Charles Nero (“Why Are Gay Ghettoes White?,” in Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology, 2005); and Cathy Cohen’s extensive body of work on the intersections of race, class, and queer economies.

It is perhaps in this last respect that Buying Gay reveals some of its biggest questions for readers of queer history. Without the archival evidence or analytic context to scrutinize race, class, and, indeed, gender more carefully, the work unfairly relegates gay men of color and lesbians to a handful of anecdotes and footnotes. The book totally omits trans and gender nonconforming people, which is especially curious given the intense debates physique readers and publishers engaged in over masculinity and, especially, the significance of Virginia Prince’s Transvestia, a publication for trans readers launched at the height of the physique magazine craze in 1960.

Like almost all pioneering or “first works,” Johnson’s nevertheless fascinating and important study reveals a flaw in the field that can only be remedied with more archival research, analytic context, and, especially, attention to the methodologies that make economic and business history such a necessary intervention for business historians and queer historians a like. Readers may certainly fault this reviewer for unfairly holding Johnson to account for a book he did not write, but the omission of these critical actors from his more ambitious argument connecting physique magazines to “the movement” is unconvincing. Moreover, by failing to elaborate an economic analysis, he sometimes undermines his most important argument about the ways in which the rhetoric and political analysis of gay liberation activists created a binary opposition between “commercial” and “political” activity. This is most obvious in his assessment of Oscar Wilde Bookshop’s Craig Rodwell, who he describes as “offended” by the high price and exploitative nature of erotic publications. However, even this analysis suggests Rodwell was more prudish than his personal papers and the archive of his activity suggest. Rodwell frequently contributed to sexually explicit publications, especially the Queen’s Quarterly, a gay take on Playboy Magazine that, according to Johnson, would not have existed without physique magazines. Furthermore, the Oscar Wilde Bookshop did, in fact, sell explicit and erotic materials. My own research reveals that when Rodwell was accused of censorship—and, indeed, he was—it was not because of his objection to sexually explicit images but because he objected to precisely what Johnson misses in his analysis: to the open marketing of racism in personal ads, the exploitation of racial fetishization, misogyny, and, most importantly, the pernicious effects that these elements, unchecked by gay consumer culture, represented to queer politics and a queer economy. If anything, Rodwell, like the physique entrepreneurs in Johnson's book, always saw business and markets as pieces of a much more politically important if rhetorically idealized form of social organization for queer life: community.