Max Sparber at Minnpost shared a fascinating bit of Minneapolis gay history. Apparently, Minneapolis was a hub for “beefcake” books back in the early 1960s and the state tried to take the publishers to court calling the pinup photos “pornography” (the images were essentially bodybuilders in poses).

Sparber writes (and the whole thing is definitely worth a read):

It turned out that the Vagabond catalog was produced by a company called Directory Services, Inc., a company run by two men, Lloyd Spinar and Conrad Germain. And Spinar and Germain didn’t just print the catalog, they also printed an assortment of beefcake photography magazines with titles like “Butch” and “Rugged.” And they were somewhat progressive in their tastes in such photos, as they allowed various dangly parts to just dangle, which wasn’t really done back then. So, of course, they were taken to court.

The court case was a bit of a fiasco, as described in a book by Thomas Waugh called “Hard to Imagine.” In order for images of nude men to be prurient, they had to have no artistic value whatsoever, but, of course, the whole trick to beefcake photography was that it pretended it existed for enthusiasts of the classical male form. Photographs typically consisted of men taking bodybuilder poses, which, in turn, were based on Greek statues, and even when they wore sailor hats, the whole thing still looked like something Michelangelo might have sculpted. So it was up to the prosecutor to prove that there was no art to it, and so he brought in a professional photographer, who declared the images “‘technically low and aesthetically zero minus” and an art student who complained that he found sailor’s hats distracting. Hey, kid, you weren’t alone.

It turned out the case was overseen by an unusually progressive judge, Earl R. Larson, who ruled that just showing a man in his skivvies wasn’t inherently pornographic, despite the images being targeted at a gay audience, thus clearing the way for more beefcake magazines and, one supposes, nude fitness clubs, which we used to have in the Twin Cities, back when things were more interesting.