From Recipes to Pecs: A brief personal history of gay magazines

A look back at this history of gay magazines, and recollections of their importance of the coming out process, by Paul Baker.

Gay Times used to feature pictures of gay celebrities or icons on its front cover in the 1980s and early 1990s – can you imagine Jimmy Somerville getting on the front cover of GT now? By the mid 1990s a change was afoot and now the rules were that the front cover was always a meaty young orange torso, with almost every other issue featuring the word SEX in big bold capitals.

An historical timeline of gay magazines, from 1897 to 2008.

The first gay magazine, Der Eigene, was published in Germany in 1896. The medium has gone from politics and activism to pop and hard-core.

“The word magazine is an Arabic term for storehouse. Although periodicals had been published before, it was first used to describe a publication in 1731 with advent of the Gentlemen’s Magazine.”