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Warburton (L) with the late Oliver Reed in the film Dragonard (1988) (Image via Cannon)

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Oh, Mickey — he's so fine! (Image by Zeus)

Please check out my Substack piece on Mickey Squires, the classic Colt Model who is (1) alive, (2) well, and (3) about to become the subject of a new documentary on the real guy behind the butch persona.

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Hard at work! (Image via Facebook)

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This one will take you to the mat. (Images by Phil Tarley)

My long interview with Phil Tarley aka Philip St. John is ready for your probing eyes!

He directed the gay-porn classics Getting It and Below the Belt, was the first director to feature Chad Douglas and is a filmmaker and art curator, all of which made for a fascinating conversation.

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A man of many moments (Images via Dennis Forbes & Falcon)

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The beginning of my latest story to give you a free taste of it:

Dennis Forbes may have photographed more men more erotically than anyone else during the Golden Age of Gay Porn.

But who is he?

Fred sexy (Image via Dennis Forbes)

He's better known — but still not widely known enough — as Fred Bisonnes, whose vision of the male form became one of the most dominant in gay fantasy history, thanks not only to his running Western Man publishing in the '70s and '80s and his founding of Advocate Men in June 1984, but to his being involved

Read the History of Mandate

with so many other publications, businesses and creators, starting more than 50 years ago: After Dark, Vector, The Advocate, Jim French, Kristen Bjorn, Crawford Barton, Kenn Duncan, Chuck Holmes, John Preston, Modernismo's Mandate and Honcho, and many others.

He shot everyone from Christopher Isherwood to Peter Berlin, Casey Donovan to Bill Henson, Al Parker to Leo Ford — and in many cases produced the very images you think of first when you hear those names. He built on Colt's image, and he revamped Falcon's, putting his personal stamp on both.

The impossibly handsome Bill Henson(Image via Dennis Forbes)

The book in Henson's hands in the image above. (Image via Stonehill)

In short, the Fred Bisonnes aesthetic was a cock ring around the entire scene.

Because this Renaissance man — who had been in the Navy, attended Brigham Young University, at one point looked like a hippie and worked as a copywriter for Better Homes & Gardens— wore so many hats, he wound up having had an impact on gay culture far greater than he might have as merely another gifted photographer. He was a writer first, he became an illustrator, he created collages and he was a one-man packager as well as a freelancer.

Through it all, Forbes's eye for beauty, his taste level, and the decisions he made about what he would not do at a time when many others were happy to do whatever they were asked, to the detriment of making anything lasting, established his own unique style. You can tell his work a mile away — or from a distance of nine or so inches. His men are natural stunners with timeless expressions.

Even when the same models are drenched in '70s clone trappings or '80s California-twink couture in other, contemporaneous photographs, you'd be hard-pressed to find a camp Bisonnes spread.

His men look the way he saw them, and they are still as immortal as his legacy should be.

Most surprisingly, Forbes documented this casual beauty largely in a time when gay men, including many of his subjects, were dying. At the time a visual relief, the images today are also a testament to defiant self-love, sexual expression and even community amid suffering, oppression and death.

A lifelong artist, Dennis, who turned 84 this year, has not photographed a naked man in 35 years. He spent decades publishing Kmt, a magazine devoted to one of his passions, Egypt, a pursuit he only recently ended after 132 issues, and he has produced several books that chronicle his contributions: his 2006 novel Last Call (begun in 1980 for The Advocate), a book of his beefcake drawings called Blue (2011) and — most indispensable — volumes 1 and 2 of Bare Essentials (from 2021), his phonebook-sized memoirs.

For his first open-ended interview in forever, he spoke to me by phone from his home on a wooded mountainside outside Asheville, North Carolina.

(Images via Dennis Forbes)

When did you start shooting men?

The gay aspect started in 1972, when I moved to San Francisco from Iowa City, Iowa, where I was then director of publications for the University of Iowa. A few months before that long-planned move took place, as a subscriber of After Dark Magazine, I was fascinated by a San Francisco model who'd appeared in a small photo in the magazine's A&E pages named John Appleton, so wrote to editor in chief Bill Como about his interest in me finding Appleton and interviewing and photographing him for the magazine, when I moved to San Francisco in a few weeks. To my surprise Como wrote back, saying that there'd been more response to that small photo than anything else After Dark had published previously, so, yes, go for it! He even included a letter of introduction, so that "if Appleton has any questions about your legitimacy, he can see that I've given you authorization for the interview." So, I did "go for it." 

How did you find him?

I began asking around. He wasn’t in the phonebook. People knew him. He was benefiting from his fame from being in After Dark. He had shoulder-length hair and a big handlebar mustache and a fantastic body, all of which were visible in a non-frontal nude photo of him wearing turquoise jewelry by a San Francisco designer friend of his who advertised in After Dark. He was a bartender at the Midnight Sun off of Castro Street. I approached him at work. He was reluctant at first and said he’d been hassled too much and regretted he’d agreed to do the photography in the first place, blah-blah-blah. I said, “Well, here’s my card, and if you ever change your mind, give me a call.” That led to me ultimately doing the interview and the article being published in After Dark.

I’d also begun doing another article on the Renaissance Pleasure Faire. At that time, they were holding one in Los Angeles and one in Northern California over in Marin County annually. In those days, it was a big event where people got dressed up in medieval costumes and strolled around in this farmer’s wooded area with all sorts of vendors. I did photography and I wrote a story about that, which Bill Como published in After Dark. So that was the launching of my journalistic career.

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