Bachelor [magazine] (first issue, April 1937)

Philadelphia: The Bachelor, Inc.. Very Good. 1937. (Vol. 1, No. 1). Magazine. [modest bumping and slight dog-earing at corners, short diagonal crease at upper right corner of front cover, minor damage to base of spine, approx. 1" separation of front cover at top hinge]. (B&W photographs, color and B&W graphics) The inaugural issue of this short-lived magazine that was perceived and received (by the then-still-largely-closeted American gay male community) as a publication that was intended just for them. In language and imagery that we today recognize as coded (it was aimed at "the discerning cosmopolite"), it focused on such topics as men's fashion, and many of its articles were devoted to extolling the lifestyle of the "confirmed bachelor" and somewhat disdaining the female gender (e.g. "The Insolence of American Women," by Baron Giorgio Suriani). It somewhat mimicked Esquire in size and format, and pictorially the obvious emphasis was on extremely handsome, well-turned-out, and (mostly) single men, with an occasional woman tossed in (such as Lily Damita, photographed with then-husband Errol Flynn, both equally gorgeous). Given that the magazine's creator and editor, Elizabeth Criswell, was a married woman from a small town in Ohio, there is some question as to whether the publication was intentionally aimed at a gay readership or whether it just fell into that zone more or less coincidentally. There's an extensive and very interesting article about the publication at the Columbia Journalism Review site, which quotes a pre-publication comment by Mrs. Criswell, in which she stated that "half the business of history has been investing women with romance. It’s time somebody started lending glamor to men, especially unmarried ones.” From the same article: "Regardless of her exact intention, Criswell hired enough queer staff -- photo editor, [Jerome] Zerbe, who was gay and a fixture of New York high society; Lucius Beebe, a gay writer who penned articles and provided editorial guidance -- that the magazine took on a queer aesthetic. Criswell wanted to apply a heterosexual female gaze to men and men’s fashion; in doing so, she created an opening for queer men to express their desires through [the magazine], too." The magazine, for a variety of reasons, never caught on and folded after just eight issues, publishing its final number in February 1938. Although it's somewhat legendary in gay-history annals, it's interesting to note that not a single one of the 19 subject headings assigned to this title in OCLC makes any reference to homosexuality. .