Like Marti Muth—my high school English teacher who slid a copy of “The Normal Heart” across my desk in 1986 and said, “Read this”—International Male knew I was gay before.
My cooped-up teen behind devoured the company’s menswear catalog when it landed in my family’s mailbox in the 1980s. I was drawn to the fanciful clothes—things like twine tops and peekaboo rowing pants—that were a universe away from my fat boy pants. Flip through a copy of the catalog today and the clothes look strangely masculine, like something Lil Nas X would drape off his body.
According to the new documentary “All Man: The International Male Story,” available on streaming services, I wasn’t alone. Through interviews with celebrity fans, catalog models, company employees and Gene Burkard, the company’s gay founder, the film explores how, over some 40 years, a catalog of outré menswear became a generation-defining gay chef.
In a recent interview, one of the film’s directors, Bryan Darling, told me he hopes audiences find the documentary an “empowering” discovery or rediscovery of the catalog’s peacock-like fashion and pre-Instagram homoeroticism. It was for him: He had never seen the catalog until Jesse Finley Reed, his co-director, showed him a copy.
“When I opened it up, especially when I saw the ’80s stuff, I thought, why aren’t we having so much fun now?” said Darling, who, like Reed, is gay.
The film charts the catalog’s rise and fall, beginning with the first issue in 1976—a collection of European-inspired menswear curated by Wisconsin native Burkard—and ending when the last catalog was shipped around 2007. (Burkard died at age 90 in 2020.) In the decades in between, the catalog was a multi-million dollar success, making about $100 million annually in the early 1990s.
Editorially, the catalog never advertised itself as being for gay people, but many of the buyers and art directors in the tight-knit company were gay men and straight women who knew how to appeal to gay tastes. Some male models refused an international male appearance for fear they would look or be perceived as gay.
I have never bought anything from International Male. But for many gay Gen Xers like me, the catalog was formative — the gay coming-of-age equivalent of my heterosexual high school friends drooling over a stolen copy of Playboy. Flipping through it, though I didn’t fully understand it, I found myself liking boys, a torturous realization at a time when most I heard about gays were clowns and sick men.
I didn’t see myself in the men in the catalog – I was too young, curvy and fey – but I saw myself making love to them one day on that gritty Arcadia where I assumed they all lived. I studied the catalog alone, frightened but excited, dawdling over shirtless men with ambitious treasure trails that Jesus warned me were off limits.
But magazines that you could “read” in the bathroom or hide under the bed – those were pretty much the only sexually arousing materials guys like me had.
I recently reached out to friends to see if they had similar memories of the catalog and boy did they. Benjamin recalled nervously buying it from a bookstore near his family’s home near Columbus, Ohio.
“Imagine the mental gymnastics that comes with being so deeply closeted, but convincing myself that I am, of course, a 16-year-old who loves fashion and wants to look good in a jockstrap — for his girlfriend, he told me. “That’s not gay at all.”
Some friends did indeed buy clothes. Carl said what looked good on the page made him look like he was in “a very, very merry production of ‘Peter Pan’ in person.” Patrick bought some kind of wrestling shirt that served a special purpose.
“If I wanted to go to bed with a guy faster,” he told me, “I’d put it on and it got things moving.”
What “All Man” doesn’t explain is how the catalog found me. I suspect someone typed my address into a database after I won a picnic basket of Calvin Klein Obsession products in a GQ fashion show raffle in a Cleveland mall around 1986. Or maybe someone at the Columbia House record club saw my order of 11 albums for a penny that included the soundtracks “Godspell” and “Fame,” and said, This queen will buy a man’s panties.
Or maybe the gay gods looked down on me and said, like the chief angel to Clarence in “It’s a Wonderful Life,” “A man on earth needs our help.”