Headscratchers / The Power of the Dog

• Why would Bronco Henry write his name on his secret gay porn mags?
  • It's mainly the magazines' context (stashed away in secret) that makes it clear they're being stashed as porn. The magazines all have names and taglines indicating they're physical culture magazines — essentially, early fitness and bodybuilding, making them Poor Man's Porn. (At least one appears to have images of lightly clad muscular women, though context makes it clear that's likely not why Phil is hanging onto them.) While some contemporary readers certainly had a homoerotic appreciation for physical culture imagery, it's more like hanging onto old issues of Men's Health than it is writing your name on a bunch of old issues of Honcho.
    • It's my understanding that these vintage muscle magazines used "fitness" as a threadbare excuse to skirt anti-obscenity laws that made pornography illegal. I think most people of the era would have understood them as smut, hence why Bronco Henry hid them.
      • That wasn't the case yet at the time the magazines were originally acquired and signed, since the issues we see seem to be from ~1900 or so by their covers and for Bronco Henry to have signed them himself — but by the mid-1920s the very fact that these were now 20-some years out of date would be the more suspicious part. Earlier in the century under the regime of postal censors like Comstock, many health and fitness publications and *Physical Culture* in particular ran into obscenity charges for dealing too frankly with *heterosexual* sexuality and topics like venereal disease and what we'd now call safer sex. (Also eugenics. Lots of eugenics.) But by the 1950s "fitness" was about as thin a fig leaf on gay-interest muscle mags as "photography"/"figure drawing" was for photos of naked and near-naked ladies as heterosexual-interest material.