“Jock and the Great Outdoors”: White American Masculinities, Gay Reader-Tourists, and Fantasies of Africa in Postwar Physique Magazines

This article draws from critical discourse analysis to explore motifs in editorial information produced on images by the South African photographer Jock in postwar physique magazines aimed at (mostly white) gay readerships. The research shows that these recurrent narratives turned on homoerotic fantasies of Africa as a rural idyll for actualizing white masculinities suspended outside of modernity. Read against the backdrop of anxieties about the domestication (and possible effeminization) of American men at mid-century and the masculinization of gay culture at the same historical juncture, such photo-texts therefore met demands for the return of white men to “the wild”. More precisely, this aspirational ideal is discussed as historically framed via primitivism in relation to Jock’s photography, satisfying an appetite for representations of exotic, virile white men among American gay reader-tourists.