We Love Los Angeles

The vintage images in Bruce of Los Angeles: Inside/Out spark such a sweet rush of excitement that you almost want to shove this coffee-table tome in your sock drawer. Meticulously restoring the work of Bruce Ballas — who served as America’s premier “beefcake” specialist from the 1940s until his death in 1974 — Inside/Out is the Rosetta Stone of pre-Stonewall gay culture, documenting the preferred “smut” for boys who liked boys in an era when men were men.

Compared to today’s pornographic standards, Ballas’s Technicolor tableaus of hyper-handsome, milk-drinking, barely clothed bodybuilders feel as innocuous as Leave It to Beaver. But time has cranked their queer quotient up to 11. A bare-buttocked pretty boy in boots and Stetson, some naked dudes playing tug of war, all those gladiator-style loincloths — this thing is gayer than Liberace inviting Paul Lynde over for brunch!

And thank God for that. Without Ballas, there’d have been no Robert Mapplethorpe, no Bruce Weber, no Herb Ritts. Treat yourself to Inside/Out and experience the birth of gay iconography as we’ve come to know it.

Bruce of Los Angeles: Inside/Out is available now from powerHouse Books.

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