The Origins of Gay Media

in Australia 1969-78

By Bill Calder

Chapter 2 – Porn Mags

Bill Munro helped pioneer the Australian gay porn industry (Butch, Vol. 1, Nos. 2&3)

Turning a nude photography hobby into a business was no goldmine for the early porn mag publishers. One of the first publishers of Australian gay porn was Bill Munro who produced two editions of the porn mag Butch, the first in December 1972 and a second early the following year, with a cover price of $2. Those who knew him suggest he was not driven by the prospect of profit but interested rather in using his magazine to attract handsome young men willing to be photographed naked and willing to have sex with him. [56]

What we do know about Munro is that he was born on 9 April, 1943 and completed his final four years of secondary school in 1960 at one of Melbourne’s more conservative schools, Scotch College. He completed a Bachelor in Architecture at Melbourne University in 1965 and later moved to Sydney. We can surmise that while living and working in Sydney Munro combined his desire for sex with his enthusiasm for photography and surfing. Some of the photographs used in Butch were possibly taken on surfing trips along the northern beaches.

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Bill Munro proudly featured his name on the cover of his porn mag, Butch

His photographs in Butch include naked men in forest and beach settings, as well as wrestling, shower and dance art scenes. Political activism was not the objective for Munro’s Butch but surprisingly he featured his own name prominently on the cover as the magazine’s creator at a time when many gay magazines were being produced anonymously. Inside the magazine he published photographs of himself and his staff.[57]

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Bill Munro’s team of helpers (Butch Vol. 1, Nos. 2&3)

The motivation to read pornography comes from individual sexual desire. The appearance of locally produced gay pornography helped legitimise this desire in the minds of individual gay men and provided ingredients to imagine a gay identity. It also demonstrated that a community of gay people existed, who had produced this media.

Prior to 1970 there was no gay porn published in Australia due to the censorship laws of those times, laws that affected both gay and straight porn. As Dennis Altman points out, almost all Western countries saw “the virtual collapse of censorship” from the period starting late 1960s and into the 1970s.[58] This initial censorship of published material had begun in England in the second half of the nineteenth century in response to an expansion of sexually explicit popular literature. The Australian colonies duly passed obscenity legislation based on the British Act of 1857. During the mid-1950s most Australian states enacted new laws to tighten bans further on the distribution of printed material that their regulatory authorities deemed obscene. Among those

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prosecuted at this time were the distributors and publishers of “comics, popular magazines and hard-core pornographic publications as well as novels which claimed artistic merit”.[59]

Before porn, body builder magazines such as Muscle Builder provided visual stimulation

As a result of these censorship laws body-physique magazines provided the only quasi-legitimate form of visual stimulation for gay men. These magazines were associated with the sport of body-building and this legitimacy allowed the representation of ‘manliness’ that featured handsome, athletic men, usually with little or even no clothing. Accompanying the photos were details “real or bogus” about the

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models’ personality that allowed some models to develop a hero status.[60] Much of this material originated in America, reaching its zenith during the 1950s with titles such as Muscleman, Physique Artistry, Mr Universe and Man’s World finding their way to Australia, though at least one local title, Muscle Builder was also published. While there were no laws against publishing these magazines, it didn’t stop suspicion being cast on its readers, a point sharply highlighted in 1941 when mainstream newspapers exposed the existence of “a sensational vice ring … threatening the entire Commonwealth“. It turns out to have been a small direct mail business for body-physique magazines.[61]

It was the censorship of novels with artistic merit, such as D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover and James Joyce’s Ulysses, that roused the ire of early liberal campaigners against censorship. Debate and popular opposition to censorship steadily increased, fuelled by public interest in cases such as the 1964 Oz Magazinetrial that saw its publisher sentenced to six months jail under NSW obscenity laws and the trial of Wendy Bacon in 1971 for publishing her poem ‘Cunt is a Christian Word’, for which she received a fine, eight days in jail and a two year good behaviour bond.[62] By the late sixties the debate to liberalise censorship laws had moved beyond simply allowing distribution of novels with artistic merit to the point where “some parliamentarians were claiming that citizens had the right to read and view whatever they wished, even if that was pornography.”[63]

The first significant response from government to these growing liberal attitudes in society was in 1967 when the National Literature Board of Review was established. It was an attempt to provide uniform censorship of literature across the country. More dramatic moves followed the appointment of Don Chipp as Minister for Customs and Excise and he argued a “complete overhaul of censorship policy and practice was necessary”. During 1970-71 he proceeded to un-ban a large number of novels. The Whitlam Government, with Senator Lionel Murphy as the new Minister for Customs, went further in 1973 and stopped all prosecutions against importation of publications.

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This left only state government obscenity laws to restrict the distribution of pornographic material.[64]

Liberal state governments, such as those led by Bolte in Victoria and Askin in New South Wales, initially responded to the Federal Government’s abandonment of its restrictive import policy by arbitrarily banning certain titles. This increasingly became codified as a national classification system was introduced between 1973 and 1975 to identify restricted publications and allow adults to purchase and consume this pornography, while maintaining restrictions on public display and sales to children.[65] During this time New South Wales introduced a rule where certain ‘banned’ publications could be sold in sealed plain bags but only if the customer knew specifically what to request, with no advice allowed to be given by the shop-keeper. As new titles came and went rapidly there was little chance a customer would know which title to ask for. To get around the problem, a copy of the NSW Government Gazette listing banned publications would be put up in the bookshop window for customers to read, allowing them to then order appropriately named magazines.[66]

The general easing in attitudes towards censorship, along with significant cost reductions in printing technology, meant both gay and straight pornographic publications could now be published as a commercially viable enterprise. Much of the gay porn initially distributed in Australia was imported from the United States, but from 1970 it started to be produced by small local entrepreneurs.[67] They mainly distributed their publications through mail orders or newsagents, though most newsstands outside the ‘gay ghetto’ refused to stock gay material.[68] The establishment in 1972 of sex shops in many capital cities opened an important new avenue for distribution of gay magazines.

With the distribution of gay porn now legally possible in Australia it soon replaced physique magazines as the viewing material of choice. This change had a profound effect on individual gay men reading it and on the development of a gay identity. Gay

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porn helped liberate people from guilt by demonstrating that they “had no reason to feel ashamed of displaying their bodies”,[69] a point emphasised in recent research by Katherine Albury, Catharine Lumby and Alan McKee that found pornography offered “reassurance for marginalised sexual groups such as gay men”.[70] Crucially too, the porn mags directed themselves openly to gay men – a form of coming out, if you like – in contrast to the physique magazines that “kept the individual in isolation, doing nothing to indicate the existence of other gay men or promote a sense of community”.[71]

Joe Thomson suggests that reading pornography in the 1970s was more prevalent among gay men than straight men. He points to a 1979 US survey that found more than 50 per cent of gay men sometimes used pornography for sexual stimulation.[72] He develops the argument that it also had a significant impact on developing a positive – even defiant – gay identity:

Ultimately, because the sexual activity that is depicted in gay porn represents the basic difference that creates the homosexual identity, gay porn’s popularity can be seen as an important affirmation of gay life and culture. … What better way to assert a gay identity than by the open, casual acceptance and celebration of homophobically dreaded sex acts? [73]

Beyond legitimising sexual desire and gay identity, some of the 1970s gay porn mags further developed individual readers’ sense of identity and community by including serious feature articles, lifestyle stories and personal classifieds alongside the pictures of naked men and raunchy sex fiction. While most were short lived it is worth detailing the progress, success and failings of the key ones. It will illuminate the tenuous nature of the gay community and its media at this time, as well as provide insights into the relationship that existed between the activist press and the porn mags.

In essence there were three important porn publishing houses. The first produced William & John magazine that closed down after facing a costly obscenity trial. The

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second group began with Bill Munro and Butch magazine. He later expanded into a newspaper format with the title Little Butch but ran into financial difficulty and handed it to a straight porn publisher who renamed it Gay. The third publishing house was also straight owned, producing the magazine Stallion. Facing restrictions from state government censors the publishers sanitised its contents and even renamed it Gayzette, while producing a second magazine Apollothat they deliberately designed to be classified a restricted publication.

William & John combined raunchy pictures and stories with serious feature articles 

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William & John was first published in January 1972 as a 40 page black and white monthly magazine, A4 size, with higher quality paper and colour on both the cover and centre spread. It sold for a dollar. The publishershad an affiliated mail order business offering readers a range of products, including copies of photographs inWilliam & John, novelty sex greeting cards and playing cards, posters and imported sex toys. They also sold a range of serious gay books and nudist magazines, and from early 1972, their own locally produced pure porn mag, Mankind. The first editors were William Easton and John Baker, and the publisher was W.J. Publishing Company, though in the second half of 1972 Michael Delaney became joint editor and publisher with John Baker, replacing William Easton.

Delaney had previously been, briefly, an assistant editor at Camp Ink, but William & John suited his editorial outlook better. A photograph of him, standing naked with his back to the camera and a $12 price tag attached to his ankle had featured on the August 1971 Camp Ink cover. His photograph was superimposed on the El Alamein fountain, a popular Kings Cross pick-up point for male prostitutes during the 1970s.[74] Prior to this cover he had weighed into a debate in Camp Ink on promiscuity with a letter to the editor attacking those who lamented the presence of promiscuity in gay life as speaking “idealistic diarrhoea”:

Frustration, insecurity, loneliness, tension and last (but certainly not least) a pure, simple, earthy, satisfying F-U-C-K- they all go as part and parcel to the whole promiscuous scene. Why fight it. It’s much easier and infinitely more fulfilling to try and live with it.[75]

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Michael Delaney, pictured here on the cover of Camp Ink switched to editing gay porn, which he found more to his taste  (Camp Ink August 1971)

In the first edition of William & John, the editors announced they were “homosexual and proud”. They promised to use the magazine to campaign for the rights of homosexuals and provide “a voice and communication for the camp community” while at the same time providing “entertainment and information [alongside] great pictures”.[76] They later described William & John as the magazine for “the homosexual revolution”.[77]

“William and John” will bring to its readers ideas on fashion, theatre and entertainment. Its publishers believe the minority homosexual set, which is fast becoming a significant and active percentage of the population, are both

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responsible and positive thinking people. The magazine will be directed in the main to all truly caring and thinking people.[78]

From the start William & John faced difficulties with the censors, announcing in issue three that they had been forced to publish a special edition for Victoria “censoring our full frontal nudes”. Yet this act of self censorship did not stop them being summoned to court on obscenity charges. Somewhat perplexed, Easton and Baker concluded that the Chief Secretary’s Department must consider the personal classifieds in the magazine as “obscene and indecent”,[79] even ones that got no more raunchy than a young man seeking “broadminded and well endowed males for sincere friendship”.[80]

If this is so, then the Chief Secretary’s Department might not realize that our classifieds are not ‘promoting’ bizarre sexual practices – and that it is in fact a simple case of helping people who are kept in isolation by the social and legal situation to find one another and perhaps bring love into their lives … The case against ‘William and John’ is only another example of the repression we suffer … Heterosexuals are allowed to contact one another in any way they wish – classified ads, computers, magazines etc – in order to break any isolation they might find themselves in. But we are expected to be martyrs to an antiquated legal system and mode of thought.[81]

By early 1973 William & John was facing prosecution on obscenity charges in both NSW and Victoria, a total of 64 charges in all, relating to printing and publishing “obscene [and] indecent” material and both founding publishers, Baker and Easton faced the charges. One year after the first edition, the final of just eight issues ofWilliam & John was released in early 1973 and presumably it was shut down due to the costs and impact of the obscenity trial. The “publishers” of William & John though subsequently produced a single issue of the publication Mate, under the new publishing name, Jeepster Productions. In it they accused the Victorian and New South Wales Liberal governments of orchestrating a campaign against William & John, part of a broader anti-porn campaign in both states “due to the close proximity

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of elections” that year.[82] This new publishing structure clearly did not last long as “the liquidation of W. & J. Publishing Co. and Jeepster Productions”,[83]along with new management for Mankind magazine, was announced soon after. This new management doesn’t appear to have eventuated as no subsequent edition of Mankind exists in the Australian Lesbian and Gay Archives. John Baker still lives in Sydney but Michael Delaney died in a car accident in 1980.[84]

          Facing obscenity charges, the publishers of William & John switched their endeavours         to a new title, Mankind

The relationship between William & John and the activist press was at times a confused one. At the start of 1972 Camp Ink promoted the imminent arrival of William & John as “Australia’s first professional camp magazine” yet made no further mention of its existence, even through its obscenity trial. [85] CAMP co-president at the time Lex Watson reflected on this ambivalence towards William & John a decade later and acknowledged there was debate in 1972 among activists as to whether they should write for the commercial gay press.[86] Watson’s co-president at CAMP, Sue Wills recalls the debate more definitively saying there was a reluctance to write for them, accept advertising or even sell them in the CAMP clubrooms for fear this would

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“tacitly approve of their contents and the whole exploitative commercial scene”.[87] Other activists, such as Dennis Altman allowed William & John to interview him in early 1972, shortly after Gay Liberation split from CAMP. Altman also wrote a number of articles for William & John in the lead up to the December 1972 Federal Election.

It was into the vacuum left by William & John’s demise that Bill Munro launched Little Butch, with the ambitious plan to publish a fortnightly newspaper. Little Butch was softer porn than Butch with nude pictures and porn stories, though no genitals on display. It also included hangover advice, arts and venue guides, personal classifieds and occasional law reform news. It sold for 20 cents but ceased production in April 1973, also after just eight issues. In June it reappeared under the new name Gay, with in brackets “formerly Little Butch” and had a new owner, heterosexual porn king of Ribald fame, Bill Horne.[88]

Bill Munro makes a bold expansionary move with his fortnightly publication, Little Butch, but expansion fails and his publication is taken over and renamed Gay

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In the first issue of Gay magazine, Bill Munro, apparently facing difficulties, thanked the “beautiful big hetro baby” Ribald for helping out. [89] Horne had a history of helping gay porn publishers having previously printed and distributed William & John. In fact, just prior to William & John closing down, the title’s listed address was Horne’s Sussex Street office. After Horne took over with Gay magazine Munro remained its editor for just three editions published spasmodically in the second half of 1973 and a fourth early in 1974. He later lived in the United States where he worked as an architect before dying in New York in 1983 from an AIDS related illness.[90]

Twenty-seven year old Barry Lowe took over editing Gay from Munro after studying drama at NSW University where he had joined the campus gay lib group that he now describes as “very wanky and pretentious”. Despite his cynicism towards gay activism Lowe was committed to “putting political stuff into Gay, in between nude pictures of men”, even despite his boss Bill Horne’s lack of support for this content.[91] Lowe says Horne was only in gay publishing because he believed it was a profitable market about to “take off” and that most of the pictures and stories used in Gay were stolen from magazines subscribed to from overseas with a lot of material “pinched” from the American publication Fag Rag. Bill Horne was also very cautious about the possibility of police raids, Lowe recounts, and effectively barricaded his operation inside the Sussex Street office.

We were on the fourth and fifth floor of this old warehouse. You had to buzz to be allowed up because Bill Horne was terrified of police raids. We had wire bars around the stairs, so the police couldn’t burst up the stairs and get in. It was all locked so if there’d been a fire we were in real trouble. You had to buzz the receptionist for her to press the lift to get you up to the floor. [92]

When Lowe left Gay towards the end of 1975 Horne soon dropped much of the broader editorial and publishedGay as purely titillation and personal classifieds until 1991. In the early 1980s, he dipped his toe into the free gay newspaper market that

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was starting to appear in Sydney, briefly publishing Libertine and Oxford Weekender.[93]

The third important player in this 1970s porn mag market was Herd Publishing with the magazine Stallionappearing in April 1973. Ian Hartley worked for Herd in 1974 and says it was part of a larger business that owned sex shops in Sydney and published a series of heterosexual porn magazines. Hartley says the owners of Herd Publishing were the husband and wife team “Gus and Josie” and they would regularly suffer police raids on their sex shops and appear in current affairs programs.[94] Stallion was first published as a 12 page monthly tabloid newspaper, on sale for 30 cents. The first issue was titillating pictures and stories, along with advertising for sex shop businesses. New sections though were steadily added in subsequent editions. By issue nine, at the start of 1974, it changed format to an A4 magazine size and included news, book reviews, a venue guide and personal classifieds in addition to its porn.

The husband and wife team Gus and Rosie launched Stallion to join their stable of sex shops

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In the first half of 1974 Herd Publishing introduced changes to Stallion, reducing the sexually explicit content and launched a second gay publication titled Apollo that only lasted five issues. Apollo was deliberately raunchy and designed to attract a restricted classification with a naked man featured on the cover. While largely titillating content, it did include personal classifieds and a gay venue guide. This diversification of product was presumably designed in part to avoid a restricted classification for Stallion. Unfortunately it failed, certainly in Victoria, as both Apollo and Stallion were regularly classified as “restricted publications” in theVictorian Government Gazette.[95] In September that year, following a questionnaire seeking reader views,Stallion was renamed Gayzette and marketed as a fortnightly promising to be “lighter than ‘Stallion’, but newsier than ‘Apollo’”.[96] If this was a further strategy to avoid classification, it also failed as Gayzette too was regularly listed as a restricted publication.

Apollo magazine was published deliberately to attract a restricted classification

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The appointment by the start of 1974 of Martin Smith as Stallion’s editor no doubt influenced the publishing decisions. Politically motivated, Smith had been a member of Gay Liberation and later started the Jewish gay group, Chutzpah at the end of 1974. Journalist Jay Watchorn, who wrote for Stallion, described him as thin with “big, horn-rimmed glasses” that made him look like “a preacher”.[97] Smith had gone to school at Trinity Grammar in Summer Hill and in 1972 edited the Nepean Herald in Penrith. Later that year he was publicity director for the unsuccessful Liberal candidate for the Federal seat of Macquarie, Basil Genders. In 1973, Smith had a tilt himself and stood in December as an independent candidate for the New South Wales state seat of Waverley where he won 1.44 per cent of the primary vote. In 1990 Smith died from a heart attack, aged 58.[98]

Martin Smith being thrown out of an evangelical Mary Whitehouse rally in 1973 at Sydney Town Hall (Campaign December 1990)

At the start of 1975, Gayzette simply stopped coming out with no explanation in the final edition. Ian Hartley says Herd Publishing folded due to financial difficulties.

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Ironically the name Gayzette lived on as a column written by Smith in the mid 1970s for the independent straight weekly newspaper Nation Review.[99]

As can be seen from this discussion of porn mags in the early 1970s, they played an important role in building a positive gay identity for the gay men reading them. Beyond this they provided practical information in the form of venue guides and personal classifieds that allowed individuals to connect with each other and imagine their own place within a gay community. In notable cases, perhaps through the choice of editor, these publications provided other information, news and lifestyle articles, that further expanded the imaginary possibilities of a gay community for their readers.

While often alienated from the publishers of the activist press, the porn mags reflected not only their readers sexual desires, they also at times shared with the activists the aspiration for social change, most noticeably when they faced the censors’ wrath. In the next chapter we follow a further link between the media strands by introducing one of the smaller porn mag publishers from the 1970s, Peter Langford. He produced Australian Golden Boys in 1974 before taking up a job with gay nightclub entrepreneur Rod Stringer and became the first editor of the successful gay community building publication, Campaign magazine.

Peter Langford switched from publishing porn and joined forces with gay nightclub entrepreneurs to edit the community magazine, Campaign

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[56] Based on description of Munro in the article “Sir Frank goes Gay”, Stallion, No 9, p. 15. Also anonymous letter, received January 2011, responding to an article in the gay media about this research project; and photographs in Butch, Vol 1 No. 2&3, pp. 42-3.

[57] Butch, Vol 1 No 2&3, p. 42-3.

[58] Altman, The Homosexualization of America: The Americanization of the Homosexual, p. 90.

[59] Barbara Sullivan, The Politics of Sex – Prostitution and Pornography in Australia since 1945(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 84.

[60]Alasdair Foster, “Getting Physical,” OutRage, October 1988, pp. 15-18.

[61] Melbourne Truth, 14 June 1941, p. 1, cited in Wotherspoon, City of the Plain: History of a Gay Subculture, p. 85.

[62] Peter Coleman, Obscenity, Blasphemy, Sedition: 100 Years of Censorship in Australia (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1974), pp. 45-6, 63-4.

[63] Sullivan, The Politics of Sex – Prostitution and Pornography in Australia since 1945, p. 70.

[64] Ibid., p. 130. Also Coleman, Obscenity, Blasphemy, Sedition: 100 Years of Censorship in Australia, pp. 24-26.

[65] Sullivan, The Politics of Sex – Prostitution and Pornography in Australia since 1945, pp. 125-48. Queensland though stood alone, not joining the national regulatory system.

[66] Lex Watson spoke of this strategy during an informal discussion, December 2010.

[67] Ibid., pp. 11, 129. Also Freedman, ed., Intimate Matters, a History of Sexuality in America, pp. 327-30.

[68] Wotherspoon, City of the Plain: History of a Gay Subculture. p. 201.

[69] Streitmatter, Unspeakable: The Rise of the Gay & Lesbian Press in America, p. 96.

[70] Katherine Albury and Catharine Lumby Alan McKee, eds. The Porn Report (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2008), p. 85.

[71] Foster, “Getting Physical”, p.18.

[72] Joe Thomas, “Gay Male Pornography since Stonewall,” in Sex for Sale: Prostitution, Pornography and the Sex Industry, ed. Ronald Weitzer (Routledge, 2009), p. 61.

[73] Ibid., pp. 50, 62.

[74] El Alamein fountain story from informal discussion with Lex Watson.

[75] Mike Delaney, “Letters”, Camp Ink, July 1971, p. 15.

[76] “Editorial”, William & John, January 1972, p. 4.

[77] Advertisement for William & John in Mankind, No. 2, p. 98.

[78] Advertisement in Camp Ink, February 1972, p. 2.

[79] “Editorial”, William & John, Vol. 1 No. 5, p. 4.

[80] “Classifieds”, William & John, Vol. 1 No. 4, p. 64.

[81] “Editorial”, William & John, Vol. 1 No. 5, p. 4.

[82] Editorial, Mate, undated copy, probably early 1973, p. 3.

[83] Editorial, Mankind, No 3, undated but after 25 February 1973, which was the release date for MankindNo. 2 according to Mate magazine, p. 112. Most likely it appeared at the end of March, as it was claiming to now be monthly.

[84] From conversation with Delaney’s boy-friend at the time, Lloyd James.

[85] Advertisement in Camp Ink, January 1972, p. 2.

[86] Watson, “Judge Not Though, It Is Part of the History”, p. 23.

[87] Sue Wills “The Politics of Sexual Liberation”, PhD thesis, University of Sydney, 1981, p. 103.

[88] No contact has been made for this research with Bill Horne, or even verification that it was his real name. It may be a play on the word ‘horny’ as pseudonyms for the purpose of protecting anonymity were common at the time.

[89] Gay No. 1, June 21, 1973, p. 5.

[90] From an email received from PLWHA (Victoria) board member Neil Shepherd, January 2011.

[91] Interview with Barry Lowe.

[92] ibid.

[93] Tony Sarno, “A Golden Mile of Press Barons,” New Journalist, no. 41 September (1983)., pp. 16-19.

[94] Interview with Ian Hartley.

[95] Victorian Government Gazette, 19 June, 3 July, 14 August, 21 August, 11 September, 25 September, 16 October, 20 November, 27 November, 18 December 1974 and 5 February 1975

[96] “What’s Happening”, Gayzette, 5 September, 1974, p. 2.

[97] Interview with Kevin Randall. Jay Watchorn was in fact the secret pen name used by moonlighting Kevin Randall, who worked then as media liaison officer for the Deputy Leader of the Liberal Party, Phillip Lynch.

[98] Stewart Lawlor “The Strange World of Martin Smith” Campaign, December 1990 pp. 72-3.

[99] Wotherspoon, City of the Plain: History of a Gay Subculture, p. 188.