Beefcake

Thom Fitzgerald's film is about the muscle magazines published in America in the 1950s. They were officially sold as health and bodybuilding publications, but their real buyers were gay men who had to stay hidden at the time. At the centre of it is Bob Mizer, who put out a magazine for close to forty years and made men's films without explicit content, running the business together with his mother. The film is not a straight documentary; it interleaves real interviews with dramatised scenes and at times deliberately leaves it unclear which is which. Its subject is less a magazine trade than how something forbidden went on existing in disguise. Daniel MacIvor is in the cast.