For those of us who grew up before the internet, shopping catalogs were about much more than shopping.

The Sears and Roebuck catalog and the JCPenney catalog arrived at our homes several times a year, filled with everything from tools and appliances to school clothes and Christmas gifts. They were meant to help families decide what to buy.

For some of us, however, they offered something we didn’t fully understand at the time.

The men’s underwear section.

I suspect I’m far from the only gay man who spent a little longer flipping through those pages than was strictly necessary. There they were: page after page of handsome men modeling briefs, boxers, tank tops, and undershirts. They smiled confidently into the camera, athletic and fit, showing just enough skin to capture a teenage boy’s attention.

At the time, I probably told myself I admired their physiques because I wanted to look like them.

Looking back, I know that wasn’t the whole story.

I wasn’t really interested in whether the underwear was made by Hanes, Jockey, Fruit of the Loom, or BVD.

I was interested in the men wearing it.

The experience didn’t end when the catalogs were put away.

Trips to the department store offered another opportunity. Growing up in Alabama, that usually meant Gayfers or Parisians. Walking through the men’s department almost inevitably meant passing the underwear aisle. Boxes lined the shelves with photographs of smiling models wearing the latest briefs or boxer briefs. Hanging displays featured larger promotional photographs, and every brand seemed determined to convince shoppers that buying their underwear was somehow the key to looking like the handsome man on the package.

I never lingered very long.

I was terrified someone might notice me looking too closely and somehow think I was gay. So my glances were brief—a quick look at one box, then another, before pretending to be interested in something else. Looking back, it’s funny to think I believed anyone was paying that much attention to me, but when you’re a closeted teenager, that’s how fear works.

I almost always shopped with Mama, never with both of my parents. As I got older, she trusted me enough to wander off into the boys’ or men’s department while she shopped elsewhere. Those few minutes alone felt like a small freedom. I could spend just a little more time in the underwear aisle, picking up one package and then another, pretending to compare brands when I was really getting a closer look at the model on the front.

Of course, I couldn’t have explained why.

I wasn’t consciously searching for attractive men.

Or perhaps I was—I just didn’t have the words to admit it, even to myself.

As I got older, the catalogs evolved along with me.

Eventually I discovered International Male.

Unlike Sears or JCPenney, International Male wasn’t trying to sell everyday basics to the average American family. It specialized in fashion that was bold, stylish, and unapologetically sexy. The models were more glamorous, the photography more dramatic, and the clothing… well, sometimes there wasn’t much of it.

Then came Undergear.

Although it marketed underwear, swimwear, athletic clothing, and casual wear, everyone knew the models were just as much a part of the appeal as the products themselves. The photography celebrated the male physique in ways that mainstream department store catalogs rarely did. It still wasn’t pornography, but it certainly wasn’t pretending the models were incidental either.

By the late 1980s and into the 1990s, even mainstream advertising had changed.

Calvin Klein transformed men’s underwear advertising into something far more than product photography. Athletic young men became the centerpiece of campaigns that celebrated confidence, sexuality, and the male physique. Tom Hintnaus posed atop a rooftop overlooking Santorini, and a few years later Mark Wahlberg’s famous campaigns became nearly impossible to escape. Imagine walking through Times Square and looking up to see a larger-than-life Mark Wahlberg towering above the street in nothing but a pair of Calvin Klein briefs. Underwear advertising had become a cultural phenomenon, and department stores suddenly displayed enormous posters of impossibly fit men, making the underwear aisle even more difficult for a young gay man to walk through without lingering a little longer than he intended.

Then there was A&F Quarterly.

Published by Abercrombie & Fitch beginning in the late 1990s, it hardly resembled a traditional catalog at all. Part fashion magazine, part travel journal, and part photography book, it was filled with Bruce Weber’s evocative images of beautiful young men and women. Officially, it existed to sell clothing. Unofficially, many people looked forward to each new issue as much for the photography as for the merchandise. Like so much of what had come before, it celebrated youthful beauty while carefully remaining on the respectable side of what mainstream retailers considered acceptable.

Looking back, it’s fascinating to see how the presentation of the male body evolved. The wholesome Sears and JCPenney underwear models of my childhood gradually gave way to fashion photography that was increasingly artistic, increasingly sensual, and increasingly aware that beautiful men could sell just about anything. The catalogs evolved, but so did the culture.

Today, if a teenager wants to see handsome men in their underwear, he can find thousands of images within seconds on his phone.

My generation had to wait for the mail.

Or hope that Mama needed to stop by Gayfers.

Those catalogs were never intended to become part of anyone’s coming-out story.

Yet I suspect they played that role for far more gay men than anyone ever realized.

Sometimes our first crushes weren’t classmates, movie stars, or musicians.

Sometimes they were the smiling guy modeling briefs on page 487 of the Sears catalog.

And somehow, that was enough to make us turn the page just a little more slowly.

I also can’t help but smile at the irony.

As a teenager, I was convinced that if I looked at those underwear boxes for even a few seconds too long, someone would somehow know my secret. I was so careful to keep my glances brief, convinced that my eyes would betray me.

Today, I’m writing an entire blog post about it.

Maybe that’s the greatest difference of all—not that the catalogs have disappeared, but that I no longer have to pretend I was only looking at the underwear. 

I felt like I should add the bonus picture below, because of all the CK models, Cooper Koch might be my favorite.

*Rusty Joiner was born in Montgomery, Alabama, and I was obsessed with him for a while.

For much of the twentieth century, Life magazine wasn’t just another magazine. It was America’s photo album.

Through its pages, readers witnessed wars and weddings, presidential campaigns and baseball championships, scientific discoveries and everyday life. Its photographers documented the world with an honesty that made readers feel as though they were standing in the middle of history rather than merely reading about it. Long before television became the dominant medium, Life brought Americans behind the scenes of history through photographs that were often as memorable as the events themselves.

Life magazine was largely before my time. By the time I was growing up in Alabama, its golden age had already passed. But as someone who has always loved history, I eventually found myself exploring old issues in libraries, museum collections, and, years later, in digital archives. I was fascinated by the stories and the photography, but every now and then I would come across something unexpected.

Unlike fitness magazines or bodybuilding publications, Life never set out to celebrate the male physique. It wasn’t selling an ideal body or encouraging readers to spend hours in the gym. If a photograph included a shirtless or nude man, it wasn’t because the editors were trying to be provocative. It was because that was the story unfolding before the camera.

That distinction made all the difference.

One of the places Life most frequently presented the male body was through sports. Before television routinely took viewers into locker rooms and behind the scenes, Life photographers did exactly that. They followed athletes beyond the playing field, documenting the moments before and after competition that most fans never saw.

One of my favorite examples is Life‘s coverage of athletes. Rather than stopping with the final out, the photographers captured the celebration in the clubhouse. Players laughed, embraced, showered, and celebrated exactly as victorious athletes do. The camera wasn’t creating glamour photographs. It was preserving history.

The same approach appeared in the magazine’s coverage of the Yale swim team. Swimmers naturally spent much of their lives wearing very little, and Life photographed them without embarrassment or sensationalism. Coverage of the Cincinnati Reds during spring training in Florida in 1939, Purdue football players in their locker room in 1954, hockey star Bobby Hull, pitcher Karl Spooner, Red Sox player Joe Albanese, and jockey Raymond York after riding Determine to victory in the 1954 Kentucky Derby all reflected the same philosophy. The photographers followed the story wherever it led, even if that meant photographing athletes changing clothes, preparing for competition, or relaxing afterward.

To the editors, these were simply honest moments of athletic life.

To me, they became something more.

War photography offered another window into everyday masculinity. During World War II, Life published countless photographs of American servicemen. Soldiers bathed in rivers, shaved together, washed from steel helmets, changed uniforms, and tried to find moments of normalcy amid extraordinary circumstances. They were often shirtless, and sometimes completely nude, because that was simply the reality of military life.

These photographs weren’t intended to highlight the male body. They were meant to show the daily lives of ordinary men serving their country. Yet, in doing so, they also captured moments of vulnerability and camaraderie that rarely appeared elsewhere in mainstream American publications.

The same honesty extended beyond sports and war. One of Life‘s greatest strengths was documenting ordinary Americans. Farmers worked under the hot summer sun with their shirts off. Construction workers, fishermen, ranchers, and laborers appeared exactly as they were. The magazine wasn’t trying to create idealized images of masculinity. It simply recorded everyday life.

Looking back now, that’s what makes these photographs so remarkable.

The male body wasn’t hidden.

It wasn’t sensationalized.

It simply existed.

As I explored those old issues of Life, I began to notice something that had probably never crossed the minds of the magazine’s editors. Mixed among the stories of war, sports, politics, and everyday life were photographs that quietly celebrated the male body—not as fantasy or glamour, but simply as part of life itself.

I wasn’t reading Life hoping to find pictures of shirtless or nude men. Most issues contained nothing of the sort. But every so often, there would be a photograph that quietly caught my attention. At first, I probably would have said I admired the composition, the lighting, or the historical significance of the image.

The truth was more complicated than that.

What I was really looking for, though I didn’t yet fully understand it, wasn’t nudity.

It was recognition.

Growing up, there were very few openly gay people in my world. There were no gay characters on television that I identified with, no openly gay teachers or neighbors, and certainly no one talking openly about sexuality in the small Southern community where I was raised. I didn’t have the language to describe what I was feeling, much less anyone with whom I felt comfortable discussing it.

So I found reflections wherever they appeared.

Sometimes that reflection came from a photograph of a victorious baseball team celebrating in the clubhouse.

Sometimes it came from swimmers preparing for practice.

Sometimes it came from soldiers bathing in a river halfway around the world.

None of those photographs were intended for someone like me.

Yet they reminded me, quietly and without judgment, that the male body wasn’t something shameful. It could be strong, vulnerable, athletic, ordinary, and beautiful—all at the same time.

That was an important lesson, even if I didn’t recognize it at the time.

Today, images of the male body are everywhere. Social media, streaming services, advertising, and the internet have made them almost impossible to avoid. Young gay men have access to representations of masculinity that my generation could scarcely have imagined.

In many ways, that’s a wonderful thing.

But I also think there was something uniquely powerful about discovering these images unexpectedly, tucked away in the pages of a magazine whose purpose was to document history rather than create fantasy.

The photographs in Life weren’t asking to be admired.

They weren’t selling underwear, gym memberships, or protein powder.

They weren’t trying to be erotic.

They simply documented life.

Ironically, that honesty made them even more meaningful.

I doubt the editors of Life ever imagined their magazine would become part of anyone’s journey toward understanding his sexuality—especially decades after many of those issues were first appeared on newsstands.

Yet I suspect it did.

Long after those photographs were taken, they continued to speak to new generations of readers who saw something the photographers never intended to capture. History has a way of doing that. Sometimes the meaning of an image changes with time—not because the image changes, but because we do.