Vintage Gay Ephemera, A Collectors Guide
I get a lot of questions about how I have managed to collect so many gay magazines and books on a relatively small budget. Personally, I have just found myself in the exact right place and time to make it happen. A lot of my books were found at local gay bookstores, thrift stores, and the now closed The and thrift stores which San Francisco used to have in abundance. A lot of my magazines came from The Magazine which was a massive used gay magazine store that closed shortly after one of the owners passed away. It is now The Bob Mizer Museum, which I highly recommend visiting if you ever get the chance. But without making this too long, here is a list of where you can buy, see, or download vintage gay magazines and books.
Where to Buy books and magazines:
AutoErotica - 4077A 18th Street, San Francisco, CA 94114
Amazing store with thousands of vintage gay magazines from the 50's to the 2000's. They also have lots of rare gay books and generally sell everything for way cheaper than online stores would. (Be polite to the owner or else.
Fabulosa Books - 489 Castro Street, San Francisco, CA 94114
Also in the Castro, this gay-owned bookstore has a massive selection of modern gay books of all kinds along with with a fairly impressive collection rare gay books and magazines.
This is a very easy one, but I ton of my magazines and books come from Ebay. If you're looking for something specific I recommend saving a search and making it a habit of searching the same search terms on a weekly basis. it the digital version of hunting at a thrift store for a good deal.
This site was created a a response to Ebay "banning" the sale of adult material on their website a few years ago. It works essentially like Ebay and it allows the seller to show the uncensored images which helps you get a better idea of what you're buying.
Tom of Finland Store aka CultureEdit
The Tom of Finland store has a large collection of modern gay erotic books and magazines for sale along with alot of physique era magazines. Notably they have too many fucking Physique Pictorials so they regularly have them of sale for $7 each!
This on is a long shot, but I have a bunch of saved searched for: gay art, gay magazines, gay books, etc. The type of people that have alot of vintage gay stuff to sell are usually older gay men and they still prefer to use Craigslist or even sometimes FB marketplace. I once got like 250 In Touch for Men magazines for virtually nothing from a Craigslist listing.
The Bob Mizer Foundation - Modern Physique Pictorials
The Bob Mizer Foundation has been publishing new editions of Physique Pictorials. These magazines focus mainly on modern queer erotic photography , BUT they always feature a few, never before published Bob Mizer images or from other physique era photographers.
Where to View or Download Books and Magazines:
Lavender Zines is a publicly accessible archive of queer magazines and ephemera from the 1960's. The magazines are not for sell, but they are publicly accessible. They notably have a large collection of drag and trans magazines from the 1960's as well.
I am not the first person to post here about Cowboy Frank. This is personal site where he posts all about his life and also uploaded tons of his own scans of Drummer, Honcho, Mandate, and Advocate Men, all available to view for free.
It is hard to use the search function her but there are quite a few random gay magazines available on here. Notably someone uploaded a massive collection of Honcho and Drummer magazines as PDFs. which can be viewed or downloaded for free.
Adonis Male is a gay forum site where men talk about all things gay and erotic. This site requires a much bigger commitment. You have to register an account and make at least 5 comments before you are allowed access to he full site. Once you do that you will be allowed to download up to three files a day. You can sign up for a membership for about $13 a month with will allow you to download 12 files a day. This site has over 7,000 scanned gay magazines . They are not well organized by any means.
I will do my best to update this post if I learn of any other resources.
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