In Gay Print Culture, Juan Carlos Mezo González investigates the relationship between transnational gay liberation politics, periodicals, and images in Mexico, the United States, and Canada from the early 1970s through the mid-1990s. Mezo González examines the production, content, circulation, and reception of leading gay periodicals published in these countries, including community-based gay liberation publications and commercially oriented gay lifestyle and erotic magazines. He demonstrates how they aimed to visualize the political goals of gay liberation, particularly those concerning the liberation and celebration of homoerotic desires. Mezo González contends that visualizing these goals allowed activists, editors, publishers, and artists to foster the formation of gay communities and identities while advancing gay liberation movements at the local, national, and international levels. In so doing, he furthers understandings of the transnational nature of gay periodicals, the relationship between gay liberation politics and visual culture, and the existing tensions between the liberation of some and the oppression of others across the American continent.

Juan Carlos Mezo González is Assistant Professor in the Department of Humanities at Mount Royal University.

Acknowledgments  ix
Introduction  1
1. Periodicals, Coming Out, and the Visualization of Gay Liberation  23
2. Sexual Imagery, Transnational Communities, and the Politics of Visualization in The Body Politic  67
3. Liberationist Politics, Colonial Optics, and the Desire for Latin America in Gay Sunshine  103
4. Gay Masculinity and the Commodification of the Mexican Body in Macho Tips  141
5. The Gay Editorial Market and the Transnational Production of Racialized Desires  185
Conclusion  221
Notes  227
Bibliography  253
Index  269