For gay men who came of age in the 1970s through the early 1990s, hiding the “International Male” catalog, which somehow seemed to magically appear in the family mailbox, became a rite of passage. “All Man: The International Male Story” examines the genesis of the catalog and its continuing cultural relevance — and the story told here winds up being more complex than it may at first appear.
Co-directors Bryan Darling and Jesse Finley Reed and writer Peter Jones manage to cover a lot of territory in a compact 83-minute running time, while striking the same balance between sexy and peculiar that makes the catalog such a hard-to-parse artifact of its era.
It all began in the head of Gene Burkard, interviewed here as an elderly man who recalls spending all night hiding under the table of a gay bar in order to avoid arrest. Burkard grew up in the post-war era of the novel and movie “The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit,” a time when men were expected to wear a sort of uniform and stick to a certain silhouette. “If you wore a blue shirt, there was something wrong,” says writer Christopher Harrity, one of many lively and provocative commentators here.
Things began to loosen up for Burkard by the time he lived in San Diego in the 1970s. A key moment came when he saw a medical undergarment called a suspensory in a store window and got the idea that if he made some small adjustments to it that it might make for a sexy pair of underwear for men. My own saved copy of the catalog from 1992 was still selling this model and calling it a Sport Strap. It still looks extremely sexy because it has skimpy straps in the front as well as the back, giving an effect that is almost like what a garter belt can be for a woman.
Burkard started sending out the catalog in the mid-’70s and got a big boost in sales when he put an ad in Playboy magazine. The documentary makes it clear that Burkard was not business-minded and was more into having fun and being creative, so he had key colleagues like Gloria Tomita to help with what soon became a thriving company.
International Male opened up brick-and-mortar stores, and we are told that 75% of the clientele were women (including, they say, Barbra Streisand) buying clothes to make their men look hot at the disco. Cosmopolitan editor Helen Gurley Brown is seen on “The Dick Cavett Show” saying that women will soon be looking at men as sex objects. Cavett reacts in a bluntly incredulous way, but the culture was changing.
Almost all of the models shot for the catalog were heterosexual, and some of these models are interviewed in “All Man” talking about how embarrassed they were to wear some of the more flamboyant and/or ridiculous clothing. The sexual tension of the catalog came from these very square-jawed, masculine-looking guys wearing very tight and brightly patterned fantasy clothing, and some of them have an expression on their faces that says, “How dare you see me as a sex object!” with some implied retribution in store for the viewer.
Matt Bomer’s narration in “All Man” leans heavily into the sexiness of this catalog fantasy world; he can get a lot of heat into words like “undressed.” But there is a great sadness to this story, too, because so many of the men who worked at the company died during the AIDS crisis. There comes a point when we just see photos of these men and their names. If this film has a flaw, it’s only that we aren’t able to hear from these guys about what it was like to work for the catalog.
In the midst of all the death around him, Burkard decided that he wasn’t enjoying his work anymore, and he eventually sold the catalog in 1987. There was an attempt in the early ’90s to hire heterosexual photographers, to pair the models with women and to tone down the clothes, so much so that by 2000 the owners actually contacted Burkard because they had lost their gay audience and wanted his help to get it back. (He rightly declined to aid in this effort.)
The International Male catalog doesn’t exist anymore, but just take a look at the styling of contemporary male stars like Lil Nas X and Timothée Chalamet, and it becomes clear that International Male did its work to move men away from that gray flannel suit and into the form-fitting, the outrageous, the fantastical and the colorful, a process precisely charted in this diverting and thoughtful documentary.
“All Man: The International Male Story” makes its world premiere at the 2022 Tribeca Film Festival.