The 1980s Art Director for International Male Tells All...
The 1980s Art Director for International Male Tells All...
The lovely Dennis Mori insists that nobody at IM in the 1980s was trying to make a "gay" catalog...no matter how many of us closeted teens hid it under our beds.
Happy New Year, readers! I am really hoping for as happy and healthy a 2022 for all of you as is humanly possible in such crazy times. I also hope to have so many delicious interviews and other items for you in 2022, so please tell friends about The Caftan Chronicles via word of mouth or social media to help me grow the subscription base. By the way—don’t you love the new logo image that was designed for me by my talented illustrator friend Anthony Ernest Kieren? I do!
Okay, now…let me just say I died when I learned that sometime this year, we will be treated to a whole documentary about the legendary International Male catalog, which was the closest thing many of us closeted kids could get to porn—or at least Playgirl—from the mid-70s, when San Diego’s Gene Burkard debuted it, to 2007, when its by-then longtime owner Hanover Direct morphed it into the Undergear brand and it all but disappeared. When I was in high school in the 1980s, the catalogs would mysteriously come to our house in suburban Boston—and then just as mysteriously disappear, not between my mattress and box spring (my mother was an obsessive cleaner), but—how gay is this?—into the jacket for my Angela Lansbury Mame soundtrack in my record box! The makers of the doc, All Man, for which you can watch the trailer and peruse the incredible Instagram here, even sent me a PDF of the entire Summer 1986 catalog—whose models became my secret lovers and fantasies. The pang of erotic recognition as I e-flipped through it was so strong that I almost cried—like Proust recalling his madeleine. How I had missed those beautiful men!
Sadly, Burkard died at 90 of COVID in late 2020. But, with extreme generosity, the filmmaking team put me in touch with the lovely and hilarious Dennis Mori, who was the catalog’s art director from 1983-1989. We had the most amazing chat, which I am so excited to share with you, along with a treasure trove of photos. International Male is the kind of gay history I love—something that was so seemingly trivial and ephemeral that you forget all about it…but when you revisit it years later, you realize how profoundly formative it was for you and how much it shaped our ideas of both gay beauty (sadly almost 100% white at the time) and style. I’ve had this conversation about IM with so many gay men roughly my age—we all jerked off to it in secret!—so to have this opportunity to talk to Dennis was beyond gold.
So here we go. I wanna say one more time how much I appreciate the support and love from all of you for Caftan so far. Finding conversations like this one with Dennis only want to make me dig deeper to find gay men “of a certain age” who have remarkable stories to tell. Dennis could not put the mission of this project of mine more succinctly—or movingly—than he does at the end of our chat.
Tim: Dennis, I am so excited to talk to you. I'm sure you've heard this before, but as a closeted teen in the 1980s, I used to hide copies of International Male in my room and, uh, well I'm sure you can guess what I did with them. Particularly the Spring 1986 issue with dreamboat Robert Goold on the cover was my portal to all sorts of dirty dreams.
But they also displayed such incredible male beauty in a way that was so rare then.
Dennis: If I had a dime for every time someone told me that. Whenever I tell people I worked at IM, they say, "I didn't even know how you knew to send it to me! Did you have some sort of gay radar?" But in fact we were doing blind mailings.
Tim: I assumed you bought mailing lists from other publications. Like, in high school, I had subscriptions to Spin, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, GQ...that would make sense, right?
Dennis: Yes that, and they'd also put ads in the back of GQ or Playboy for the Jock Sock or the Buns underwear. Those people would order and then they'd go on the mailing list. A lot of gay men told me that the catalog would come to their dad and their mom would be shocked and say to the dad, "Are you hiding something from me?"
Tim: Haha, yes indeed. So let's get some bio on you.
Dennis: I turned 65 last July. I live in Cathedral City right next to Palm Springs. I've been with my partner, Bruce Larson, for 23 years. We married in 2015 when it became federally legal. I'm currently a communications manager for a country club; I do all their graphics and social media and website.
My whole career from the age of 16, except for my six years as senior art director at IM, has been visual display merchandising. I was also a display manager at Macy's, JCPenney, the Sharper Image. The 20 years prior to recent years I was visual manager at the Navy Exchange stores on the Navy bases around the world. They're a cross between Macy's and Target, everything from shampoo to clothes to fine jewelry.
Tim: Wow, I had no idea that the military had its own department stores! Where were you born?
Dennis: In Chicago in 1956. Italian on both sides. We were there until I was 12, then moved to a tiny town in Michigan where we had a little farm with cows, pigs and chicken.
Tim: What were you like as a kid?
Dennis: A crazy dancer! Dancing, laughing and having fun. My mom and aunts were like comedians. I actually had an aunt who carried rubber chickens in her purse.
Tim: When did you know you were gay?
Dennis: Oh, God—eight or nine? Once I was in middle school, I decided that, since I was gay, the best thing I could do was to educated myself, so I went to the library and looked up "homosexuality," read all the books and magazines about it that I could. I remember reading something saying that Phil Silvers was a homosexual. I decided that if I ever needed to talk about being gay to anyone, I wanted to be armed with information. But honestly my family, being Italian, was so loving and wonderful. They celebrated my differentness. "He likes to dress nicely and he's such a good dancer." I went into retail at 16!
So when I came out around 18 in the mid-1970s, it was hell for two weeks—but then my parents told everyone in the family and even though they didn't talk about it, everyone was supportive. I remember going to Christmas in my grandmother's finished basement right after everyone found out. I thought it was going to be weird, but it was joyous. Everyone grabbed me and hugged me—aunts, uncles, cousins. Exactly what you'd read in a book about a happy ending. And they are still supportive to this day. Of course I had dozens of friends who had horrible comings-out—thrown out of their family and never spoke to them again until they were dying of AIDS. So I had some guilt actually about having a happy coming-out. That was around when I graduated from high school in 1974.
Tim: It's really nice to hear, actually. So tell us briefly about your life between 1974 and 1983, when you go to work for IM.
Dennis: I went to a small college in Michigan and within two weeks I'd met the gay theater people. All these friends later moved to San Diego and they told me to come out, so I did, and I knew I was going to move there, even though no one in my family had ever moved away. But I arrived in San Diego on Mother's Day 1979 and got a job doing displays at a high-end clothing store. The gay scene was phenomenal. At that time, someone told me, about 5,000 people a week were moving to San Diego. There were tons of gay bars, churches, restaurants.
The wild part is, I was 21 and intended to have fun being single, but two weeks later, I ended up with the first love of my life, George Cloen, and we were together 20 years. He actually died recently of COVID at 70 years old. He was five years older than me.
Tim: Oh, I'm so sorry to hear that. What was the gay scene in San Diego like at that time?
Dennis: We marched a lot in protests for gay rights. Otherwise, everyone was a clone. There were different looks. One would be Converse high-tops in white or black, or maybe black Army boots, with black button-fly Levi's—absolutely no other jeans—with maybe a small cuff, a cloth belt with that metal buckle you slid the belt through, and either an Izod or a Polo, with the collar up if you were seriously affected. Or maybe a black Tshirt or tank top for an edgier look.
Tim: What was your favorite club?
Dennis: It was called West Coast Production Company, WCPC. Every bar was painted black and smelled like someone peed in the corner. WCPC had a giant mirrored cowboy hat hanging over the dance floor instead of a disco ball.
Tim: What was the typical decor in a gay guy's place?
Dennis: Baskets on the wall! And posters of, like Erte or Gauguin from a museum. A lot of rattan furniture and a white linen couch, and track lighting in every room.
Tim: That sounds very Southern California. And can I ask you when AIDS started filtering into your life?
Dennis: It got really bad for me in 1984. At first you hear of people who've died, but nobody in your circle. Then you see people at a bar and you can't say, "You look great, did you lose weight?" anymore. Then "Look at that guy—he's still coming to the bar even though he has KS lesions." And then it was like bombs dropping closer and closer. Right before I went to IM I worked at I. Magnin. There was this big old queen whom I got along famously with, and George and I often hung out with him and his younger boyfriend. Then he got AIDS. It wasn't too bad for a while, then people at IM started getting it.
Tim: So yes, let's backtrack to 1983 and how you end up at IM.
Dennis: A man named Robert Rogers—with whom I got back in touch recently through Facebook—hired me to be the assistant manager of the IM store on Midway Drive.
