Richard Hawkins wrote the following piece in Tom of Finland Foundation’s 1997 Spring Dispatch.

Richard Hawkins, a contemporary artist with a special affinity for the physique artists and photographers of the ’50s and ’60s, is creating a website and eventually a book on the life and work of George Quaintance.

Right from the cover of the first issue of the first muscle magazine, Physique Pictorial, in 1950, George Quaintance was the advance guard of gay erotic art in the ’50s. His paintings portrayed a homoerotic Southwest from such a campy, even faggoty, point of view they were a leap forward for an underground gay culture that was just beginning to awaken. His sexy males were almost overtly subversive of the muscle magazines’ obligatory heterosexual facade, but not enough to keep them from frequently publishing his work.

The photograph below of young Quaintance, from his own scrapbooks, shows him as a lithe, stylish youth of the late Teens and Roaring Twenties. However, anyone who remembers Quaintance from the ’50s knew him as the muscular blond seen below. Whether these photos betray an early Valentino-esque affectation or a later “gentlemen prefer blondes” coloring, it may, in the end, be too late to tell.