Bearing the Heft: Bulk Male Magazine and the Affective Refusal of Subcultural Identity in the Time of an Epidemic

To better understand discursive limitations regarding subjective identity, this thesis looks to Bulk Male Magazine, a groundbreaking fat-and-gay male erotica publication in print from 1991-2001 to illuminate a lateral mode of existence ample with potential, perhaps in the vein of utopian refusal. I argue that the magazine can be understood as a classified ad through its archival preservation in the GLBT Historical Center’s archives and its resonance in the work of artist James Unsworth. Following, I identify the magazine’s affective pull, which flattens space—physical, temporal and archival—to offer newer understandings of the embrace of normativity and assimilation of the men depicted therein: the fat-and-gay man or the ‘bear.’ Brushing up against this archive of physical and pictorial bodies in this way enables a rethinking of refusal and failure through a community of haptic affection mired in playfully campy dialectics and hegemonic discourses of pathology.