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By Damion Matthews

April 29, 2000 |  My religious conversion to the muscle-magazine mind-set occurred in the middle of an Albertsons supermarket 10 months ago.

I had usually ignored men's magazines, but as I perused the magazine shelves, this one had an irresistible allure. Its cover featured a healthy, bright-faced youth, wearing nothing but a Speedo -- and a nicely bulging Speedo at that. He was shown emerging from a pool with a look on his face of absolute joy. Water dripped down his glorious, muscular body. He seemed to me the most gorgeous specimen of masculinity I had ever seen. Sort of like a young Tom Cruise, but sexier and with a less prominent nose. I quickly looked to see if the magazine's contents lived up to its cover. Indeed, they did. Page after page of male heat sizzled inside. Posing, sweating, getting physical. Men! Men! Men! I could feel my temperature rise.

Had I found the magazine Burn! Real Fitness for Real Men at a gay bookstore I wouldn't have been surprised, but at the local grocery market? That bastion of homogenous, middle-class, suburban heterosexual culture? What would Dr. Laura say? Though Burn! was disguised as just another fitness magazine, I blushed as I handed it to the clerk at the checkout stand. I knew it was much more than a fitness magazine.

It was pornographic, and it turned me on.

Available at most any newsstand, muscle magazines are homoerotic pornography for the masses. Their appeal seems to cross sexual orientations. Straight, gay and bisexual men have been known to enjoy them. In their pages, they eroticize both the flesh and the culture of men. To read them is to be sexually seduced into a fraternity to which all men are invited. They unite their readers in a kind of sexually charged adulation of masculinity. To the cult of testosterone in America, they have an almost biblical authority. They give direction, in the most literal ways, on how to be the ideal man: "Do this exercise, take this supplement, play this sport and you will be just like the men in these pages."

When Richard Perez-Feria founded Gym and Burn! magazines in 1998 he believed there was a void in the so-called men's fitness market for publications dealing with the lifestyle of men who enjoy working out. His instinct proved correct. They became huge hits. This month, approximately 300,000 copies of each title were distributed to newsstands nationwide. While the Audit Bureau of Circulations has not released paid circulation numbers for the magazines, Perez-Feria says they have averaged a 35 percent sell-through on newsstands. And Muscle & Fitness boasts a paid circulation of almost 500,000.

Having sold the magazines to a publisher a few months ago, Perez-Feria will soon launch a similar one called Tough, fully expecting it to be a hit as well. He says he wasn't surprised by the success. Instead, "I was surprised at the intensity and the quickness ... and near fanaticism which I got."

He received thousands of positive e-mails, letters and phone calls from readers. "There was such passion behind it. The readers were so excited about the magazine. The intensity ... and devotion to the magazine was incredible."

Several of these letters appeared in the magazines. The writers represented a wide spectrum of masculinity, from married men in the suburbs to college frat boys to guys who are openly gay. Someone wrote in to admit that the models were so hot that both he and his wife were turned on by them.

While at first I thought this to be a new trend -- fitness magazines doubling as homoerotic porn -- I soon discovered it's an old practice that's undergoing an intense revival.

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