by MATTHEW HAYS

Looking at the work of Alan B. Stone, the late physique and travel photographer who took thousands of photographs during the ’50s and ’60s, it’s almost impossible to believe the man ever inhabited a closet.

But as the new documentary from the Montreal filmmaking team Jean-François Monette and Philip Lewis indicates, despite the scantily-clad, muscled-up beefcakes who Stone so often focused on, the man lived a very discreet life. In their film, Eye on the Guy: Alan B. Stone and the Age of Beefcake, the filmmakers look back on Stone, his achievements, and even reconnect with a few of his models from the day.

Stone’s style was one born of repression: beefy men are flexing for the cameras, with skimpy bathing suits or underwear covering their crotches. It is now the stuff of cliché, but in the ’50s, when homosexuality was still in the criminal code and there was no such thing as a gay pride parade, these images filled “fitness” magazines and allowed gay men to connect under the radar.

Concordia film scholar Thomas Waugh, who appears in the documentary, has already expressed disappointment in it, lamenting its “formulaic seamlessness, its sanitized and sentimental, over-written and over-narrated treatment of what was after all a fundamentally subversive story of suburban subterfuge in the 1950s.” Waugh is suggesting that the essentially conservative form of bound-for-TV documentary is at odds with the subject matter in Eye on the Guy.

He has a point, but Eye on the Guy remains a crucial bit of lost history reclaimed, a valiant effort by the filmmakers to bring Stone’s legacy some much-needed attention. Indeed, the filmmakers may have felt constrained by the limitations of TV financiers, but Eye on the Guy is still essential viewing for photography and history buffs. n

Eye on the Guy: Alan B. Stone and the Age of Beefcake screens July 28 (French version at 8 p.m., English version at 9:30 p.m.) and Aug. 4 (English at 8 p.m., French at 9:30 p.m.), at Montreal’s Grande BibliothÈque (475 de Maisonneuve E.).

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