Amid the government documents he stumbled upon at the home of an activist, he also found Drum, Physique Pictorial, and MANual - magazines that unabashedly celebrated the statuesque beauty of the male body. Johnson was conducting research on what would become his book Lavender Scare (now a documentary film ), a history of the conflict between the US government and its homosexual population, which was considered as dangerous a threat to national security as communists.
Johnson’s Buying Gayīack in the 1990s, historian David K.