covert textual references to homosexuality were rare in the early years of physique magazines. One early example cited by Kenneth Krauss is a 1956 announcement of the marriage of famed physique model Glenn Bishop in Body Beautiful, which joked that "The Broken Hearts chapter of the GLENN BISHOP FAN CLUB will sponsor a mass drowning at Fire Island"—many gay men in the 1950s would have understood this as an inside joke, given the status of Fire Island as a gay hotspot. As time went on, some magazines became more daring in their willingness to discuss homosexuality directly. The July 1959 issue of VIM included an article titled "Males, Morals & Mores" which offered a measured defense of homosexuality as merely "different", and quoted Alfred Kinsey's study of male sexuality. The article warned that homosexuals and readers of physique magazines were being unfairly scapegoated as causes of juvenile delinquency. Drum, published by Clark Polak from 1964 was an example of a hybrid format combining physique photography with editorial content devoted to the homophile movement. The circulation of overtly gay magazines increased tenfold between 1965 and 1969. The increased acceptability of such publications contributed to the extinction of the physique magazine. Format Early physique magazines were digest size. Eventually large-format titles would appear, some with full color. Among the earliest were the Joe Weider magazines Young Physique and Demi-Gods, debuting in 1958 and 1961, respectively. Circulation and scale At their height of popularity, physique magazines were a major industry. It has been estimated that their circulation exceeded the serious political magazines dedicated to the homophile movement (what would now be called the gay rights movement) such as ONE magazine and the Mattachine Review, by a factor of ten, or even one hundred. One factor affecting this discrepancy was that homophile publications faced greater barriers to being carried by newsstands. In 1964, a large newsstand in Dayton, Ohio was found to be selling about twenty different physique magazines, each of which would likely have sold around twenty to forty thousand copies per issue. One publisher estimated a total annual circulation, across all physique magazines, of nine million in the United States. The United States led the world in physique photography, and American physique magazines were consumed internationally, but other countries also developed their own local titles such as: Male Model Monthly in the UK; Muscle Builder in Australia; Sciences culturistes, La culture physique,