MIKE ARLEN (Photographer of Male Models)

RICHARD BLACKBIRD

ROSS SANDERSON

STEVE STEWART & STEPHAN LEE

Mike Arlen is a London photographer, he began photographing male nudes in the late 1970’s and although not the first photographer of naked men he was the first person who didn’t hide behind the guise of health and bodybuilding. His determination to publish the male erection played an important part in the gay sexual liberation of Britain.

Mike Arlen first took up a camera when a photographer failed to show up for a shoot associated with a showbiz interview. Mike’s photographs of men in swimwear sold readily. Very soon he was asked by a German magazine editor to contribute male nudes, which were far more widely published there than in the UK. It’s not clear when he started publishing under his name Mike Arlen but it was about when he started contributing to British magazines for gay men.
This led to Mike Arlen’s Guys, a series of fifteen glossy magazines each featuring a number of well-endowed models. Mike Arlen’s models always looked like “Real Men”; he found them in pubs, many of them popular with soldiers, and from distributing his contact cards in newsagent’s windows and supermarket notice boards. It worked like this: he met you in a pub, asked if you were interested in doing some test shots and gave you a card. Flattered, and maybe intrigued, you phoned the number on the card and came along for five test shots, which Mike did for free, important in the days when film and printing was expensive.
Mike varied his locations, but they always looked real, as did the guys. He did shoots in homes, on the tube and he hired a London bus for one photo story which included a sequence where the conductor is telling off guys dressed as schoolboys for writing graffiti on the bus panels in felt pen. Mike stressed that all of his models were over the age of 21 years without exceptions. There were several shoots on farms, including farm animals.
Mike Arlen’s Guys featured well-endowed men as the main attraction. It was never a fetish magazine but as well as documenting the rapidly evolving fashions of the times, it titillated with glimpses of the fetishes of the time: white PE kit, white shorts, white briefs, rugger jockstraps, jeans and military uniforms. Bikers, punks and skinheads were peripheral; he didn’t feature many tattoos either. Other magazines by other photographers had their own territory: muscle men in Zipper, young guys in Vulcan etc although contributions by Mike Arlen often appeared in those magazines too. It was a small market but there was nothing else to educate or satisfy gay men whose only other outlets were the very few gay pubs or illegal cottaging and dangerous outdoor cruising.