For lovers of the male physique, TiminVermont.com is the gay Library of Congress.

by Onan the Vulgarian

When you think of adult websites, www.timinvermont.com is probably not one of the first that springs to mind. The eponymous Tim is Tim Wilbur, the one-man-band who owns, operates and updates the site. If you have the remotest interest in vintage physique magazines or any of the hundreds of slick j/o mags that inundated adult newsstands at the end of the 20th century, then timinvermont is a place you ought to know.

The front page is about as plain and bare-bones as it gets, consisting of the URL and four text links on a white background. Nary a single image. The links offer three options: fitness and weightlifting; vintage physique photography; and family genealogy.

I'll skip the lattermost. Tim says it's "just a hobby of mine placed online for family members and others interested in genealogy." It's a free part of the site. So is the fitness area, whose most recent update was in July 2003. It is primarily a long list of hyperlinks grouped into categories: General Fitness, Nutrition, Weightlifting, Supplement/Steroids, Newsgroups, Favorites and the like. If it's of interest to you, check it out, but that's not why we're here.

The other two links on the front page are what deserve your undivided attention. They both say "Vintage Physique Photography." One is the members' turnstile and the other has info for joining the site. That info includes some amazing statistics, and rather than belabor them, I'll just show them to you here.

I can't even imagine counting to 827,000, much less scanning that many images and uploading them to a server. When I asked Tim how many people worked for him scanning images, he told me, "I am the sole scanner, with the small exception of a few people who have shared magazines they already scanned."

The info page also shows four sample model photos, a list of studios represented, a list of magazines on the site, a handful of model biographies, titles of movies available for download or purchase and reference books. More esoteric categories include images that show studio imprints, logos and copyrights and rules for various physique contests. finally, there's a search engine, an "Updates" page that is updated daily and a site master index.

Five membership options are offered, starting at $7 for 7 days, nonrecurring, all the way up to one year, nonrecurring for $99. You will need a PayPal account or major credit card to join.

Tim launched the site in 2003, as a hobby, to showcase the magazines he collected. He says, "I have thousands of magazines stored in my basement in containers. At some point I will begin to sell, but not right now. Too many other projects going."

I asked whether there were magazines he would not post on his site:

"In the late 60s when nudes became legal, there were no laws regarding model age. This quickly changed, but not before several photographers published magazines with what is now considered to be underage kids. Examples would be Sennels, DOM (Guy Strait) and Lyric (Billy Byers). If a magazine contains a lot of these, I will not place it online."

That leaves plenty of other stuff — easily more than you could peruse in a lifetime. It's a magnificent archive that every scholar of gay history and make erotica should be aware of. In fact, it's the Gay Library of Congress.

February 2012