Midday Cowboy / 1970
Regency’s 1970 answer to Midnight Cowboy: denim, straw hats and boys holding up shop windows in broad daylight, out of a P.O. box in El Cajon.
1 in stock
Ships in plain outer packaging. $6 U.S. shipping, free over $100.
Vintage is final sale. Every mark we mention is in the photos.
Condition report
Good. This one has been around the block, with flaking in the cover sky and a well-handled back, but it is whole and the pages inside are sound. Every mark is in the photos.
Flaws notedCover wear, Stains or moisture marks, Creases
PagesNot fully verified
The story
Midday Cowboy came out of Regency Publishing Co. in El Cajon, a San Diego suburb, in 1970, and the title is a wink nobody at the newsstand would have missed: Midnight Cowboy had just made hustling, Times Square and a denim jacket the most talked-about things in American film. Regency answered with daylight, sidewalks and boys in jeans leaning on shop windows, a street-cruising fantasy shot outdoors in plain view.
The masthead does its legal homework in small type, promising that every photograph was posed by professional models, and the cover is stamped Adults Only. That is what selling men to men looked like in 1970, a year after Stonewall and just as the line between physique pictorial and open gay erotica was being redrawn by the courts and the market at the same time.
Catalog facts
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Why it matters
A small California publisher riding the Midnight Cowboy moment to sell the denim-and-hat fantasy to gay men in 1970, right at the turn from physique coyness to open desire.
The copy in hand
What we checked before listing it.
Good. This one has been around the block, with flaking in the cover sky and a well-handled back, but it is whole and the pages inside are sound. Every mark is in the photos.
Visible in the photos.
Noted in the listing.
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