This book documents a moment in the history of American culture - a period in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s that gave birth to new notions of male beauty and desire, and to a new type of male icon. Long before Stonewall and the gay pride movement, there was a small group of men - both photographers and the models who sat for them - who helped pave the way for male sexual liberation. Led by the photographer George Platt Lynes, the painter Paul Cadmus, and the arts patron Lincoln Kirstein, this group shattered taboos surrounding the artistic presentation of the male figure.