Turning the Calendar

"January" is a blond relaxing in the buff in a library. "April" is a slightly paunchy brunet at the seashore, bare backside to the camera and eye to a yard-long telescope. "November" is a handsome, dark-haired thing reclining across a rumpled bed. The other months, too, are represented by models with well-turned thighs, flashing eyes, bare chests and other features familiar to devotees of calendar art. But this calendar, the Ladies Home Companion 1973, is really something else. All the nudes are male.

The first nude calendar designed for women was conceived by two California women, Freelance Photographer Judy Horst and Advertising Production Manager Christine Hopf. Impressed by the frenzied reaction to Actor Burt Reynolds' nude portrait in the April issue of Cosmopolitan, they formed Bo-Tree Productions (named for the tree under which Buddha sat when he received enlightenment), and with the help of friends began recruiting comely male sex objects.

That task was not always easy. "Some of the guys were reluctant to pose," says Carol Fulton, 25, who took eight of the twelve Companion pictures. "They didn't know if it was going to be pornographic or something." To ease their fears Photographer Fulton showed them a mock-up of the calendar, which is printed in Victorian sepia tones and discreetly cloaks parts of the anatomy in shadows or hides them behind strategically placed hardware.

Scheduled to go on sale in September for $4.50, the Companion has apparently lifted the spirits--and egos--of some of the men who posed for it. Ex-Playboy Photographer Jeffrey Cohen has rigged his telephone with an answering device that announces that yes, he is Mr. March. Village Voice Columnist Howard Smith, who appears as Mr. November, wrote a column about his role. "I loved it. Such physical attention was a kind of gentle titillation. Being such a pure object as a photographed nude is a strange pleasure that shouldn't be monopolized by women only."

Also cashing in on the developing market in beefcake is the San Francisco firm of Men For Women, which is selling 18-in. by 28-in. posters of nude men in classic pinup poses for $2 each. The models come in several racial types and varying degrees of hirsuteness. MFW claims that they all have one thing in common: their "eyes say, 'I care about you.' "

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