It’s so deceptively simple at first glance that you probably won’t notice Pinups is a quiet revolution. For decades, there have been magazines celebrating the sex appeal of men outside the mainstream gay physical ideal, through sub-culture publications like Bear, 100% Beef, and most recently the ultra-hip Butt magazine. The idea of hirsute, chubby, or bearded men being attractive is nothing new– but Pinups is unique in presenting its subjects as plainly erotic, without the trappings that come along with qualifying them (or the magazine itself) as “bear,” or “leather,” or even “gay”.

Schulz has been publishing Pinups through a Brooklyn mom-and-pop print shop since April of last year. Currently preparing for the fifth issue’s release (March 9th), he has recently upgraded to a full-service zine publisher. He’s also mixing up the layout by throwing in bonus single-page photos between the abstract puzzle-piece pages. The origami-esque complexity and erotic content of Pinups stands in stark contrast to Schulz’s day job as graphic designer for the website of a children’s book publisher (recalling shades of my favorite Swedish porn-funkster/award-winning children’s artist, Tom Zacharias).

Schulz’s aesthetic is a carefully cultivated one: his Myspace page lists Fassbinder, Yoko Ono, and Dutch design firm Experimental Jetset as a few of his heroes. I thought there might be some connection between his work and the art-porn films of 70’s filmmaker Fred Halsted, but it turned out to be still photography and magazines from that decade that inspired him to create Pinups. “Like After Dark, which is not a porn– but it’s kind of a great magazine,” he told me. “It was out of New York in the 70s. There were articles about actors, and it was very gay–but it never really proclaimed to be gay.”

Peter Saville’s album covers are another important point of reference for Schulz– especially the immortal design for Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures (which, he says, “doesn’t work as well on a t-shirt”). As much as he may appreciate Joy Division, however, Schulz had no desire to watch Anton Corbijn’s recent Ian Curtis biopic, Control. “I did not see that movie. I heard that he’s wearing American Apparel underwear in one scene, and that really upset me. That really pisses me off. Cause I go out of my way to eliminate those sort of references–obviously, the models that I use have certain piercings or tattoos that are sort of giveaways that it’s a contemporary photo, but come on… you’re doing a period-specific film that takes place in the late 70s–and you’re wearing American Apparel? Just not cool.”

It’s hard to argue that the formerly chic retro-influenced basics brand hasn’t become oversaturated to the point of self-parody. “The interesting thing is, I kind of like the aesthetic of American Apparel,” says Schulz, “Because the aesthetic of American Apparel is vintage– stripping it down, removing the label. But at the same time they’re kind of killing the original looks because what ends up happening is that people end up associating the look so strongly with American Apparel, you can’t wear anything like that without someone thinking you’re wearing American Apparel.”

We’re not just going off on fashion-related tangents here, I’m pretty sure. It all has to do with an important gray area in contemporary life: the space between feeling connected to a sub-cultural community and losing your identity within said community. It’s a fence that many of us attempt to straddle– whether it’s sharing discerning aesthetic and cultural tastes with like-minded young people and not falling into the trappings of the “hipster” label (for instance, by dressing like you work at American Apparel), or publishing a magazine that celebrates the hotness of naked husky dudes without being relocated to the conceptual gay (or bear) ghetto.

Pinups is “post-gay,” but not in the same way as twat pop singer Mika thinks he is. Mika uses similar arguments about the problems with labels to justify his cowardly closetedness. Mika is stuck in the ambiguous, needlessly deceptive 70’s world of After Dark. Pinups lifts cues from that world’s coy nonchalance, but transcends the undercurrent of fear that went along with it. Pinups comes from the world of Wong Kar Wai’s Happy Together and Fassbinder’s Fox and His Friends, where gayness is just one more detail in the bigger picture.

The magazine reflects a generational shift in gay history. Take, for instance, Schulz’s own coming out process: “I didn’t really come out,” he says. “I had all these things going on where I could just act naturally and not have to come out cause I feel like everyone just knew I was gay, and I just started talking about guys that were hot. There was never a moment of coming out– just like no one comes out when they’re straight. I went to an art high school, and I was around it a lot when I was younger. Some of my teachers were gay, and I never really had to struggle with those issues.” Clearly, not all adolescents have such an easy time coming to terms with their sexuality (a sad reality we’re reminded of by the tragic murder of 15-year-old Lawrence King), but for many kids today, coming out is easier than it ever has been. It’s a generation of anti-coming out narratives.

Being “post-gay” means living in that aforementioned gray area: fall too far on one side of the spectrum and risk losing yourself– fall on the other side and risk losing genuine connections to the past and other people. It’s like the struggle of finding a balance between sex columnist Dan Savage and AIDS activist Larry Kramer, who in his 2004 speech, “The Tragedy of Today’s Gays,” scolded:

You condemn your predecessors to nonexistence and flounder into a future that you seem unable to fashion into anything you can hold on to that gives you emotional sustenance. You refuse to be part of any community. But if you don’t have any community, you have no political strength. You are too busy denying and disassociating to know that. You do not seem able, it seems to me, to fashion your future. To discover what you want. You don’t even ask what you want. You don’t even ask what you need. Your needs are as mighty as needs always have been, but you don’t ask what they are, which amazes me.

Conversely, from a 2003 interview with Dan Savage:

There is no such thing as the gay community. The only people who yammer on about the gay community are the gay thought police. They believe that gay community means that we are under siege; we have to pretend to agree with each other and battle the heterosexuals. That is not the reality of the majority of gay people’s lives.

We’re regular people and we are not waiting for marching orders from the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. The people who invariably go on about what their gay community thinks and how someone may make the gay community look bad are rainbow flag waving dumbasses who live in hermetically sealed little gay neighborhoods. They are really anachronisms and throwbacks to pre-Stonewall gay life where you lived on a sort of precipice. No gay people I know live that way anymore.