That singular product was such a runaway hit that Burkard spun it off into a cottage industry, evolving International Male into a glossy catalog that inadvertently helped an entire generation of gay men embrace their sexuality — and helped a generation of straight men realize it’s OK to peacock out once in a while.
This long-forgotten institution is getting its due with a documentary. All Man: The International Male Story, directed by Bryan Darling and Jesse Finley Reed, premiered at New York’s Tribeca Film Festival in June. It will make its Dallas debut Sunday, Oct. 16, at the Alamo Drafthouse as part of the Dallas International Film Festival. The journey from subject to screening came about serendipitously.
“Jesse and I were working on another film which dealt with growing up in the age of AIDS,” says Darling. “A coworker of his was throwing out a gag gift of these International Male catalogs, and he was like, ‘Wow, I used to get these all the time.” I had never heard of them, and to him, they were very special.”
The film was originally envisioned as a breezy little short, but it wasn’t long before the duo realized that they had a subject with some meat (no pun intended) on their hands. Often the first glimpse of an alternate world for sheltered Midwestern kids, the glossy pages of International Male displayed handsome men with chiseled abs posing in exotic locales, proving there was an exciting life to be had out there.
“For a lot of young men and boys, this was their gateway, a window into the world," Darling says. "I found that fascinating and said, ‘Let’s make a film about this fun catalog and what it meant to gay men.’ We quickly realized this was going to be a lot bigger than a short film because everything just opened up. We discovered this deals with a lot of subjects: what is masculinity, exploring male sexuality, and also its impact on culture. It opened up from there, and we went for it.”
The directors tried to connect with Burkard from the very beginning but initially found resistance. Instead, they began interviewing the likes of Maureen Dalton Wolfe, a former art director for the company who currently has her own local business representing fashion photographers in Dallas.
Initially hired to do window displays in an International Male store, Dalton Wolfe was promoted to art director, where she would find herself doing everything from booking models to crafting layouts to pinning underwear — all to better show off a model’s attributes, which wasn’t the worst part of the job.
“You didn’t think twice about it; it was like fixing your friend’s hair,” Dalton Wolfe recalls. "Basically [the models] were like a big brother or your best friend’s brother, that kind of feeling. They were just playful and fun, and they were just happy to be there. At the time, male models weren’t making a ton of money, they were doing these big campaigns in Europe, but they were coming to us because we had fun. We were like a family and repeated the same guys over and over.”
The participation of Dalton Wolfe and other former employees inspired the filmmakers to keep going. Once filmmaker Peter Jones, who is known for his documentary on Johnny Carson, joined as producer, doors started to open, and the duo found themselves finally scoring an interview with then-90-year-old Burkard shortly before his death in 2020.
“I think the reason people were open to talking about it is no one had ever really talked about International Male,” says Darling. “They might have told stories to friends, but they’d never gone on camera or at events. Several models wanted to come and speak to us because of the impact that International Male had on their lives and careers. It was the highest-paying job in the industry.”
"Several models wanted to come and speak to us because of the impact that International Male had on their lives and careers. It was the highest-paying job in the industry.” – Filmmaker Bryan Darling
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Ultimately six years in the making, All Man is narrated by actor Matt Bomer. The film features appearances by the likes of author Simon Doonan, the Scissor Sisters’ Jake Shears and TV personality Carson Kressley, all of whom were thrilled to speak about the joys of the clothes (and the men who wore them).
For a business that at its peak had more than 3 million subscribers and $120 million in revenue, it might seem surprising that International Male didn’t burn out rather than fade away. The AIDS epidemic affected a great deal of its original staff, and Burkard decided to sell the property to the East Coast-based catalog company Hanover House.
What made the catalog iconic also eventually prompted its demise in the new owner’s hands. Hanover did a hard pivot away from the tight tops and shorty shorts, leaning into a Miami Vice/faux Versace aesthetic. A puffy shirt featured in its pages was famously parodied in a Seinfeld episode. The writing was on the wall.
But by that time, the catalog had already made an indelible impact. Women had long dressed their men from its pages, and a new era of metrosexuality was just around the corner. By the early ‘90s, International Male was over, but in 2022 — when genderless fashion is everywhere — its impact still resonates.
“If you were a hetero-normative, play-by-the-rules type of person there was plenty out there for you,” says Darling. “But if you were on the fringes [stylistically], there wasn’t a lot of representation. Getting a catalog like this offered you an ability to be able to express yourself. That’s what made it so interesting and special.”
