Jack Haber, the magazine’s editor-in-chief from 1969 to 1983, was a gay man, as were his two extraordinary art directors, Harry Coulianos, who served from 1971 to 1980, and Donald Sterzin, who started out as one of Coulianos’s deputies and eventually succeeded him, running the department until late 1983. (Only the gauche ever uttered the “54” part.) It was also, not to put too fine a point on it, a much gayer era of GQ.

It was a time when the magazine had a smaller readership, measurable in the low six figures, and a smaller staff: a hedonistic, tight-knit group whose members socialized together after work, often in a pack, often at Studio. Sometimes, there would even be a woman in the shot. And in the foreground, gorgeous creatures in very small bathing suits, frolicking in the surf, water beading seductively on supple flesh. Can we get a seaplane? Indeed we can get a seaplane! So there would be a seaplane-an expensive prop int he background. Everyone’s hair had blond highlights everyone’s skin was fetchingly on t he cusp of a burn. Or if it wasn’t summer, it was at least an occasion to pack up and jet off to some summery locale, maybe Tahiti or Hawaii or t he Caribbean.

It was always summer at GQ in the late 1970s.