Henri Garsou

Henri Garsou (1914-1969) was born into an old and distinguished landed family native to the Walloon region of Belgium. However, by the time our Henri was born, the ravages of two centuries of wars and two World Wars had lessened the family's fortunes considerably. Garsou was born in Mortier in 1914 on the eve of the First World War and christened at Saint Pierre-Apôtre in Mortier as his fathers and grandfathers before him had been. The family suffered great hardships through the war and Henri lost his mother to the influenza epidemic in 1918. Belgium in the 1920s was racked by famine and poor economic conditions, then blighted by the world economic depression in the 1930s. The life Henri Garsou knew as a child and young man were defined by these conditions. Just as things began to get better, the Second World War erupted on his door step.

After the Second World War, Henri Garsou set himself to becoming the Belgian equivalent of Bob Mizer - that there were many striking similarities in the lives of Mizer and Garsou merits remark. From 1946, he was editor and publisher of Muscles, a French-language beefcake magazine. When he began printing Muscles, many must have thought him mad for food rationing and bombed-out ruin were the norm for most of his post-war readers. In publishing “Muscles”, Garsou faced these realities every print cycle - printing presses were non-existent, paper was in short supply, colored inks ran out and were impossible to replace, the economy was flat-lined. But Henri Garsou was determined to make it work.

In 1946, bodybuilding in Belgium became a more formalized sport with the founding of the Belgian Physical Culture Federation (Fédération Belge de Culture Physique). Marcel Rouet - a French bodybuilder who advocated for a complete and scientifically based approach to bodybuilding - was one of the leading forces in the post-war Belgian physical culture movement. Georges Dardenne was one of his supporters in the struggle for the promotion of physical culture in Belgium. The publicized efforts of Rouet and Dardenne inspired Henri Garsou in Andrimont to create Muscles magazine. Muscles was, at the time, the only publication treating with physical culture and bodybuilding in Belgium. Years would pass before the hardships of the post-war economy in Europe brought foreign beefcake magazines into Belgium. But, considering the homophobic culture of largely Catholic Belgium, it was hardly a guaranteed success. There would be periods of persecution, often under the banner of anti-communism and morality.

Henri Garsou was a photographer as well, but in those early post-war years, between shortages and rationing, finding chemicals and models was nearly impossible. One has to consider the food rationing endemic of post-war Europe, many people in post-war Europe were living on less than 1,800 calories a day, so finding muscular models was difficult if not impossible. This being the case, Garsou he had little choice but to use the work of American beefcake photographers to fill the pages of his new magazine. One consideration that needs remarking is that with the memory of the war so fresh, German and Italian - even German-looking and Italian-looking - models were a thing to be avoided in the early years. That being the lay of things, American models were probably the only "safe bet".

As the situation in Europe improved, Garsou began boosting his brand by making diet supplements (VIR Milk advert above) and setting up Club Muscles - a retreat near Goffontaine (a hamlet in the scenic woodlands 22 km east of Liège) for fans of physical culture. Doubtless, Club Muscles drew its fair share of amateur beefcake photographers and models. About this same time, across Europe, food rationing was becoming less strict and native Belgian models started to appear on the pages of Muscles, granted they were a bit under-developed compared to the likes of Dick Dubois and Steve Reeves, but that they was a home-grown product to draw upon eased some of the burdens on Garsou.

For over two decades Muscles delivered the finest, fittest bodies, including American superstars like Steve Reeves and Dick Dubois, and European models like Andre Coutoula and Pierre Knauf. Though the magazine wasn't explicitly gay, and perhaps never meant for gay audiences, one can well surmise that if one were gay in Antwerp between 1946 and 1969, then one encountered, and spent significant time drooling over, the images in Muscles magazine and other images Garsou published through his studio Europhoto, much like Americans did with the work of Bob Mizer. Muscles magazine ran from 1946 until 1969, when the sudden death of Henri Garsou abruptly ended the activities of the magazine. Which perhaps saved Garsou from watching his life's work fade into obscurity as porn and Joe Weider style publications took control of the market.

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