Larry Knight

Image courtesy of Not Ottoman

Larry Knight operated as BM/VADC from the late-1950s through the 1960s. His work was published in Men’s World and Popular Man, among others. His models were often men who trained at his gym.

According to documents in the archives of the United States Postal Inspection Service, the studio name BM/VADC is a contraction for “Baltimore, Virginia & District of Columbia” that was associated in some manner with their investigations of Herman Lynn Womack and Guild Press during the late-1950s and 1960s.

The scholar Hubert Kennedy clearly assigns BM/VADC to London in The Ideal Gay Man: The Story of Der Kreis. Also The Journal of Homosexuality assigns BM/VADC to a London address. And in Der Kreis archive at ETH-Bibliothek, the address is “Box BM/VADC, Monomark House, London”. Monomark House is a British mail drop service that is still in business.

As revealed in MANual Enterprises, Inc., et al. v. J. Edward Day, United States Postmaster General, 370 U.S. 478 (1962), Womack is known to have operated at least one—possibly more—mail drop service in the Greater Washington DC area as well as operating an anonymizing photography clearinghouse service for “art model photography” under the names Continental Studio and Continental Artists.

How this relates to BM/VADC and the Postal Inspection Service’s investigations of Womack remains unclear, but the agents of the USPIS clearly believed a link existed between Womack’s operations and BM/VADC.

Sources:

• Der Kreis : eine Monatsschrift = Le Cercle : revue mensuelle, E-Periodica Archive, ETH-Bibliotheque, Zurich, Switzerland.
• Kennedy, Hubert. The Ideal Gay Man: The Story of Der Kreis. Binghampton, New York: Harrington Park Press, 1999.
• The Journal of Homosexuality, Vol. 38, 1999