The following interview is from OUTCOME Magazine #10 published in 1991. It's the exclusive interview (the first Mel ever did), with legendary photographer MEL ROBERTS. This was the interview that brought Mel back into the spotlight when he always belongs. Since doing this he has put out three videos of his priceless photography, has been interviewed by a number of other important publications & has done exhibits of his work (some models, like the reclusive Jay Howard, have even dropped by.) When we called Mel to tell him The ARCHIVE site had opened & we wanted to do a tribute page on him we were informed that his fourth video DENIM & LEATHER was ready and he'd love a tribute page. As I'm writing this I have the advance copy of the video in my gribby little paws & it's great! Models include Damien DiMario, Jorgen Heniksen, David MacNally, Ron Brouillette, Michael Scott, Tommy Fuller, Don Evan, Rick Miller, James Bacon, Jimmy Stone, Rich Thomson, Mike Kelly, Marcus Sandler, Rick Miller, Billy Scott, David Boyce, Steve Gabott and of course more on Jay Howard & Sean Patrick. Listen to the score for each segment & you can really feel the love Mel has for his guys. We've added a link on the Creators page to help our viewers a way to contact Mel. Enjoy! Our thanks to OUTCOME for the exclusive right to publish this piece of our heritage on the web. Article ©1991 Outcome/Man-Age Press all rights reserved. All images on this page were scanned from original prints & are protected under copyright law. All images ©Mel Roberts all rights reserved. Images may not be published, reproduced or used in any manner or media in any way, shape or form without the written permission of Mel Roberts! Physique Pictorial © Athletic Model Guild, Drum © Janus Society, The Young Physique & Muscleboy © Young Physique Publishing all right reserved.
OUTCOME: Why don't we start by having you tell us how you got started?
MEL: I was a film editor for the studios, I worked on a lot of major projects mainly for Columbia Pictures & United Artists. At the time I was doing films. I had always watched & bought the works of Bob Mizer. He had that little magazine called PHYSIQUE PICTORIAL. He had some great models but I had my own ideas about how I would have photographed them. I've met him a few times & we've always had a good relationship. Early on we were in contact and of course we both suffered under the oppression of the L.A.P.D. They seized his money & safe. They didn't do that with me, they only spent 10 hours going through my house looking for whatever they could find. But getting back to starting out, so I thought gee I wonder if I could sort of. . . I had a couple of friends who were really good. My lover at the time was an extremely attractive young man & I had a couple of other good friends. I asked them if they would mind just posing for me, just to see what kind of work I could achieve. They agreed and I did some work, did some pictures. I sent them to the publisher of YOUNG PHYSIQUE and MUSCLEBOY. Low and behold he was very entranced & enchanted by them, published them and gave me very good space in some of the issues. He wrote me a letter & said he was very pleased with my work would I submit more. He'd like to use it. So I thought wow there's some interest in my work so I started finding more people and doing more pictures, sending them to him. OUTCOME: This would have been like the early 60s, right?
MEL: Yeah, this would have been like 1961 or 62. At the time I was still doing work for the studios and just doing this on the side. Then there was a publisher in Philadelphia who published a magazine called DRUM. He wrote me and said he'd seen some of my work. When I first started out you couldn't show a totally nude male, except from behind. You had to use a posing strap at the very least. One of my principal objectives was to show a beautiful male figure in a natural environment. I didn't like putting them up against backgrounds in studios with special lighting effects. I always thought the human male body was beautiful, an integral part of nature. I tried to depict it in that way. So I always drove out to the beach or up in mountains and had models appear in a natural environment. Another thing that I noticed, a lot of times when I met guys I told them I thought they were attractive and interesting. Most were straight anyway and they didn't seem to have that much objection to it. But I had to know them as a friend first. I could never just come right out and ask them to model. There were several reasons for that. One, most of them would have been reluctant anyway esp. The kinds I was attracted to photographing. Second, once they got before the camera, since they weren't professional models, if they had known me as a friend and felt comfortable with me that would also reflect in the photography. So very often I would usually have dinner and invite them over. They'd meet my friends and become almost an integral part of the family before I'd even taken my first picture of them. So that when we did ultimately go out into the field they felt so comfortable with me and so relaxed it reflected in my work. About 1967 I suddenly got a letter from a publisher in New York who said he'd seen my work and wanted to know if I'd be interested in publishing my own magazine. I thought that was very flattering and I said SURE!
OUTCOME: Yeah, why not.
MEL: And by this time I was starting to develop, people would write me because I was running ads in THE YOUNG PHYSIQUE and MUSCLEBOY, pictorial ads, and I was starting to get mail and requests for my photographs. So I began to develop a little mail order business. In fact it got to the point that it was taking up so much of my time, because I was also doing my own lab work. At that time it was not appropriate to send nude male pictures to the laboratories (hetero homophobia as you could send nude women-ed) because they wouldn't process the film, esp. when it came to making prints and esp. making color prints. So I built my own little color laboratory and began to do all my own color work. I was making color prints up to 16" x 20" and 20" x 24" in my darkroom and believe me it's a job doing color printing. I don't know if you've ever tried to do it.
OUTCOME: I've never done it because I know you have to be so precise with the temperature.
MEL: You have to have exact temperatures, a degree either way can affect the color balance and I didn't really have that professional a set up. I was doing it in my own home. I converted my basement into a laboratory and I was also doing all my b&w printing down there. So I got to the point that it was taking up so much of my time that I stopped working almost entirely in the film industry and started devoting most of my time to my male physique business. I've never really sat down with someone and talked about this in a sequential manner before. OUTCOME: What you're saying follows things CHAMPION and others have told me about that period. Everyone had to be creative to get around walls the hetero establishment set up, such as having to learn to do printing. CHAMPION retired in '73 then tried a comeback in '81 but found he couldn't make anywhere near the money that he had made. The magazines took business away from those selling prints. Then newsstand 'slicks' took it away from the 'one shot' type mags. Now videos have taken the biggest cut of the pie & totally wiped out 'loops'.
MEL: Well, I never made that
much money. It wasn't anything like the income I had working at the studios. And I was
working a hell of a lot harder but the only reason I was able to devote as much time to
it, and I did all right, was that during the time I was working at the studios I bought a
house. And believe me when you've accomplished that you've got a roof over your head &
that's probably your greatest expense, you can always find food. And I always had 2 or 3
people living with me and they were paying me rent.
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