Coq d'Or

Coq d'Or Partial cover of first issue.

Coq d'Or was a color magazine featuring photos of nude adolescents and young men published by Lyric International, starting about 1969 with an unknown number of issues. The first issue was produced when Billy Byars, Jr. was already established in Los Angeles, and from a reference to DOM, already working with Guy Strait.

First Issue

The first issue features a color cover photo of three nudes standing in line on a sand dune, leftmost and foremost being Peter Glawson, looking several years younger than when The Genesis Children was filmed in 1970 or 1971. The other two are 18 or so. The title, in the upper left, "COQ D'OR (The Golden Cock)", while in the upper right in the same italic font is "Volume One Number One" and a price of $3.50 (Playboy in 1971 had a cover price of one dollar). Below it are three black-and-white graphic elements: one seems to be a small cloud with lettering inside, the second is the capital letters "LM" draped with a deflating whale, and lastly a line drawing of a long-tailed rooster. Horizontally in the lower right in bold capitals is "Adults Only", while vertically from the bottom right in lighter capitals is "Sale to Minors Forbidden".

A 2016 online listing for the edition on a European auction site includes scans of eleven pages including the cover, strategically censored by the seller. The scans include neither table of contents nor page numbers. About a dozen models are shown, all are nude, and all (with the possible exception of Peter in the cover photo) have pubic hair. Peter and "Dick More" look to be at the start of their teens, while all the others seem closer to the end. The little interior text shown is typewritten.

Two pages of pictures, one with three black-and-white photos an another with a single color photograph, show Peter Glawson with an older boy in the living room of the house with the pool with the cinderblock walls. In these photos he is visibly older than in the cover photo, and only slightly younger than in The Genesis Children. The text on the black-and-white page is:

PETER and CHES
Ches has a way with the young and young PETER is no exception. Here Peter had just come in from the swimming pool and saw Ches in front of the camera. Since he (Peter) rarely wears clothes around the studio it took but just a few moments to have both of them focused in for some action shots. Ches seems to be admiring some of Peter's finer points.

Another page has two black-and-white photos of a boy sprawled half on a squarish easy chair and half on its hassock, dangling a cherry in his right hand. The text is surmounted by a stylized line drawing that could be a cat with its head in a duck press, and reads:

DICK MORE
DOM was photographing this one a couple of years ago (before he became so well developed) and made dates for future photography. Here we are again with Dick in the easy chair and forbidden but delightful fruit in the offing.

Physique

Lyric's catalog included only material that was at the time on the right side of the line of the law. None of the photos in the first issue of Coq d'Or show overt sexual situations. Guy Strait, nicknamed "DOM", produced pornography including child pornography, and of the two youngest boys in the magazine, the text states that he photographed one when he was even younger.

The line of legality changed with time. There may have been off-catalog Lyric products, or off-camera activities, that went beyond what the law permitted at the time. There is nothing in Coq d'Or that exceeds what is in The Genesis Children, which was legally filmed and exhibited.