I was playing video games with my little brother in our bedroom one day when my father went to collect the mail. I also presumed the catalog would arrive unnoticed in my mailbox, lost among junk mail and my subscriptions to more mainstream periodicals like Details, GQ and Interview Magazine. The see-through mesh thong underwear it featured was usually concealed among pages of leopard-print sleeveless shirts and suede vests with generous amounts of fringe, so who could suspect this booklet was satisfying anything other than a teenager’s interest in men’s clothing? When I was 17, I signed up for a free subscription to International Male, a risqué mail-order catalog of menswear that I naively convinced myself looked as innocuous as something published by J.C.