The Long View

We note with sadness the passing of Playgirl magazine.

If you were a gay man coming of age or coming out in the 1970s, Playgirl (ostensibly a woman’s sexual revolutionary counterpart to Hugh Hefner’s Playboy) was the most readily available soft-core erotica available, particularly where similar (and often raunchier) gay men’s mags were not available in  your small town or suburban mall.

I will not forget the photo of the film performer (I dare not call him an “actor”) Christopher Atkins lying supine, his firm round butt (what the Greeks, bless them, would have called callypygian) enough to tempt Zeus down to earth in some metamorphic form.

Of course, Playgirl always had a gay male readership, even as it struggled or pretended to be a women’s niche magazine. Women look at a man’s butt and box, same as Queer Eyes. Interestingly, according to Cara Buckley’s obit for the mag published in the Times, a favorite female photo fantasy sent in by readers involved “a naked man doing chores for the fully dressed lady of the house.”

I’m not sure that this particular fantasy is very much different from the Victorian “housemaid” fantasy, or the modern gay man’s “poolboy” fantasy. Which says something about sex and power, perhaps. For men and for women.