Does playgirl magazine still exist free#
“I tried to sell the collection, but nobody wanted them in the age of digital media,” he says, his voice growing soft as he recounts eventually tossing them into a blue recycling bin to free up space in his cramped WeHo apartment.ĭespite its tagline - “Entertainment for Women” - depending on who you ask and when you ask them, Playgirl ’s gay readership ranged anywhere from 30 to 100 percent. “It’s back!”Īll and all, over the next 20 years Pineda accumulated more than 400 Playgirls, which he taxingly transferred from his bedroom floor to a hallway closet whenever his mother would visit him as an adult. “But it’s the look once again ,” Pineda interrupts, pointing to a pair of mustached, Christ-like millennial hipsters entering the Chateau. “That’s the 1970s look we all lusted after,” Cruz agrees, “ Mark Spitz, Sam Elliott …” “Like him ,” Pineda gasps, pointing to a photo of David White, whose mustached machismo is featured in Playgirl ’s October 1976 issue. While played video games, we read Playgirl and fantasized about which hunk would become our future boyfriend.”
“Straight boys usually get porn from their fathers, but we had to be guerrilla about it, hiding and stealing issues wherever we could. “We’d then come in quietly to read them and exchange notes,” Cruz says. (One of them, 53-year-old Roy Cruz, joins us at the Chateau since it’s Easter Sunday brunch, we’ve relegated ourselves to a dimly-lit basement anteroom to thumb through photos of vintage penises.) When the band of queer Filipino preteen comrades would arrive at Pineda’s house, he’d tell them to wait in the hall while he carefully laid out all his Playgirls on the bedroom floor. Word soon spread to other gay boys in the neighborhood that Pineda had a collection of Playgirls. “I only knew there was something in front of me that was changing my life.” “I didn’t even know erect penises existed ,” he explains. “In American schools you see guys in the locker room all the time, but in Manila, we never did because it’s so conservative.”Īnd since pubescent gay boys can’t ogle just one Playgirl, as Pineda aged, he began accruing more and more back issues through various means - either while visiting family members abroad or by shoplifting them at a convenience store near his house that sold U.S. “My heart was racing the first time I saw it,” he recalls, noting his devout Catholic household. The 10-year-old Pineda lifted it from the china cabinet later that night. Rather, it was seized by his father, a customs officer in the Philippines, who confiscated the contraband from an American tourist and brought it home. Which included Pineda, a slight, 52-year-old bookkeeper with a wholesome grin that belies the fact that the first addition to his Playgirl collection wasn’t purchased. Who buys nudie mags with naked men? Gay men.” “It never really rang true for me because who buys nudie mags? Men.
“I always thought it was kind of funny that Playgirl, at least nominally, was a magazine for women,” says Matt Breen, my former editor at The Advocate. “We were a very threatening magazine for men, the newsstands were controlled by men.” “We were put in the back rack in 7-Eleven,” explained Ira Ritter, Playgirl’s president and publisher from 1974 until 1986, in a 2017 oral history of the magazine published in Esquire. Noting that the sexual revolution was well underway, he “sensed the woman of the 1970s was eager to become part” of it, per early promo copy for his new magazine. In 1971, a nightclub owner in Garden Grove, California, named Douglas Lambert wanted to give Playboy a run for its money.
While Raymar Pineda has spent a lifetime collecting the magazine, amassing hundreds of issues dating back to its inception in 1973, he was decidedly not among Playgirl’s target audience. Huddled near a chauffeur-driven Rolls Royce in a gothic portico at the Chateau Marmont in West Hollywood, I’m perusing pictures of 1980s Playgirl models with a middle-aged gay man.
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