It's no shocker that a magazine full of naked dudes attracted the secret patronage of gay men, especially in an era when it was risky to be out.įor women and gay men both, Playgirl's true legacy is the way it normalized sexually objectifying men. "We were a magazine 'nobody ever bought,' but everybody read," says Ira Ritter, an ad exec for, and later the owner of, Playgirl. "It's now the female gaze." (That's debatable the magazine has always been owned and published by men.) "You take on the power of what was the male gaze," says Nancie Martin, Playgirl's editor-in-chief for part of the eighties. Now, women could compare men's bodies just as men compared women's.
Playgirl\’s debut issue included lifestyle features and no full-frontal nudity. At its peak during the late seventies, each issue sold around 1.5 million copies. One of its cover lines: "Compulsions of the promiscuous woman." It sold out, moving six hundred thousand copies in four days.
On the first cover, a nude man (credited as "Eldon") sat cross-legged, his modesty preserved by shadows, as an amorous woman (credited as "Lorelei") nuzzled him from behind. Two years later, in June 1973, Playgirl's first issue hit the newsstand, with a mission similar to its long-standing counterpart: to feature nude centerfolds alongside hard-hitting features by and for women. So in the summer of 1971, Lambert, along with William Miles Jr., an experienced adman who served as Playgirl's executive vice president, invested $20,000 in the project and opened a swanky, 23rd-floor office in Los Angeles's Century City. The sexual revolution was well under way, and Lambert "sensed the woman of the '70s was eager to become part" of it, as he'd eventually write in promo copy for his new magazine. What woman wanted to ogle photos of nude men, much less buy a magazine full of them? But he slowly realized Jenny might be on to something. Lambert's wife Jenny saw a bigger opportunity: a magazine with nude male centerfolds. Lambert, a nightclub owner in Garden Grove, California, decided to get in on the action. It was 1971, and Hugh Hefner's magazine had created a new mainstream market for soft-core porn. Douglas Lambert wanted to give Playboy a run for its money.
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