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.
