Today, Mavety Media Group pulled the buttplug on all of their gay magazines—charmingly referred to as "sophisticates" in old-school publishing parlance. Puns aside, I wonder if people will notice what a major development this is in publishing, in gay history and in the porn industry.
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The gay titles were highly successful at times. Don't most gay men under 50 or so remember picking up one of those magazines and finding out something about ourselves, or about a vast, invisible community we were just beginning to realize existed?
Mr. Mavety's earliest publications mixed arts and entertainment (sometimes ridiculously) with nude photography (some of it ridiculous in its own right), but over time that gave way to most pornographic nudes peppered with "socially redeeming" articles to avoid obscenity prosecutions (they were only briefly hardcore) and finally to pure, 100% bare-naked men.
The photography went from great to terrible and back to highly professional once GT Wallace inherited the reins, took the titles seriously and did everything possible to make the magazines slick and able to do the trick.
The people who worked there were far more interesting and eccentric than the vanilla vagabonds who stripped for the publications' pages—the gruff-sounding gentle giant with the "DO NOT RESUSCITATE" sign on his desk (eventually, they didn't), the pigment-challenged spinster who kept her eye on everything but the dirty pictures, the Christian soldiers were morally opposed to the industry the employed them (including the ad lady who never sold an ad and swore a "wet shot" meant a picture of somebody in the shower).
Unfortunately, even though the quality of the magazines improved remarkably under the direction of Wallace and the world of pornography grew exponentially, the need for a printed magazine became lesser and lesser in the age of the Internet, where every fantasy is a click away. Mr. Mavety told me he couldn't grasp the appeal of online porn. "I want to hold a magazine in my hand while I masturbate—who would want to have one hand on a keyboard while you're doing that?"