Ten Years that Shook the (Men's Magazine) World
By Dian Hanson
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Some old editors who worked on these magazines told me it was the lawyers who urged the publishers to test the law. Trials kept them in business, and every First Amendment lawyer wanted his own Roth vs USA, a landmark case to stamp his name in the history books. Whatever, however, the slicks were well established by 1965 when American Art Agency of North Hollywood launched Jaybird Safari, the first magazine to use hippies as models. By 1967, when the Summer of Love warmed San Francisco and Berth Milton published his first sexually explicit photos in Private magazine, hippies were a major theme in American men's magazines. Hippie-produced titles - all with sexual content - were proliferating across Europe as well. Liberal Amsterdam was fast becoming a center for drug culture as well as experimental publishing, while in Hamburg Konkret mixed leftist political rhetoric with sexual rebellion. It was while working as an editor for this magazine that Ulrike Meinhof, soon to be co-leader of the infamous Baader-Meinhof Gang, honed her revolutionary zeal. Following the German student riots in 1968 dozens of new magazines issued from Hamburg's Red Light District using sex to provoke the government. In England Oz debuted in 1969 as the preferred radical tool. While all these magazines were made by and for hippies, they were plenty popular with "straights" who enjoyed gawking at naked hippie chicks.
Ironically, one of the few not fantasizing about free-loving hippies in 1967 was Private publisher Berth Milton. He liked heavily made up women with towering bouffants in the style of the early 60s slick magazines. Still, it would be Berth who fought the seminal battle in The Sexual Revolution. It was, in the end, a bloodless coup. He simply walked in on a session of Swedish Parliament, showed its members a selection of hardcore photographs he intended to publish and asked what they would do about it. Reportedly they told him to try it and see. He did, and Parliament repealed the national obscenity law.
In the decade that followed, Berth Milton's sheer testicular audacity would drastically change men's magazines across Northern Europe and the world. That change, however, is the subject of Volumes V and VI in this series. In this volume you see how men's magazines evolved from barely topless to fully nude between 1958 and 1967.
You see styles transform from early 60s beehives to late 60s love beads. You see the decline of digests as Europe recovers from wartime paper shortages, and the rise of glossy, full color, exuberantly sexual magazines. Most notably, you see the US become a great men's magazine publishing power, through the efforts of Hugh Hefner certainly, but equally through the work of Bob Guccione and of misfits and visionaries like Elmer Batters, Milton Luros, Lenny Burtman, Bill Ward, Eddie Mishkin and Irving Klaw, all profiled in these two volumes. In the 70s Sweden and Denmark would reinvent sex in Europe, set the stage for Japan to become a major force in pornography, and help spread sex shops and adult bookstores to the four corners of the earth, but in the 1960s America ruled, and on these pages, brothers and sisters, you will see the jewels in her crown.
Page [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]
Page [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]
Some old editors who worked on these magazines told me it was the lawyers who urged the publishers to test the law. Trials kept them in business, and every First Amendment lawyer wanted his own Roth vs USA, a landmark case to stamp his name in the history books. Whatever, however, the slicks were well established by 1965 when American Art Agency of North Hollywood launched Jaybird Safari, the first magazine to use hippies as models. By 1967, when the Summer of Love warmed San Francisco and Berth Milton published his first sexually explicit photos in Private magazine, hippies were a major theme in American men's magazines. Hippie-produced titles - all with sexual content - were proliferating across Europe as well. Liberal Amsterdam was fast becoming a center for drug culture as well as experimental publishing, while in Hamburg Konkret mixed leftist political rhetoric with sexual rebellion. It was while working as an editor for this magazine that Ulrike Meinhof, soon to be co-leader of the infamous Baader-Meinhof Gang, honed her revolutionary zeal. Following the German student riots in 1968 dozens of new magazines issued from Hamburg's Red Light District using sex to provoke the government. In England Oz debuted in 1969 as the preferred radical tool. While all these magazines were made by and for hippies, they were plenty popular with "straights" who enjoyed gawking at naked hippie chicks.
Ironically, one of the few not fantasizing about free-loving hippies in 1967 was Private publisher Berth Milton. He liked heavily made up women with towering bouffants in the style of the early 60s slick magazines. Still, it would be Berth who fought the seminal battle in The Sexual Revolution. It was, in the end, a bloodless coup. He simply walked in on a session of Swedish Parliament, showed its members a selection of hardcore photographs he intended to publish and asked what they would do about it. Reportedly they told him to try it and see. He did, and Parliament repealed the national obscenity law.
In the decade that followed, Berth Milton's sheer testicular audacity would drastically change men's magazines across Northern Europe and the world. That change, however, is the subject of Volumes V and VI in this series. In this volume you see how men's magazines evolved from barely topless to fully nude between 1958 and 1967.
You see styles transform from early 60s beehives to late 60s love beads. You see the decline of digests as Europe recovers from wartime paper shortages, and the rise of glossy, full color, exuberantly sexual magazines. Most notably, you see the US become a great men's magazine publishing power, through the efforts of Hugh Hefner certainly, but equally through the work of Bob Guccione and of misfits and visionaries like Elmer Batters, Milton Luros, Lenny Burtman, Bill Ward, Eddie Mishkin and Irving Klaw, all profiled in these two volumes. In the 70s Sweden and Denmark would reinvent sex in Europe, set the stage for Japan to become a major force in pornography, and help spread sex shops and adult bookstores to the four corners of the earth, but in the 1960s America ruled, and on these pages, brothers and sisters, you will see the jewels in her crown.
Page [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]
History of Men's Magazines Vol. 3
Hardcover, 21.3 x 27.7 cm (8.4 x 10.9 in.), 460 pages
Special Price: $ 29.99
Save $ 30.00!
Special Price: $ 29.99
Save $ 30.00!
Swinging Sixties at the newsstand
Pagan, USA, 1966