Naked as a Jaybird and loving it
A true milestone in fine art publishing. Excerpt from the book by Dian Hanson
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Which explains a lot about the pubic equality in Jaybird. One of the notable, and laudable, Jaybird qualities was that men and women assumed the same silly poses. Jaybird also freely mixed races at a time when most magazines were rigidly segregated, in keeping with the hippie philosophy that had supplanted the nudist.
Reb doubts there were any real nudists in Jaybird by 1970. They'd become too "sensitive". Hippies, on the other hand, had a much more fun-loving attitude and enjoyed participating in the crazy Jaybird shoots. As Reb put it, "Sure we're nudists! You show us the green and we'll show you the nude!"
Connie hung on, not completely embracing Bob's changes, but accepting them as part of getting the message across. "The only purpose was to show people having fun", she says today. "Even if we had to go about it through selling to people who wanted to look at naked bodies, we wanted to get to them with the message. The hippie lingo of the later magazines came because we were feeling more relaxed. We felt the world was really changing. We displayed humor. We were all having an awful lot of fun." Sadly, the fun was fast coming to an end.
In 1968 Ed Lange retitled his long-running Sundial magazine Sundisk, and gave it a groovy psychedelic makeover. Clearly competing with the hippified Jaybird, his models not only bared their charms; they shoved them in the reader's face.
"Sundisk is an entirely different kind of magazine," stated the first issue's editorial. No longer pretending to a nudist agenda, the cover proclaimed "Sex and Social Intercourse". Inside were articles by dubious sexologists attacking conventional morality, illustrated by hard-eyed models that looked more like strippers than hippies.
The nudist establishment had had enough. Here was Ed Lange, owner of Southern California's highest profile camp, making and marketing unapologetic pornography. His Elysium Fields was built with the profits from his nudist magazines and Sundial had functioned as official organ for the camp. The nudists wanted nothing to do with the organs on display in Sundisk. It looked to them as if Jaybird was contaminating the whole movement, relegating their cause, their philosophy, their whole way of life to masturbation fodder.
Lange could have argued it was a matter of survival, because that same year Luros dropped the panties in his girlie magazines. With girlies showing what had once been purely nudist turf-namely pubic turf-- there was no reason for non-nudists to buy nudist magazines. Sales plummeted as quickly as they'd risen; proving once and for all that it was all about the fuzz and not the philosophy. Even Lange's blazing Sundisk couldn't outshine the new Luros magazines that, as Connie describes it, "covered the beauty of the nude body with garter belts and stockings and nutty underpants that have holes cut in them, turning it into an unattractive ornament that's only a sexual thing."
Page [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12]
Page [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12]
Which explains a lot about the pubic equality in Jaybird. One of the notable, and laudable, Jaybird qualities was that men and women assumed the same silly poses. Jaybird also freely mixed races at a time when most magazines were rigidly segregated, in keeping with the hippie philosophy that had supplanted the nudist.
Reb doubts there were any real nudists in Jaybird by 1970. They'd become too "sensitive". Hippies, on the other hand, had a much more fun-loving attitude and enjoyed participating in the crazy Jaybird shoots. As Reb put it, "Sure we're nudists! You show us the green and we'll show you the nude!"
Connie hung on, not completely embracing Bob's changes, but accepting them as part of getting the message across. "The only purpose was to show people having fun", she says today. "Even if we had to go about it through selling to people who wanted to look at naked bodies, we wanted to get to them with the message. The hippie lingo of the later magazines came because we were feeling more relaxed. We felt the world was really changing. We displayed humor. We were all having an awful lot of fun." Sadly, the fun was fast coming to an end.
In 1968 Ed Lange retitled his long-running Sundial magazine Sundisk, and gave it a groovy psychedelic makeover. Clearly competing with the hippified Jaybird, his models not only bared their charms; they shoved them in the reader's face.
"Sundisk is an entirely different kind of magazine," stated the first issue's editorial. No longer pretending to a nudist agenda, the cover proclaimed "Sex and Social Intercourse". Inside were articles by dubious sexologists attacking conventional morality, illustrated by hard-eyed models that looked more like strippers than hippies.
The nudist establishment had had enough. Here was Ed Lange, owner of Southern California's highest profile camp, making and marketing unapologetic pornography. His Elysium Fields was built with the profits from his nudist magazines and Sundial had functioned as official organ for the camp. The nudists wanted nothing to do with the organs on display in Sundisk. It looked to them as if Jaybird was contaminating the whole movement, relegating their cause, their philosophy, their whole way of life to masturbation fodder.
Lange could have argued it was a matter of survival, because that same year Luros dropped the panties in his girlie magazines. With girlies showing what had once been purely nudist turf-namely pubic turf-- there was no reason for non-nudists to buy nudist magazines. Sales plummeted as quickly as they'd risen; proving once and for all that it was all about the fuzz and not the philosophy. Even Lange's blazing Sundisk couldn't outshine the new Luros magazines that, as Connie describes it, "covered the beauty of the nude body with garter belts and stockings and nutty underpants that have holes cut in them, turning it into an unattractive ornament that's only a sexual thing."
Page [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12]
