Sex Doesn't Sell
...If you're a gay magazine
By Chris Fleisher
WHEN it comes to magazines, the “sex sells” mantra is a golden truism
rarely challenged. Take Maxim, one of the great magazine success stories
over the last few years. Founded in 1997 with a modest circulation
of 175,000, it is now the leading men’s-interest magazine, with a 2.5
million circulation, achieved—apparently—through its raunchy, juvenile
approach to sex. A typical Maxim feature: “Found Porn,” where
readers send in objects that could be interpreted as sexual (a brand of
pipe cleaner called Ream-N-Klean and a picture of a toy monkey humping
a banana). A typical cover line: “Monkeys & Lesbians.” Maxim takes
sex to a lowest-common-denominator level, and it sells.Or, if you prefer women’s mags, consider the racy Cosmopolitan. March’s cover has “Men on Sex,” “Very Sexy Things to Do After Sex” and “Hilarious Hook-Ups.”
But there is one telling exception to this sexy strategy. Despite the progress made over the past ten years, gay and lesbian magazines still struggle to emerge from the shadow of taboo sex. Advertisers worry about embroiling themselves in controversy and newsstands refuse to carry titles that might offend customers. For these smaller magazines, advertising and newsstand dollars mean life or death and, so far, many have learned that gay sex can be a tough sell.
There are about ten national gay and lesbian magazines in the United States right now, and only Out and The Advocate have a circulation of more than 100,000. The Advocate is a newsmagazine that sees its competition as Time and Newsweek rather than other gay and lesbian lifestyle publications. It treats sexual content as a newsmagazine would—as news, not titillation. The March 2 issue, published near Academy Awards time, featured the sexy Charlize Theron, but, like many of the celebrities in the magazine, she’s a straight person with some connection to the gay and lesbian community (for her Oscar-winning performance as a bisexual in “Monster”). Other leading titles, such as the gay men’s magazine Genre, are similarly conservative. Genre, a style magazine, sells home and fashion the old-fashioned way—by showing pictures of things for your home and men wearing stylish suits. Of course, the same could be said of GQ, but what separates these two magazines is what each tells its readers about sex. GQ’s March issue tells its guys how to “Meet a Geisha” and “Four Ways Into Your Beloved’s Pants.” Genre’s advice is a bit safer. In a March advice piece titled “Open Wide and Say…” Genre advises gay men to be honest and upfront about their sexual orientation—when they go to the doctor.
For lesbians, the pickings are even slimmer. Curve, a top lesbian magazine with a circulation of more than 68,000, has (surprise!) a straight celebrity, Cyndi Lauper, gracing its April cover and, inside, a lot of travel suggestions—but not a hint of sex. Girlfriends, which claims to be “The No. 1 Lesbian Monthly,” gets a little bit hotter in the April issue with an article called “Mooning Over Miami” about Miami’s biggest “Dyke Party,” but it eventually becomes just another travel article—go to Miami to see a “magical eye-candyland” and Miami’s great, um, Spanish monastery.
Even when gay magazines do use sexual content, it tends to be muted. Since 1992, Out magazine—the most widely read national gay publication, with a circulation of more than 113,000—has built its reputation on being upfront about gay sexuality. The April issue’s cover lines tantalize its readers with “Young Gay Men and Dangerous Sex” and promise a feature about “Queer as Folk” actor Robert Gant called “Sex & the Single Guy,” accompanied by “His Most Revealing Photos Ever!” But open up the magazine, and the content tells a different story. The “revealing photos” have Gant fully dressed and, in one, wearing a tuxedo. His faceless companions (male and female) are nude or scantily clad, but the model who reveals the most is a bare-breasted woman. Far from sexy, the article on dangerous sex deals with a familiar topic to gay readers: HIV. Though the writer, Kai Wright, argues that public health is going to have to “broaden its one-note song on the dangers of eros and start affirming the sexual part of sexually transmitted diseases,” the article is social commentary, not playfulness.
Seems that what’s truly “in” for gay magazines are suggestions of sex but not the same kind of sexual advice freely given to straight people. Straight guys could turn to the April issue of Men’s Health and find out how a woman fakes an orgasm or get seventeen seduction strategies from a selfproclaimed Casanova. But the kind of sex advice that straight men enjoy in Men’s Health is scarcely found in Out. The advice comes with a softer suggestion for improving relationships. The March issue’s article provides eight short tips for gay dating. But if you believe that all guys want to do is score, then gay men may want to skip this one. The piece talks more about how to build a lasting relationship (“Be a Zen beaver and give it time. Your dam will come.”) than gettin’ down and dirty.
“We have been very careful to walk the line and not overdo or overemphasize the sexual content of a legitimate news or entertainment story,” said Eric Chandler, public relations manager of LPI Media, which publishes The Advocate and Out. “We’re very cognizant of this so that we don’t have incidents with our advertisers.” It’s not just an issue of covers and content. It’s also a matter of advertising and newsstand placement. And here the explanation lies less within the gay and lesbian communities than with the mainstream.
Heterosexuals, insofar as they represent America, matter a lot in two important arenas that affect the gay-magazine industry: advertising and distribution. As gay magazines attempt to expand their sales, courting major advertisers and getting wider distribution on newsstands are absolute musts. Major gay and lesbian magazines are starting to get wide distribution in Barnes & Noble bookstores and attract business from such advertisers as Tommy Hilfiger and Volvo. But, as Chandler pointed out, these successes have come as a result of careful consideration of sexual content that might offend mainstream tastes.
Even the advertisements that tailor their messages to a gay and lesbian audience are not sexual. Absolut Vodka, a longtime advertiser in gay publications, was one of the first major companies to create gay-specific advertising. But the advertisements are rarely, if ever, sexual. In one popular ad, Absolut wrapped a bottle in a rainbow flag and printed “Absolut Diversity” at the bottom. Sex was nowhere in sight. Even companies like Calvin Klein, which is notorious for its provocative ads, run sexual ads but with straight couples. These companies are willing to be associated with gay communities, and they’re willing to be sexual, but not at the same time.
Outside of advertising, the most important financial crutch is newsstand distribution. When distributors start to worry about offending their heterosexual customers, placement becomes a huge issue for gay magazines. Chain stores like Barnes & Noble have set up gay and lesbian sections in some of their stores’ magazine racks, but most small newsstands don’t have such sections. They often set gay newsmagazines like The Advocate in the porn section rather than beside Time. Even in many bookstores, the gay men’s magazines are set in the “Men’s Interest” section, back on the third and fourth shelf, next to or, in some cases, behind Playboy, while racy heterosexual magazines like FHM, Blender and Maxim occupy the front shelf.
“In the broader picture, [mainstream America] hasn’t gone much further in accepting gay sex than where we were fifteen years ago,” said Michael Bronski, a journalist and cultural critic who has written for The Village Voice and Z Magazine. He pointed out that television shows like “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” and “Will & Grace” present gay men who have virtually no sex lives at all. And though shows like “Queer as Folk” and “The L Word” are more explicit about gay and lesbian sex, Bronski said the difference is in the sexual orientation of the viewers.
“I don’t see the average heterosexual American man as being all that interested in seeing gay sex,” he said. “Queer Eye” is shown on a basic cable channel (Bravo) and “Will & Grace” is shown on NBC—both channels for which the basic audience demographic is broader and many of the viewers are likely to be heterosexual. Bronski said he suspects that this is not the case for more sexual shows like “Folk,” which has a dominantly homosexual audience.
But, he continued, it isn’t just mainstream America’s lack of interest in gay sex that is at issue. He thinks America is still uncomfortable with sex in general, whatever its orientation. “We’ve come a long way since the Fifties,” Bronski said. “But, with all our obsessions with sex, all we need is a little instance, like Janet Jackson’s breast, to literally bring a federal case against somebody.”
Although heterosexuals may be getting more comfortable with straight sexual images, gay and lesbian sex can still take on a kind of foreign and, often, forbidding mystique. After all, the sodomy law was repealed only last summer, and while some straight people may be accepting gay sex, the larger mainstream may not be ready to start celebrating it on TV or in their magazines.
But one emerging gay magazine isn’t waiting for the mainstream to come around. “We have to address sexuality,” said JR Pratts, publisher of the gay magazine Instinct. “We are a gay men’s magazine and sexuality is part of being gay.” Launching just a few months after its heterosexual counterpart, Maxim, in 1997, the editors of Instinct began with the philosophy that they were going to stop being polite and start having fun.
Instinct’s cover leaves little to the imagination. April’s “Swimsuit Spectacular” proclaims “16 Eye-Popping Pages of Sexy Studs” and shows an oiled-up hunk in a Speedo. Inside, the regular “Matchmaker” feature, which sets up two guys on a blind date, takes a “go for it” attitude and shows pictures of a happy couple making out. Instinct wants the reader to know that getting action on the first date isn’t a bad thing.
Early on, the magazine managed to survive with only gay-specific advertisers (such as Key West travel packages) and products. National advertisers began to trickle in as the buzz about the magazine grew, but not without certain consequences. “I remember the second year, we had a small picture of two guys embracing. A national advertiser told us to bag the magazine,” Pratts said, referring to the cellophane wrapping that is required of magazines like Hustler and Penthouse. Pratts said he went out immediately and bought copies of Maxim and Details, two magazines in which that advertiser had also bought space. Pratts showed the advertising representative sexual images of men and women that, he claims, were much more explicit than what Instinct was planning to do.
“I said, ‘If you’re doing this because we’re gay, we are going to make so much noise,’” Pratts said. Not only did Instinct retain the advertiser, it has managed to pull in a few more national brands like Bud Light and Camel while raising its initial circulation of 25,000 to 65,000 in just six years. “With all the recent attention, this is the most exciting time in our community right now,” said Pratts. “The gay market in America is exploding!”
He’s right—to a certain extent. The progress gays and lesbians have made in gaining wider acceptance in mainstream America is difficult to deny, but “hetero America” will have to crawl before it can walk. The sodomy law may have been repealed and gay marriage is at the forefront of political discussion, but one has the sense that mainstream media still struggle to accept gay sexuality. What’s the difference between showing a shirtless guy on the cover of Instinct and showing one on the cover of Men’s Health? “A guy without a shirt in a gay publication will always be seen as more sexual,” said Todd Evans, president of Rivendell Media, which handles advertising for Instinct.
On most newsstands, that’s enough of a reason to hide the gay and lesbian magazines on the back shelf. Sure, part of this has to do with sales numbers, but if that were the only explanation, Playboy would be sitting right next to the candy rack by the front door. As Bronski pointed out, Americans may be obsessed with the idea of sex without really wanting to dive in and explore it. If they were, Janet wouldn’t have needed to apologize and gay men would be able to read about how they can please each other in bed without offending the straight guy next to them at the magazine rack, who is thumbing through the story about monkeys and lesbians.
“As we’ve seen with the same-sex marriage debate, with more exposure
there will be more acceptance,” said Bronski. For gay and lesbian
magazines, hope may simmer in magazines like Instinct if it continues
to flourish without watering down sexual content. Sooner or later, the
magazines may even start to migrate toward the front shelf at the magazine
stand. Exposure leads to acceptance, right? If that particular truism
holds up, then acceptance may evolve into celebration.
And that sells. 