Playboy is world famous for its nudes. So closely associated is the publication with sexy depictions of women that I was shocked to discover the magazine has, across its more than 65 years, run plenty of photos of naked or near-naked men. Nude dudes, in Playboy? Now that’s worth a little exploration.
So I decided to investigate. Whipping out my proverbial magnifying glass, I would become a privates detective, a gumshoe of guys, a dick of…dick. What would the pages reveal?
Read More: Kris Kristofferson and Sarah Miles, from the Playboy archives
As I sifted through the nearly 750 issues that constitute the Playboy archive, a couple of things became abundantly clear. First, the images of unclothed women far outnumber those of nude or semi-nude men, which isn’t terribly shocking. But it is worth noting, because my impression had been that Playboy was designed to show women without any men at all—no distractions that might get in the way of the ultimate fantasy. And second, though scantily clad men do show up in Playboy’s pages, the true full monty is rare, and a full-on hard-on appears to be a unicorn—that is, it doesn’t exist. (I would love to be wrong about this.)
I was excited by my first sighting of a nearly naked guy—not because it’s an especially sexy photo (it’s not) but because it occurs in the December 1953 Playboy—the very first issue. On the back inside cover, a black-and-white photo shows a young man wearing nothing but a turban, a codpiece and a saucy smile. The image promotes an article in the next issue about a swinging “art ball,” and that January 1954 piece features front and back photos of another nearly nude man, this one dressed as a satyr—horns, cleverly placed ivy leaves and a perky tail secured by God knows what. Fun party!
On the hunt for naked men in Playboy, things seemed off to a cheeky and playful start. But alas, the fun, sassy “oops, my towel might fall” photos quickly dry up, with nary a pec to be seen for what feels like years.
Thankfully, once the 1960s and 1970s hit, we get back to intermittent pictorials spotlighting guys who, in keeping with the free-spirited times, take off those confining clothes, man. These photo features often revolve around well-known actors in on-set photography from upcoming movies. Notable members of this elite gentlemen’s club include Peter Sellers (carrying a guitar to protect his modesty in the nudist-camp whodunit* A Shot in the Dark), Elliott Gould (manhood obscured in a sudsy bathtub for his film *Move) and David Carradine (steaming up the rails with Barbara Hershey in Boxcar Bertha).
Kris Kristofferson and the ‘Oh My’ Moment
Though I’m sure these sets were professional and chaste, some of the 1970s pictorials remind me of screen-grabbed porn. Looking at you, Kris Kristofferson and Sarah Miles, whose “oh my” July 1976 photo spread (promoting the movie The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea) showcases no fewer than five different sex moves.
Frankly, it’s nice to see a man like Kristofferson doing his part for readers’ entertainment, even if we don’t get to see his junk. The more I thought about it, the more sense this sort of male nudity seemed to make in Playboy. The magazine began as a kind of instruction manual for straight American men, so what better way to illustrate the epitome of that lifestyle than by putting naked men with naked women in sexy situations? It’s like an easy-to-follow visual aid to living the dream—five sex moves you too can master!—but without any visible wangs to distract men from their affirmed heterosexuality.
And then, in the August 1973 issue, I hit the jackpot: what I believe to be the magazine’s first full-on penis photo—a shot of porn star Harry Reems in a…relaxed state. It’s a seminal moment for Playboy. Even better, the magazine didn’t just publish that groundbreaking photo and then decide it had filled the penis quota for the year: The following issue includes an equally revealing photo of actor Johnny Crawford promoting his appropriately titled flick The Naked Ape (which happens to be a Playboy Productions movie).
That this tiny uptick in male nudity comes in the early 1970s is no surprise; porn was pumping into the mainstream, and the so-called pubic wars, in which Playboy and Penthouse published raunchier and raunchier images, were raging. By the 1980s, it seems a kinder, gentler era of male nudity had dawned in Playboy, as opposed to the frequently intense sexuality of the 1970s. Dolph Lundgren is like a pale beefy mannequin, more prop than player in his 1985 pictorial with then girlfriend supermodel Grace Jones. In 1986’s Double Take, a nude Don Johnson frolics by a waterfall with Melanie Griffith in an outtake captured for a story that had run a decade earlier—a johnson-free Johnson pictorial.
Men in Playboy, a History
To get a sense of why certain decisions regarding nude male photography were made in the past, I spoke with Gary Cole, Playboy’s longtime photography director, who held the role from 1975 until 2009. He quickly clarified the penis-shy editorial perspective.
“The subhead under the magazine’s cover logo read ‘Entertainment for Men,’ ” Cole says. And though the magazine had a generally welcoming attitude regarding all sexual orientations, it’s obvious the subhead in question could more accurately have read “Entertainment for Heterosexual Men.” Unsurprisingly for the world’s preeminent men’s magazine, the editors operated “on the assumption that our readers were not particularly interested” in photos of naked men.
“Male nudity was not a subject we dwelled on,” Cole adds, “though it was occasionally included in the magazine, especially in features such as Sex in Cinema and The Year in Sex.”
And he’s absolutely right. Flipping through these annual assemblages of film stills and nip slips, I saw a number of stars and leading men naked or close to it: David Bowie, Peter Fonda, Dennis Rodman and Antonio Banderas, to name just a handful, who all appeared alongside plenty of color photography of women celebs and actresses.
From time to time male skin was also deployed to great comic effect in Playboy. (See, for example, Steve Martin on the January 1980 cover, wearing only a white tux jacket and what might best be described as a diaper, which I guess is sexy to someone, somewhere.) Perhaps the most stellar example I found of nudity in service of hilarity is The Vatican Sex Manual. Appearing in the November 1976 issue, the pictorial is actually excerpted from comedian Eric Idle’s Rutland Dirty Weekend Book, in which the Monty Python star and a female model, both in various states of undress, demonstrate for the camera several amusingly asexual sex positions such as “The Fred Astaire” (butt to butt) and “The Missionary Position” (praying while kneeling on opposite sides of a bed).
“I always loved this gag,” Idle tells me via e-mail, “a how not-to-have sex manual.” He recalls feeling no awkwardness during the photo shoot. “I was fairly accustomed to being nude, as almost everyone swam naked in Provence in the summer in those days. It didn’t bother me.” (Interesting side note: Idle’s wife, Tania Kosevich, is the jeans-shorted September 1974 Playboy cover model.)
It’s easy to imagine that if the editors had been as comfortable with the naked male body as Idle was, we might have seen more of it, for the potential benefit of all readers—regardless of sexual orientation or gender identification.
Maybe that time has finally come. The world has seen increased recognition and acceptance of sexual fluidity, and as a culture we’re realizing that, yes, sexuality truly is rich and varied. Readers, like the population as a whole, come from across the sexual spectrum, so surely there’s a market. Male nudity can be a beautiful thing to so many people—here’s to entertainment for all.