A look at the magazine's early LGBTQ advocacy in "The Playboy Philosophy."
What does it mean to advocate for sexual freedom? And who is permitted to be free?
These are the central questions posed by “The Playboy Philosophy,” a series of editorials penned by Hugh Hefner in which the Playboy founder strove to articulate the ethos guiding the magazine, following years of criticism from both the right and left alike. While defending the publication’s impact on the burgeoning sexual revolution — and more broadly, society itself — these intermittent editorials decried puritanism and censorship, while advocating for freedom of speech and the right of individuals to make informed decisions about their own bodies. Between 1962 and 1965, 25 installments of “The Playboy Philosophy” ran in its namesake’s glossy pages.
Although Playboy is most commonly associated with the mechanics of heterosexual desire, “The Playboy Philosophy” advocated not merely for the sexual autonomy of straight people, but also fought against the criminalization of queer sex, then widespread across the U.S. When the first installment of “The Playboy Philosophy” was published, Illinois had been the only state to repeal its decades-old law banning sodomy — commonly understood as targeting consensual sex between male partners. In Playboy’s April 1964 issue, the column denounced these laws as “irrational,” while noting that more than a dozen states — at the time — allowed for individuals convicted with “crimes against nature” to be imprisoned with hard labor.
While the project was, in some ways, ahead of its time, it took several years for its author to openly advocate for LGBTQ+ equality. Early columns tiptoe around the question of queer rights — as if punting the subject to future issues. A March 1963 op-ed notes that “a man’s morality, like his religion, is a personal affair best left to his own conscience,” the word “man” is curiously left undefined. Which kinds of men, one might reasonably wonder, deserve such latitude? And how are women included in this vision of sexual freedom? When it comes to the former question, Playboy steps out of the closet — so to speak — in September 1964, using the “Philosophy” to declare sodomy statutes to be unconstitutional (and downright un-American):
By establishing a specific sex ethic as the law, our government deprives each individual of the free choice that our democracy is supposed to assure. This separation of the interests of church and state is one of the fundamental principles upon which this country was founded… The statutes that place coercive controls over the personal sex behavior of the adult members of our society are, however, quite clearly no more than the reflection of a particular religious code that is unrelated to our secular interests and welfare.
Half a century later, LGBTQ+ historians believe this sentiment made Playboy an unlikely but critical ally of the growing Gay Liberation Movement. That movement came to enjoy unprecedented visibility following the June 1969 riots at the Stonewall Inn, a protest against routine police brutality encouraged by the very same laws condemned in the “Philosophy.” Michael Bronski, author of A Queer History of the United States, says that the political mission of Playboy — one defined by freedom of choice, so long as those decisions don’t harm others — was all but predestined to echo what LGBTQ+ advocates of the period sought to accomplish. Everyone just wanted to be left alone, a message that likely resonated with Playboy’s readers.
“Just the very notion of sexual freedom for heterosexuals bled over to sexual freedom for same-sex couples and same-sex loving people,” Bronski says. “[Playboy] understood that it was hypocritical not to include everybody. The question is: How much did this carry over to the average Playboy reader? I think actually it did. Subliminally, many more people were saying: Well, I don’t know… if this is OK for me and my girlfriend, I don’t see why two guys can’t do it.”
What made the magazine’s advocacy effective, according to historians, is that it didn’t just argue that laws regulating sexual behavior were harmful for the LGBTQ+ community — instead demonstrating that they were bad for everyone. Although sodomy laws were primarily weaponized against sexual minorities, “The Playboy Philosophy” notes that their authors seldom “explain what offenses the laws were intended to cover.” That vagueness, the “Philosophy” says, permitted authorities to apply these statutes against virtually any form of intimacy viewed as non-normative by the government, particularly non-procreative erotic acts. That included sexual acts between straight partners.
These principles weren’t exclusive to the “Philosophy,” also found in the magazine’s broader coverage and content. According to Marc Stein, a professor at San Francisco State University, “The Playboy Forum” — a regular feature functioning as a dialogue between the magazine and its readership — published a letter from a man imprisoned under Indiana state law for consensual oral sex with his girlfriend. Fellatio, whether enjoyed in a straight or queer context, wouldn’t be fully legalized at the federal level until the Supreme Court’s landmark Lawrence v. Texas ruling in 2003, and Playboy “really did a service by calling attention to the public exactly what was criminalized,” Stein says.
“While the laws typically criminalized oral sex, they were enforced selectively, and that’s what led the public to think that what was being criminalized was homosexuality,” he says. “Straight people realized that they themselves were unindicted sexual criminals. That, I think, helped swing public opinion that would ultimately culminate in the decriminalization of sodomy.”
For some straight readers, the knowledge that they weren’t safe from legal scrutiny was eye-opening. Before working at Playboy for nearly 40 years, a teenage James R. Petersen was shocked when a 1963 issue of the magazine — which he procured at a local five-and-dime store — included a state-by-state breakdown outlining the criminalization of consensual sexual activity. Outraged, he showed the chart to his parents and asked, “Do you know that what you do in your bedroom is against the law?” Although they claimed that he needed therapy because he seemed “obsessed with what was going on in their bedroom,” Petersen says that he shot back, “Hey, it’s not me that’s obsessed with what’s going on in your bedroom. It’s the state of Connecticut.”
What made the advocacy undergirding “The Playboy Philosophy” so necessary is that there were so few other voices in midcentury America recognizing the realities of their everyday lives, according to Petersen. During his time as an editor for “The Playboy Forum,” he says that many letters came from LGBTQ+ readers who had nowhere else to turn. A woman once wrote to him asking what to do about the fact that her girlfriend’s parents disapproved of their relationship; a man sought advice after learning his wife was bisexual. The magazine’s goal in those days, Petersen says, was to “strip away the labels we attached to sex,” no matter who was having it.
“The common misconception of ‘The Playboy Philosophy’ is to reduce it to one sentence: If it feels good, do it,” he says. “But the philosophy was about individual rights. That word ‘individual’ gets repeated a gazillion times. He did not want the state to have any say in what you did in your bedroom, what you read in your bedroom, who you fucked in your bedroom, and how you fucked. That was not the state’s business.”
