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This story appears in our Fall 2026 issue featuring cover star Charli XCX, on newsstands September 28th. Want us to come to your place? Subscribe here to get it delivered to your door.
For 13 years, the federal government published Playboy in braille. A braille book or magazine can offer its reader perfect anonymity: To sighted eyes, it looks like a sheaf of blank paper. I know the pleasure myself, as a low-vision reader trying to keep up with my braille Harper’s. But Playboy gave its readers away. “One of the peculiarities of being a braille Playboy reader,” says Brian Charlson, a subscriber in the early 1980s, “is that the magazine had, in ink print on the cover of each volume, the Playboy logo, printed very large.”
The bunny raised questions. Mostly one: “Are there pictures in there?”
There weren’t. The Library of Congress’s National Library Service for the Blind and Print Disabled (NLS) reproduced the text and nothing else, so readers of the braille edition, as the old joke goes, really did read it just for the articles. Charlson had subscribed for the science fiction. Blinded at 11, when a homemade bomb of vinegar and baking soda went off in his hands, he had spent his adolescence clawing up from a braille Curious George toward whatever his sighted friends were reading, and Playboy ran the top sci-fi writers of the day: Bradbury, Asimov, Clarke. He liked the politics too. He was riding Boston’s buses all day to learn the system after his wife, Kim, took a job at the NLS’s Massachusetts branch, and he made a point of carrying the latest issue. “It created such fun conversations with fellow passengers,” Charlson says. Charlie, a regular driver on his route, read the print edition and—with the circumspection appropriate to a Boston transit employee—would describe the centerfold for Charlson’s benefit “without being overly graphic.”
The magazine was an anomaly in the NLS catalog, which otherwise ran to Reader’s Digest, Good Housekeeping, and inspirational tracts. “It’s a disgrace,” playwright Lillian Hellman, legally blind in her later years, told the New York Times in 1984. “There’s nothing to read.” Part of that was budget. Braille is expensive to produce and ship. The rest was the infantilizing posture that society has always taken toward blind people.
Playboy entered the NLS catalog in 1973 and quickly became one of the library’s most-read periodicals, which is how it came to the attention of two Republican lawmakers. In 1981 it drew the scrutiny of Mack Mattingly, a Georgia senator, and Chalmers Wylie, an Ohio congressman, who ordered the Librarian of Congress, historian Daniel Boorstin, to drop the magazine. Despite being imageless, the edition still carried Party Jokes, Ribald Classics, and The Playboy Forum, and the two pols deplored any impression that the federal government sanctioned the promotion of sex-oriented magazines. Boorstin reviewed the matter and declined.
Readers of the braille edition, as the old joke goes, really did read Playboy just for the articles.
So in 1985 Wylie went around him. Citing complaints from blind constituents, Wylie calculated the annual cost of the braille edition—$103,000—and moved to cut that exact sum from the appropriations bill funding the NLS. Both chambers passed it, to what one blind C-SPAN viewer remembered as laughter and snickering, and Reagan signed it in November. Boorstin, obliged to comply, warned that the vote set a precedent for defunding anything a majority of the House found inappropriate, subversive, or unacceptable. For blind readers, the message was plainer: Access to a publication available to everyone else could be treated as an indulgence and a dirty joke.
Scott Marshall, a Harvard-trained lawyer, was then director of governmental affairs for the American Council of the Blind—and a Playboy reader: “It was another source of information, and it was fun to read. The amount of literature that was available to us—remember, you could count it on one hand.” People asked him all the time how he could know he was gay if he was blind. “Same way you know you’re straight,” he’d say. “When you know, you know.”
Marshall and his colleagues sued the Librarian of Congress on First Amendment grounds, joined by the American Library Association, the Blinded Veterans Association, and Playboy, which had never earned money from the braille edition but agreed to pay the legal fees anyway. Marshall recruited Charlson, with whom he sometimes talked over the articles, as a plaintiff. Not every blind reader was on their side; the NLS fielded calls from patrons who thought Wylie had it right.
The case never went to trial. Forty years ago, ruling from the bench on August 28, 1986, Judge Thomas F. Hogan of the D.C. District Court found that the Library had engaged in viewpoint-based discrimination impinging on freedom of expression, ordered the braille edition restored, and directed that the missing 1986 issues be produced as talking books. Braille Playboy resumed in January 1987.
Blind people now have far greater access to the written word. Despite serious, persistent problems with web accessibility, a blind reader can access huge digital libraries of audiobooks and digital text—from the Kindle store to Libby—which can be read aloud by a screen reader or read in silence on a refreshable braille display. But the paternalist, ableist attitudes evinced by the 1985 Congress remain: In addition to the resurgence of book bans and attacks on librarians, in the last couple of years, the Trump administration has scapegoated (and fired) disabled federal workers, failed to enforce crucial web accessibility legislation, gutted the civil rights of disabled students, and threatened to rescind a landmark integration mandate that keeps disabled people in their communities and out of institutions. Several librarians I spoke to for this story expressed concern that drawing any attention to the services blind people still receive—including material from the NLS—will poke the bear and threaten the fragile protections we still have.
In Mel Brooks’s Robin Hood spoof, Men in Tights (1993), the blind assistant Blinkin, who thinks he’s alone, starts reading a braille edition of Ye Olde Playboy—this movie version, unlike the NLS’s, does have a tactile centerfold, and Blinkin fondles it as though it’s made of flesh. The joke here is the same one that made the congressmen snicker as they defunded Playboy in 1985: What interest could a blind person possibly have in sex? How would a blind person even conceive of a distant sexy body without direct access to the real thing?
M. Leona Godin, who is writing a book about blindness and photography, used to bring her braille Playboy to bars in the aughts, enjoying the reaction that the ink-print bunny got—the same bit Charlson was running on the bus a few decades earlier. She has spent years thinking about what it would take to make an image accessible. Tactile graphics—the obvious guess—work beautifully for maps and charts but can be challenging for photographs. What works is somebody describing the image, and describing it well: not the antiseptic distance of the old volunteer describers but the kind of thing Bridgerton pulled off in its third season, described so vividly and accurately that sighted viewers started switching the track on. (“Just watched the carriage scene with the audio description and I’m unwell,” one wrote on X.)
Playboy hasn’t kept up. The braille edition ended when Playboy stopped releasing issues in print in 2020 and so far hasn’t resumed with the magazine’s return to print last year. (NLS says it will consider adding Playboy back in spring 2027.) I visited Playboy .com recently with my screen reader running and found no alternative text on a single photograph. My computer announced, in its flat robotic voice, “Lydia Bielen graphic,” “Sophie Saint Miss July 2026 graphic.” In the age of interactive AI girlfriends, blind readers can still get only the articles.
I asked Godin what the magazine should do about it. “What if you had the descriptions voiced by the models?” she said. “That would be such a decadent, titillating form of image description.”
She’s right. A modest proposal: Playboy should publish a short audio file of each Playmate describing her own image. Twenty seconds, a micropodcast of sorts; a professional describer can step in if she’d rather not. Set it in text as well and it can go into a braille edition. As with most access work, the benefit won’t stop at the people who need it. And it would finally invert the oldest joke in this magazine’s history: It’s long past time for the blind to read Playboy for the pictures.