New Jersey-based publishing company Mavety Media Group has put the kibosh on its library of gay skin magazines.
Mavety published a variety of gay nude mag titles, including Mandate, Torso, Inches (and all its ethnic affiliates) and Playguy, since the mid-’70s.
The formula for each was the same: a buff hunk with a nice package smacked across the cover complemented by cheeky, candy-coloured headlines about hungry power bottoms, straight guys getting blowjobs and photo spreads of world-class ass.
The company was founded by tycoon George Mavety, a straight guy and former Sunday school teacher. He died in April 2000 while playing tennis at one of his homes.
Would his empire of gay porn mags have crumbled if he were still around? Perhaps not. He was, after all, a true believer in the power of print. He didn’t get the craze for internet smut.
“I want to hold a magazine in my hand while I masturbate,” he once told the author of Boy Culture, a gay internet blog. “Who would want to have one hand on a keyboard while you’re doing that?”
If Mavety saw his magazines collecting dust on the racks at Canadian-based gay stuff retailer Priape, he’d flip in his grave.
“Porn magazines don’t sell like they used to,” says Kiley Woodland, a funky-haired employee at Priape’s Toronto store. Woodland says he’s noticed a decline in porn magazine sales during his four-year tenure at Priape.
“Older clients,” he says, buy porn magazines the most. “The two-for-one packs are popular.”
Cheap porn, professional to self-made, and lots of it is what Toronto-based pornographer Todd Klinck sees in the future — a future bound to the internet.
Klinck, co-owner of Goodhandy’s, a pansexual nightclub in Toronto, isn’t surprised by Mavety’s decision to scrap its gay publications.
“There’s always talk of major newspapers closing,” he says. “I don’t see why porn should be any different.”
He says if there is an audience for porn magazines, it is likely those who live in small towns or — eek — those who don’t use computers.
Klinck says he watched porn magazines die when he ran a male strip club in early 2000 and noticed changes in the way his male models jerked off before stripping.
“In the beginning strippers brought porn magazines to the club to get hard,” says Klinck. “Now they watch porn on their iPhones.”
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