Playkids

On U.S. newsstands this month is arrayed the biggest, bawdiest, bestselling collection of stag magazines in publishing history. Just as Confidential's peep-and-tell formula sent a horde of imitators yipping after pay dirt, the sex-fueled three-year flight of Playboy ("Entertainment for Men") has shaken out a pack of wolf-whistling periodicals. In all, there are more than 40 playkids on the market, and they are fast outstripping the scandal sheets. The most successful of the upstarts are monthlies, with such names as Caper, Nugget, Rogue, Escapade and Cabaret. Like Playboy ( TIME, Sept. 24), they trade in the smirk, the leer and the female torso--only more so. Latest addition to the wolf pack, out this week, is a Negro monthly called Duke.

Last week the stag mags* were in the midst of a censorship battle that raged all the way from Boston to Los Angeles, from suburban mothers' clubs to the Supreme Court. In New York, where police in the past six months have seized some 2,000 copies of 15 different magazines under city obscenity laws, a publishing newsletter protested: "Never in the history of the magazine industry have the newsstands been flooded with so many borderline, semi-obscene and actually pornographic periodicals." Legislatures in ten states were considering bills that would make it illegal to distribute or sell the magazines. In Missouri the house is expected to pass a bill already approved by the senate to lower stiff penalties against offending magazines so that it will be easier to get convictions. In Pittsburgh, after a six-day investigation, a grand jury warned: "Immediate action must be taken to save our young people from being corrupted by lewd literature. Printed filth is seriously threatening our moral, social and community life."

Literary Chloroform. But the stags lave yet to be brought to bay. The trouble with attempts to ban them is that most legal definitions of obscenity ineviably trap serious-intentioned publishers and writers in the censor's net. Last month district attorneys from 38 Pennsylvania counties met to "discuss new methods of combatting the obscene literature pouring into the state." but were anable to agree on any fair or workable censorship formula. Even churchmen do not agree that the stag magazines drive children to delinquency. The Rev. Owen McKinley Walton, executive director of Pittsburgh's Council of Churches, denounced them as "literary chloroform, deadening the moral and spiritual strength of our youth.'' But Unitarian Minister Irving R. Murray, chairman of the Pittsburgh chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, who "deplores dirty magazines properly defined.'' quoted extensive psychological studies showing that "literature, decent or indecent, is without effect on juvenile delinquents, practically none of whom read anything."

In any case, the men's magazines are no more intended for juvenile consumption than Peyton Place--and few of them are really as gamy. Most of them run a Playboyish mishmash of racy cartoons, club-car jokes, nonfiction pieces that swagger leeringly from foreign affairs ("Those Sympathetic Geishas'') to history ("Nero, the Most Ribald Roman of Them All"). Many of their short stories are culled at no cost from such classic rogues as Boccaccio and Chaucer, who is identified in the April Modem Man as "The Passionate Pageboy." The average playkid reads less like pornography than a gay-dog college magazine put out while the dean was napping.

Smut from a Hat. In their eagerness to please the boys, publishers agree, some magazines have shed the last vestiges of good taste. To avoid prosecution, some smut publishers deliver their magazines by truck and operate through fictitious corporations. "Too many guys are working out of a hat." complains Chicago Publisher George Von Rosen, who owns 13 magazines ranging from an art monthly for teachers to Cabaret (circ. 200,000), a three-year-old monthly stag magazine. "Today they're printing a magazine. Tomorrow they're making paper boxes."

For the publisher who wants to keep on publishing, there are already some strong economic incentives to stay within the confines of good taste. He must pass postal inspection if he hopes to send his magazine through the mails. He is subject to informal censorship from dealers and newsstand chains such as New York's Union News Co., which refuses to handle offensive magazines. Another effective censor is success. Esquire (circ. 786,156), the good grey dean of men's magazines, now serves up cheesecake only as dessert with such sober fare as its current "special report" on the U.S. Army's "shockingly weak condition." As readership and advertising linage have shot up, even Playboy (circ. 795,965) has toned down its gags and dressed up its girls. Other playkids also show signs of growing up. They are bidding for original art and short stories by new authors; Playboy's fiction rates (maximum: $2.000) are among the highest in the industry. Writers, artists and photographers are responding; hard hit by the collapse of five mass-circulation family magazines in the past two years, they have found that one way to keep the wolf from the door is to act like one.

: *Also called "b. & b. [for breast and buttock] books."

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