Talk About Dishing Up Dirt!

By EMILY MITCHELL

In their own way, male and female teens are alike. They dress uniformly in jeans and T shirts, speak the same hip argot and sport identical hairstyles. Both sexes can drive parents crazy. But while teen girls have stacks of glossy magazines devoted to their interests, boys have made do with car mags, sports publications and backpacking monthlies. Now the unconscionable neglect of the social male teen has ended. Dale Lang, owner of Sassy, the irreverent and successful magazine for female teenagers, has driven across the gender gap with Dirt, a magazine for "L.A. hip-hoppers, guys from the New York club scene or boys in Alabama who are into heavy metal," in the words of one editor.

Getting Dirt into the right hands -- the target age is 14 to 20 -- was a matter of finding out where the boys are. The first issue has been given savvy packaging as a separate 23-page supplement to the September copy of Sassy (total paid circ. 631,000), and to make certain that female readers get the message, its editorial page urges them to "please give the enclosed Dirt to a guy." In fact, more than 100,000 male teens were already reading Sassy, whose lunchroom lingo -- "icky" is an acceptable adjective -- and chatty tone have made it a solid hit.

"What makes Sassy special," a teen reader told Lang and the magazine's staff, "is that when I read it, it's like talking to my best friend on the telephone." Dirt will speak to teen boys the same way, says Lang, but in a male voice. That will mean a cool collection of fiction, short takes about school, sports, art and -- yes -- articles about girls. Sample headline: HEY, BABY, WHAT'S YOUR SIGN? AN IDIOT'S GUIDE TO FIRST DATES. Another refreshing notion: Sassy treats male teens as people -- not jerks or hunks -- and that respect for the opposite sex will cross over to Dirt.

To dish up Dirt, Lang and its publisher, Bobbie Halfin, rounded up an all- male staff on the West Coast. The editor in chief is Mark Lewman, 24, a.k.a. Lew. He and Dirt's art director, Andy Jenkins, 27, and photo editor, Spike Jonze, 21, got to know one another while working at Freestylin', a Los + Angeles-based bicycling magazine. Their own publication, Homeboy, which Lewman calls "a skateboard magazine with everything from dance techniques to recipes," folded after six issues, but the threesome had honed their skills. As for other qualifications, Dirt's introductory editorial points out that all three are former teenagers.

Dirt will have a limited newsstand test in late October, and the premier issue will be available next spring. The current Dirt is crammed with dark graphics and dense type. Articles range from a 23-year-old convict's account of life in an urban gang to Lewman's good-grooming checklist. Shampoos, he notes, are recommended "before school pictures and whenever your hair looks stupid."

A few years ago, a piggyback ride from saucy Sassy might have been bumpy. At its 1988 start-up, the magazine's frank material -- the pros and cons of virginity, for example -- drew the fire of the Moral Majority, and advertisers turned shy. They returned after the magazine softened its controversial profile.

Under Lang's direction -- he bought the magazine in 1989 -- Sassy continues to attract hip readers by running smart feature articles on teenage females in the business end of the pop-music industry or the reasons why popular people can be as insecure as anybody else. Dirt, however, appears unlikely to go through the same tempestuous adolescence. So far, it seems more like a brash little brother who could be a teen forever.

With reporting by Kathleen Brady