MONDO BIZARRO ADULT SLICKS
One time sci-fi pulp cover artist Milton Luros started his American Art Agency (Parliament News) in 1958 with titles such as Snap, Touch, Cocktail, and Black Silk Stockings, the later title reportedly having been sold to Parliament by Elmer Batters. By 1965 Luros was the most prolific publisher and distributor of the high-end adult slicks in the country and also published non-girlie mags such as 1965’s The Face of War – Vietnam.
But, many other offbeat adult slicks and sexploitation mags cranked out by more obscure publishing companies from the same time period, on both the east and west coasts, constituted a vast array of diverse magazines which are worthy of discussion (if you can get the pages unstuck). These were the mags that I searched for, to include in Bad Mags.
Generally the adult slicks that came out of New York–the center of magazine publishing in the US at the time–were focused on bizarre fetish-fashion and the more sadomasochistic type of sex. California on the other hand, and coast, published more of the traditional girlie slicks, nudist mags and swinger mags, and was the center of porn from the mid-sixties on, specifically Los Angeles and its San Fernando Valley.
There was seemingly no end to the number of titles that were published, or the publishers who created them. Some of them were fly-by-night ventures, others had more staying power, but by the time hardcore porn became the accepted norm for the adult market in the early ‘70s after Deep Throat’s success, the softcore girlie and sexploitation slicks, for all intents and purposes, became a part of history and the hardcore “porno chic” took over.
The psychedelic sensibilities of the late ‘60s had been fertile ground for whacked and way out graphics and subject matter for the slicks. Having said that, these mags were generally not being bought by the youth they employed or tried to portray. Ultimately they were fantasy and masturbation tools trying to sell the “new” youthful attitude toward sexuality to an older male population, but at the same time these magazines offered more than met the groin.
Some of these mags actually did act as a sort of “sexual education” material for the times, although a slightly warped sexual education in many cases. Close-ups of genitals and sexual activity was a form of sexual education at that time and hardcore porn had its start in the “sex education” and “marriage manuals” of the late sixties and early ‘70s which are now commonly referred to as “socio-porn.”
Time and hindsight make many of these mags look strange and more alien than they did at the time they were published. Here I’ve tried to focus on the best examples of the weird and offbeat mags, but there always seemed to be others waiting in the wings. In fact, I didn’t know most of these mags existed until finding them on eBay. Having been too young at the time they came out to know about, or be concerned with such things––other than Playboy, Knight, Adam, and the other newsstand girlie mags––and not having access to any dealers that carried these titles, I only became aware of the adult slicks in the early ‘70s when I became old enough to enter adult book stores on Tremont Street and in the Combat Zone in Boston. Seeing what was available then, I would occasionally buy some collectors items from the ‘60s found in used magazine bins. The advent of the internet, and particularly eBay, has created a forum for all these publications to bubble up to the surface from all the closets, drawers, attics, nooks, crannies, and warehouses that they had been secreted in over the years. Playboy they were not!
