Male Lovers · Vol. 3 No. 2 / June/July 1971

Male Lovers came out of Pendulum Publishers in Los Angeles, the same house that put Ed Wood Jr.'s pseudonymous sex paperbacks on the racks. The editorial page in this issue does something those quickie books never bothered with: it quotes the President's Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, whose 1970 report argued that the law was not the best way to deal with porn, and it argues that a "sexual renaissance" was making homosexual men a little more tolerable to straight America.

That is the 1971 adult business talking to itself, half civics lesson and half alibi, wrapped around hairy, tattooed men kissing on the cover in full color. The features list runs from fiction like "Closet Queen" to "Nudist Freaks," and the back cover simply says "Not for sale to minors." It is a snapshot of the moment gay sex was being sold as both liberation and a magazine you could buy at the corner.