Stroke / c. 1997

Stroke never pretended to be anything but what the cover says: jerkoff stuff for guys. By the late nineties the porn magazine had become a showroom for the video studios, and this one opens with Mike Branson giving it to Brent Savage in Hardline, from Falcon Studios, the most polished name in the business. It sits alongside a hairy, mustached glory-hole shot and a raunchy color-pencil comic by Kenny Hairston.

It is a snapshot of the last years before the internet ate the newsstand. A $12.95 cover price, a Magcorp logo, and a back cover selling 1-900 phone sex tell you exactly how men were still buying their porn in 1997: off a rack, with cash, and from the same handful of studios that still define what nineties gay porn looks like.