SLEAZE '73

I recently purchased this magazine on eBay. It's yet another piece to add to my growing collection of vintage men's adventure magazines (or MAMs). I've got about two hundred different issues in my collection so far, one which I've built over the last several years. I don't buy them as often as I used to but every once in a while, I get an itch that only one of these mags can scratch.

Case in point, MEN for May 1973. I was at the end of my junior year in high school the month this magazine was originally published. I certainly didn't buy it at the time as I wasn't buying any of this type of material back then. I probably saw it on the stands at 7-11 or some other convenience store but I avoided that material for fear that one, the guy behind the counter probably wouldn't sell it to me and two, it just looked sleazy as hell.

And sleazy it is. That's a huge part of the appeal for me now all these many years later. By May of 1973, MEN was clearly making the transition from focusing on articles and artwork with the occasional, fully clothed pin-up photos to an almost 100% skin mag. You can see it in the cluttered art direction on the cover. Four different images and more than a half dozen blurbs make it hard to determine exactly what this magazine was selling. One of the articles, about "Mate-Swap" Cities, actually names Austin, TX, as one of the top cities for "swingers" in 1973.

MEN wasn't an out and out skin mag yet but clearly the powers that were at Magazine Management Company (which also handled the Marvel Comics black and white magazines of the era), saw that featuring photos, (even grainy black-and-white pics printed on cheap paper) of near naked young women was more profitable (and cheaper to produce) than paying writers and artists to crank out outlandish "true" stories of crime, adventure and war.

Even though I passed on issues of MEN and their like minded brethren publications, I was eager to reach the point where I could purchase an issue of a honest-to-Hefner real skin mag, something that had class and critical cachet. I'm speaking of course, of the legendary PLAYBOY magazine. Oh sure, I'd seen issues here and there. My older brother had copies stashed in the bath towel compartment in our bathroom, some barber shops had them around for customers to peruse and some neighborhood kid always had a prized (and possibly purloined) copy to show around.

But I had never actually gone into a 7-11 or other convenience store and purchased a copy for myself. Again, I was afraid that the sale would be turned down and I wanted to spare myself the embarrassment of not being to able to buy an issue of PLAYBOY.  All of that changed in November of 1973.

Even though I wouldn't turn 18 until March of 1974, I could pass as being of age and I decided that if I acted with confidence and self-assurance, I could probably pull off buying the latest issue.

And that's just what I did one fine day.

Here's the issue I purchased: