Gayboy Magazine (Gay Adult Magazine/70's and 80's)

Gayboy Magazine — Houston, Texas

Before gay culture had websites, apps, and social media, it had magazines—and Gayboy was one of Houston’s decidedly adult contributions to the newsstand.

Published in Houston during the 1970s and 1980s, Gayboy belonged to the explosion of gay male magazines that followed the sexual liberation movement. Part adult entertainment, part fantasy, and part underground publishing, magazines like these offered openly gay imagery at a time when simply finding representations of gay men in mainstream media was extraordinarily difficult.

The importance of these publications went beyond the obvious. Their pages also carried advertisements for gay bars, bathhouses, bookstores, mail-order businesses, clubs, and other services, creating an informal network through which gay men could discover an entire community that remained largely invisible to the outside world.

And producing an openly gay adult magazine in 1970s Texas was itself an act of defiance. Obscenity laws, conservative politics, censorship, and the social risks surrounding homosexuality meant that publishers and retailers operated in a very different environment from today. The unapologetic title GAYBOY left absolutely nothing coded.

By the 1980s, the AIDS crisis profoundly changed the world these magazines documented, while home video and eventually the internet transformed gay adult publishing altogether. Original issues now survive as fascinating pieces of queer ephemera—not simply erotica, but snapshots of the businesses, bodies, fashions, language, and desires of their era.