Contact Mags

When I was a pre-gay back at camp in the early eighties, I remember kids talking about "Contact Mags" which were not just porn mags like Playboy or Penthouse, but magazines that actually showed fucking (hence their other less mysterious name: "Fuck Mags"). These amazing commodities were possessed by some of the cooler camp counselors--and for some reason they would let their ten year old charges look at them, which was either progressive or kinda lecherous.

  In theory the mags were illegal, but in retrospect I realize this was crap--they were just harder to find because you actually had to go to a porn store to get them. They were usually no more than stills from a movie, and really served as a giant as ads for that film.

The gay versions where available at certain news stands in the West Village in New York, where I grew up. Some of my earliest images of hardcore gay sex were from these magazines.

They barely exist anymore. I got a few recently at a vintage sale for 16$, and could not have been happier. The death of print porn is a very sad thing for me. I love video too, but the enduring quality of a photograph is somehow different to me.

Contact mags often had the unusual ability to take a cheesy low budget movie and make it seem classy...probably because the film images were of so much higher quality than the VHS tapes I ended up watching. This one contains still from "Pacific Coast Highway 2", a pretty mediocre movie. Not that I didn't masturbate to it constantly for a few years, but really it wasn't that good. Steve Regis was always a favorite of mine, and Cole Phillips wasn't bad on the eyes either.

Box Cover Art, Steve Regis

These two films are from my old VHS tape stockpiles. The covers are obviously from the same photo shoot, despite being put out by different companies. In "On the Job" he was featured with Cole Phillips, whom he often partnered with, in a scene memorable for the amount of baby oil they where slathered with, and Cole Phillips' desperate need for a pubic hair trim. The other film had one grainy poorly lit scene with Steve and Ted Matthews. Steve tended to be in pictures with poor production values for some reason. I was a fan of his for his beefy build and his hairiness (not featured on these box covers), both unusual in the early 90's. His cock, which was usually cockringed, was veiny to the point of being somewhat upsetting. He generally looked and sounded like a uneducated laborer, which turns me on. He died young of a heart attack in 2001.