Hex After Dark
Kenya Ahyet
After Dark was an entertainment magazine that covered theatre, cinema, stage plays, ballet, performance art, and various artists, including singers, actors and actresses, and dancers. First published in May 1968, the magazine succeeded Ballroom Dance Magazine.[1][2]
In the late 1970s Patrick Pacheco assumed the editorship from William Como and strove for a time to make the magazine a more serious critical monthly with a greater emphasis on quality writing, abandoning color printing inside and reducing photos to a few inches square. This was a reaction to William Como's "eye-candy" thrust, but sales were low and in 1981 Louis Miele replaced Pacheco at the helm and returned the magazine to the full-color format with plenty of skin on show.
It seemed however that the day was done for After Dark, perhaps because several newer magazines were doing a better and more explicitly targeted job of appealing to the magazine's original readership, and as such Miele's incarnation of After Dark folded after only a couple of years, this time permanently.
After Dark, founded by its first editor, William Como and Rudolph Orthwine (both of Dance Magazine), covered a wide range of entertainment- or lifestyle-related topics. In addition to numerous articles on dance, topics ranged from a review of the stage production of the musical Hair in the December 1968 issue[4] and an article on Shirley Bassey in the January 1972 issue,[5] to a cover photograph and feature article on Donna Summer in the April 1977 issue.[6]
The May 1979 issue contained a profile of actor Philip Anglim, who originated the role on Broadway of John Merrick in The Elephant Man, a play by Bernard Pomerance.[7] Two other profiles in that issue were of James Mason, the actor who was nominated for an Academy Award for his role as the husband of Judy Garland in the film A Star Is Born[8] and Marilyn Hassett, who portrayed Jill Kinmont in The Other Side of the Mountain, a film about skier Kinmont's accident that left her paralyzed.[9]In 1981 Lee Swanson and Louis Miele became co-publishers with their first issue being in May 1981 with Diana Ross on the cover. Swanson & Miele published the magazine from the Flatiron Building in New York before moving it to Los Angeles. Swanson died of AIDS in 1984 at the age of 53. Ownership of the magazine was left to business manager Paul Lafayette of Stamford, Connecticut.[10]Issues regularly contained features on fashion; at times articles were about men's fashion exclusively. The "Cityscapes" section contained brief articles about then-current items of note in various cities or other geographical areas worldwide.
Reach the Audience with Money to Spare. You'll find them in After Dark! They're affluent, successful and single. With no strings to tie them down. And the time and money to live it up, any chance they get.[11]
Advertising for other products or services for gay men was explicit; for example, the ads for Hand in Hand Video, a gay pornography studio; The David Kopay Story, regarding former professional football player David Kopay's homosexuality;[13] and an ad for books by noted gay author Paul Monette, The Gold Diggers (containing the tag line, "Glittering, Glamorous, Gay"), and Lovers: The Story of Two Men, by Michael Denneny, described in the ad as "A poignantly true love story, with photographs".[14]
The May 1979 issue included an ad for an organization simply identified as "GSF" titled, "No Man Should Be Without A Man!", which stated, "If you would like to meet warm, sincere gay men (and women) who are interesting in forming...relationships then it's time you find out about GSF."[15] The issue also included an ad in its "After Dark Classified" ads for a "Gay Astrologer".[16]
Other advertising was obviously intended for adult readers as well, presumably those with open minds. The February 1977 issue contained a half-page ad for the Harry Reems Legal Defense Fund. The ad appealed for funds for Reems' defense in two separate lawsuits for his participation in the pornographic films Deep Throat and The Devil in Miss Jones.[17]
One of the strangest reincarnations in journalistic history. Catering to musically inclined blue-haired old ladies and golfers in Hush Puppies, Ballroom Dance Magazine was a recreational journal for the geriatric set. It was out of the ashes of a periodical devoted to such topics as waltzes, rumbas, and turkey trots that After Dark, an audacious mass-market experiment in gay eroticism, arose like a phoenix in all of its subversive splendor.[18]
Although not described as a "gay magazine", After Dark regularly covered topics of interest to the gay community. Cal Culver, better known as the gay porn star Casey Donovan, appeared on the cover of the December 1972 issue.[19] The February 1975 issue included a photographic portfolio of the gay porn star Peter Berlin.[20] At its height, the magazine had more than 300,000 readers, "composed almost exclusively of gay men," according to Daniel Harris.[21]
The May 1979 issue included a feature article on the G.G. Barnum's Room, a New York City alternative nightclub catering to a gay and transvestite clientele. The feature article included information about the evolution / genesis of the club and the makeup of its then-current customers. The feature also contained a tandem piece on rollerskating disco, "Boogie on Wheels".[22]
The magazine publishers acknowledged the magazine's appeal to the gay community, noting that the magazine "had gotten a following in the homosexual community seven or eight years before any of the current homosexual magazines came on the market."[23]
The magazine, intentionally or not, provided a level of homoeroticism by regularly using images of nude or partially nude men for its cover and article illustrations. Although some illustrations of partially clad or nude women were included at times, males comprised the majority of the subjects. Some of the illustrations related directly to the subject of the article, but others seemed to be used just for their nudity or partial nudity.
A feature article in the February 1977 issue, "Musclebound for Glory", contained photos of bodybuilders, thus relating the illustrations directly to the topic of the article. Arnold Schwarzenegger was the cover model for that issue and several photographs of him were used as illustrations in the article. In two photographs, he appears in the nude; one photograph shows part of his penis. The feature is an in-depth look at bodybuilding as "one of the most fascinating (and least explored) subcultures in America."[25] Illustrated with pictures of barely clothed bodybuilders, the article, intentionally or not, evokes homoeroticism.
One photograph in that issue that seems to use gratuitous nudity is one of actor Paul Charles, performing the role of "Mark" on Broadway in the musical A Chorus Line. The illustration is one of several for an article about current events on Broadway, and consists of a narrative text as well as photographs of performers with brief summaries of their productions in the captions of the photos.[26] Charles is photographed nude with a fur coat strategically draped over one shoulder that just covers his groin.
Occasionally when a teacher was absent I was asked to fill in as a substitute for their class. The children hated me even more than the faculty did. I was horribly afraid of them. When I looked at their moist, vicious faces I was reminded of something one might find in a nature documentary: a colony of secret, oceanic worms, buried in the deepest sand, slippery, pink and blind. My fundamental lack of authority was dazzling. The children sensed it intuitively. When I tried to take attendance, it released in them an animal frenzy.
I peered up at the sky, colored pink by the deranged and blazing sunset. All around there was the sound that was so much like rain but was not rain; it was only the spring wind moving horribly through its attendant trees.
I was hungover when I arrived at work the next morning. I sat stiffly at my desk, staring at the round, childish wall clock positioned above me, three minutes too slow, and taking small sips of water from my reusable stainless-steel bottle. Occasionally I would vomit a little in my mouth, at which point I would swallow my puke and chase it down with more water. Between sips I gazed into the hall through the half-open door of my windowless office and typed out emails about the forms I was paid to keep track of.
Out in the hallway I watched a sophomore glance in both directions and, once she had determined that she was alone, bang her head discreetly against a glossy blue locker. Her skull made a dull thwacking sound when it struck the metal.
During a crash, I read in the driving manual PDF I had taken to studying when no one else could see the screen of my desktop, a person not properly restrained becomes a flying object and a danger to each person in the vehicle.
I did not like zoos. Not for ethical reasons, but because the animals were always smaller than I imagined and often seemed to have clinical depression, which ruined my fun. The seals were, of course, the exception to this. They did not seem to have clinical depression, but I disliked them for other reasons: the reality of their rubbery, bulbous bodies and the way they appeared to be content with a ridiculous form of domestication in which they were made to perform the same repetitive, degrading ritual over and over again, just for the opportunity to listlessly chomp down on some bits of fish. The seals, I thought, had no self-respect. Watching them made me feel totally humiliated.
When my parents arrived, my mother was wearing a long silk skirt and a leopard-print blouse with an oversized collar; my father wore dark-wash jeans and a crisp cotton shirt the color of a live trout. They looked as elegant as I had hoped. Did they like this bar? I asked. No, they did not. Also, the weather was bad. They had not had a good day. They had visited a museum whose folksy Americana quilts struck them as totally pathetic. Their tour guide had braces, which was childish and disgusting. They did not know why they were in this city. They were feeling disillusioned with the nation as a whole. Violent crime, they reminded me, was on the rise. My mother ordered a gin and tonic and stirred it with her pinky while she rattled off a list of the zoo animals she did and did not like.
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