The site is called Men CyberClub (www.menmagazine.com), and as of deadline was barely six weeks old, an online boy toy trying to insert itself firmly into a niche market that already contains the likes of Chisel (www.chisel.com) and Boyzone (www.boyzone.com), to name a few. In order to succeed, then, this newest venture in online gay porn will have to be extremely hardcore, right? It'll have to go where few men have gone before, right? Wrong. The truth of the matter is that if there is such a thing as a soft niche within a hard niche, this is it. The site could in fact be rated PG. It may not even qualify as porn at all.
"For you guys, it wouldn't," says Caryn Goldberg, publisher of both the print and online versions of Men magazine and its brother publications. "But for a more mainstream non-sex reader, they consider anything with naked guys in it to be pornography. It's a fine line. We do have some sets with two guys, but still, there's no sex, no penetration and no ejaculation. There's nothing. It's softcore. Although, strangely enough, straight people still consider it hardcore." But of course they do. The scientists call it Fear of the Phallus. Most men are afflicted.
"You've seen it out in the mainstream entertainment industry too," continues Goldberg, definitely on a roll. "A movie that has frontal nudity of a woman gets a G or PG rating, and the second there's a dick in it, all of a sudden it's R-rated. And it really is no more than that. It's just that male nudity is so much more... 'dirty' than female." Preaching to the choir, baby.
But enough griping. Men CyberClub certainly has nothing to be ashamed of. It's a solid product with an enviable stockpile of original images that should keep it cruising for years to come. And though new to the Internet, it boasts a rather distinguished offline pedigree. According to Goldberg, its roots coincide with the beginnings of the Gay Liberation Movement. "LPI (Liberation Publications Inc.) was started in 1966 with The Advocate, which never made any money. It was started the year before Stonewall as a little mimeographed newsletter produced in the dark of night in the basement of ABC Television here in LA by some gay employees; mostly to warn people about bar raids. It depended heavily on personal ads and phone sex ads, but it showed no graphic nudity, no frontal nudity at all. But it was still basically a man's magazine, before Out or anything. It was one of a kind. Then, in 1984, they started Men magazine, which was supposed to do sexual products to help support The Advocate financially."
Now, more than fifteen years and a million archived photographs later, Men is finally ready to venture into cyberspace along with a fistful of fellow publications. "We have three print magazines," says Goldberg. "Men, Freshmen, which was originally a spin-off from Men featuring younger guys but basically the same format as Men, and Unzipped, a bi-weekly that covers primarily the adult gay entertainment community. However, it's going monthly and we're changing the focus of it to be something more broad. It's going to be about gay sex and sexuality in general, of which porn is one manifestation, but only one. If you look at a magazine like Men's Health, which covers all aspects of men's physical and emotional health, this will be about gay sex and sexuality from just about as many angles, but it will still feature nude layouts and eroticism."
The formats of these sites are simple but effective and easy to navigate - several layouts, several pieces of fiction, video reviews, an advice column, a chat room and a bevy of message boards. Men CyberClub is a pay site ($9.95/month, $24.95/quarter, $89.95/year), as Freshmen (www.freshmen.com) will also be when it is up and running by the time this issue is out. Both will basically be archives of the print magazine, and the current issue. There are no plans to add content that is not in the print versions. "Not on those sites," Goldberg says, "because they are magazine specific. We might have slightly related sites. Like if we do videos, it might be in conjunction with the stores. But we're not going to do live sex feeds and the other standard stuff, for a variety of reasons. One of which is that it's the same stuff you see everywhere."
There is, for lack of a better phrase, a certain highbrow elegance to Men CyberClub. You won't find any annoying ad banners, exit consoles or links to any other company's sites. "We're not there yet," says Goldberg. "I'm not interested in sending people away from our site, unless it's to one of our other sites. Basically, I want them." She definitely sees Men CyberClub as a top-drawer site, even if the usual cultural biases restrict her ability to attract national advertisers. "I consider our magazine to be about on the level of Playboy," she says. "But Playboy can get national advertising. We can only get sex advertisers. So there it is right there. As soon as you put a dick in there, it's a whole different story. And I have my theories about why that is. It's probably because straight men are making these decisions in most places, and they are so threatened by it [a penis] - what if they happen to find it arousing - that they just don't even want to look at it, so they just immediately dismiss it."
But for unadulterated no-frills high-quality viewing of some of the most amazingly sculpted and photographed men on the planet, www.menmagazine.com is the place to visit. With hundreds of new photographs being added every day, each online image can be viewed in either low (640x480 pixels), medium (800x600) or high (1024x768) resolution, with the high resolution literally filling the screen with ripped and engorged flesh. And every photograph is original and owned by the site. "We use different photographers," says Goldberg, "but the thing that we do is that we buy full rights to a set. So that's how we have the archive that we have for the websites, because we can do whatever we want with them."
They have had instances of other sites stealing their images, so they are particularly vigilant. "We are absolute sticklers about that, absolute sticklers. When it's a small company, we just write them and say, hey, stop it, and they do. When it's a big company, we sue them. All of our stuff is watermarked. Our photography is our inventory."
So with Men CyberClub up and running (with approximately 2500 paid members as of deadline), with Freshmen.com about to go up, and with some online form of Unzipped looming, the future looks rosy. Not that anyone is resting on their laurels. "We have a new title called Erotic Physique," says Goldberg. "It's kind of going back to the 1950s physique magazines, a little bit more arty, a little bit less focused on the genitals, although they're there... And we've also got a new title, which I don't know the name of yet. We're working on it. It'll come out in the fall and will be a bi-monthly magazine of couples. Again, sort of like Men and Freshmen, but all couples."
Sounds like a classy little empire in the making.
