My father never had anything racier than Esquire, but a couple of older guys(15? years old) in the area shared their Playboys and a few raunchier mags with us kids (12? years old). I have no memory of how they acquired them. This would have been ca. 1969.
Around this time, three friends and I were squirrel hunting deep in the woods. We were at least a mile from the nearest house or road. I don’t recall who first saw it, but under some scrub pines there was a noticeable mound in the pine needles. It was somebody’s stash of porn, probably long forgotten, wrapped in a rubberized cloth. They were nudist/nature magazines from the '50s. About the size of a Reader’s Digest, they had glossy black-and-white pics of people - hikers, families on picnics, exercise groups, etc., all completely naked going about their business and not looking posed at all.
My father didn’t, but my grandfather had a Playboy subscription for as long as I can remember, and kept them in the magazine rack in the living room. They lived just down the street from the church we went to. When I was old enough to not need someone to watch me, Mom would drop me at her parents’ house on Saturday mornings while she went to the church to do a bunch of secretarial stuff.
Saturday morning just also happened to be when my grand-parents did their food shopping and left the house for an hour or more. I really looked forward to Saturday mornings growing up.
My dad had exactly one issue of Playboy, at least that I’m aware of. He had left it out in plain sight, like on a kitchen counter, and somebody made sure I stayed the hell away from it.
There wasn’t a dad in my house, but we spent a lot of time with my grandparents. I found a box of paperback books in the back of their closet that was very interesting. Another time, I found a copy of Oui in the backseat of the car.
When I was about twelve, we moved into a neighborhood that had several other kids around my age. There was kind of boys vs. girls dynamic, and we had little forts in the woods. One day we raided the boys’ fort and got their magazines, which we perused with fascination before they were stolen back again.
I spent the summer after 8th grade selling The Joy of Sex at a sidewalk sale for a bookstore. Once it got cold, they paid me to sit behind a one-way mirror in the Room of Porn and look for shoplifters.
This was a great job for a young man just hitting puberty!
Forgot to answer OP’s question: Not in my house. But there was a city dumpsite for paper (early days of recycling) and we found lots of skin mags there. We also had at least one old-time barbershop where the reading matter while you waited comprised “men’s magazines”. I’m surprised more guys my age weren’t sporting crewcuts needing weekly maintenance!
The pool halls where we hung out were in the backs of “variety stores”, which usually meant 7-11 type stores but in these cases were focused more on magazines of all types. And the proprietors didn’t mind kids buying mags, just didn’t want us browsing them for obvious reasons. So we had what now seems like lots of access for the time (mid-1970s).
When I was 14, I went on a school trip to Paris and at night, one of the friends I was sharing a room with started passing around a couple of skin mags.
It was the first time I had a detailed look at female genitalia and I was… puzzled. I expected it to be just a slit, you know. What were all those layers and folds for? Of course, I didn’t say anything and tried to look as blasé as I could.
Over 35 years later, I’m happy to report that I like the real-life version much better than what I had imagined.
Maybe pre-Playboy, but post-Playboy plenty did, including the one I mentioned I got in 1966. They were well established by then. Classy men’s magazines, like Esquire, I agree didn’t have any kind of nudity.
No, and after he had a surgery and a friend gave him a recovery care basket with a Penthouse in it, he was very embarrassed, though my sense of my parents was that they were comfortable with sexuality.
The babysitters had some R. Crumb, and I certainly scrutinized that.
My dad had a stack of Playboy poorly “hidden” in the attic storage room attached to their master bedroom (not the closet). My brother would sneak a few and let me look, too.
I had friends who found stashes in the woods. That sounds like a cliche, but it happened.
Yes, we found some in the woods which were hidden there by the neighborhood boys, but I also found a stash in some bushes years later at a fast food restaurant.
Not my father, but my brother. However. . . I do remember occasionally a tabloid called “Insider” coming into the home, something of a “Weekly World News,” but with mostly lurid stories. Some on ebay now if anyone’s interested.
My father didn’t. I did. My bought a bunch of magazine subscriptions and the Playboys showed up with her name on the mailing label. By the time my kids were born in the 80s Playboy was pretty tame and in the 90s a new world of porn had emerged anyway.
Yup. On particular issue of Playboy in a plastic bag would show up in different little hiding places around the neighborhood.
Also, every kid knew someone who went to a different school where one of the teachers had appeared nude in Playboy. Similar to Canadian girlfriends and if you could do 1000 pushups in high school they’d let you hand out towels in the girls locker room.
My dad had a Penthouse (Sep 1987, with nude pictures of Madonna) tucked away in his file cabinet.
There was also a pornographic parody of a spy novel in our bookshelves, with a female agent 69 (how original) who had sex with anything that moved (including her pet dog). And there was at least one semi-explicit bodice ripper romance in the same set of shelves.
I think my dad also got some steamy Old West novels out of the library, like the Slocum series. I remember there was another steamy Old West series that featured a woman and an Asian man as the main characters, but I forget the name.
