That was 20-plus years ago. Twenty-plus years ago, I was just hitting puberty, outwardly shining, an altar boy, an honors student. Inwardly I was burning up from the flames of shame, for it was men I craved. Men and only men. Too stricken to act on it (which seemed an impossibility, anyway, where I grew up), my sole outlet was the only full-color magazine to feature fully nude men, short of hardcore gay porn (and where would I have found that in upstate New York?). Playgirl was "Entertainment For Women." But for me, and no doubt for an entire nation of miserably closeted small-town gay boys, it was nothing of the kind. It was a lifeline to our sexual existence.

Ostensibly, Playgirl was marketed toward the urban, upper-middle-class, liberated groovy chick. But in the demographics of loins, the target audience was the mirror image of that which it exploited: men. Gay men in particular, and maybe a few confused straight men. So long as a dick dangles unhampered by the confines of clothing, a queer man will be there.

To this day, all it takes is the sight of those vintage 1970s covers to bring back the thrill. Certain images remain in the brain forever, and so it was with the glossy images of a stud named Stone. He was Playgirl's new "Man of the Year" -- its cocksure, uncovered cover boy.

By the time Stone made the cover, it was no longer enough for me to sneak peeks at the magazine rack of the local drugstore when no one was looking, to recall later in my fevered memory bank, alone in bed. Acquisition had become the order of the day. Realizing that attempting to steal the bulky magazine whole could be dangerous, I discovered that it was unnecessary to lift an entire magazine that spouted the incidental drivel of the female life -- douching, dating and so on. All I needed to lift were the pages held fast by the staples, and I had it down to a science. First, I'd scale the summit of the magazine rack where all the adult entertainment mags were. The next step was to place my Playgirl behind an innocuous McCall's on the third shelf, reach in, find the slick pages of the centerfold with greedy fingers, give one good yank and slide the booty between adolescent chest and T-shirt, all the while making my way without too obvious a haste toward the exit.

It was through such an audacious tactic of appropriation that the photographs of Stone entered my permanent collection, between mattress and box spring, and his perfect penis into my consciousness, wherein it stayed lodged for two decades.

Stone's was the era of 'Boogie Nights," when the nude men in magazines were worth looking at. I'm talking long sideburns; wild, unruly hair; mustache; coral pendants dangling between their tits; and hair everywhere, ass, legs, chest, a nest of thick pubic hair and a slightly drug-dazed grin for the camera. Nowadays Playgirl centerfolds are airbrushed, shaved, hairless everywhere but for the head, where some long faggy blond mane now hangs, coiffed to within an inch of its life. The Playgirl centerfolds of the 1970s may have been gay or straight (very often the former, despite the seductive talk about the ideal woman, or taking their ladies for a midnight stroll on the beach and a duck into the dunes to "ball"), but at least they all looked like men, and not prettier versions of the women who were supposed to be ogling them.

So whose escort ad in a free gay weekly should I recently have stumbled across but Stone's? The picture in the ad was recent, but he still looked damn good, and it made perfect sense, if the body was still good, to keep it on the payroll. Seeing Stone, looking relatively the same after two decades, churned up a sentimentality for my lost youth in all its Sturm und Drang, guilt-choked lust -- the full force of which I never again felt in the same way. Who better to marry my teenage lust to than the man who'd been most responsible for my fevered fantasies of sexual abandon? What better way to forget about the numbing dissatisfactions of my current (non-)marital state than to return to the previous life of the lustful adolescent mind? And what better way to reclaim my autonomy than to be the boss of my own desires?

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