Daniel Radcliffe and the Half-Blood Cover Photo

Well, the ol' tubes of the internets are buzzing with mostly complaints about gay lifestyle magazine Out's new cover featuring actor Daniel Radcliffe. (Do tubes buzz? We'll never know; Ted Stevens isn't around any longer to ask.) The image, as you can see, makes the handsome young actor look either crazy or strung out after a night of drugs.

The story inside the magazine is at least somewhat interesting; it's about Radcliffe's befriending of a transgendered musician. It also plays up the fact that Radcliffe has become a very public champion of equal rights for everybody, including the LGBT population. Gay magazines love to play up gay-friendly actors or other performers – especially if they're gifted in the looks department – because there's only so many times you can put Rupert Everett or Adam Lambert on the cover. And, let's face it, some folks love to fantasize about the gay-friendly-but-straight actors like Radcliffe. Hell, even Mel Gibson used to be a gay icon, and he's barking mad in his homophobia.

So I'm glad to see Radcliffe being unafraid to identify himself with gays, lesbians, and transgendered folks. He's proving himself to be a thoughtful person, one who is also a talented actor.

But what does this Out cover photo convey? That he needs to get out in the sun some more, despite his natural Britishness? That no one – no one – should ever wear a tank top? That you can make even Daniel Radcliffe look unattractive if you try hard enough?

In short, the photo is horrible. It was chosen, no doubt, to give some edge to an actor associated with a wholesome young-adults movie series, but it was still a bad choice. That's not to say that you can't dirty up Radcliffe. Esquire's UK edition did so a little while ago, and it looked fine. The cover photo showed the roughed-up actor in a way that supported the editorial content inside, and it didn't make you speculate about the magazine's professional judgement.

Another UK magazine, the gay lifestyle magazine Attitude, had Radcliffe on the cover and didn't think he needed to look vampiric. The American mag Details (and is there any gayer straight magazine?) had a very good-looking Radcliffe on the cover. And you certainly didn't think this blog in particular would publish a bunch of Daniel Radcliffe magazine covers and not include at least one Starlog cover, did you?

Of course, Dumbledore should have been getting this love from the gay publishing world, and maybe he would have, if that dastardly old Snape hadn't offed him ...

Daniel Radcliffe Earns More Points

Not only has he grown to be a good actor and a young man with remarkable social conscience, but Daniel Radcliffe is not afraid to tell the world he's not up on things. Like Justin Beiber. A CNN blogger notes that he wasn't familiar with the tweener singing star until a couple weeks ago, and when he heard Bieber's voice, he thought it was a woman singing.

Now, I don't pass that along to bash Bieber. I have heard the name but don't know of any of his music; nonetheless, who cares? I'm hardly in the demographic of Beiber's feverish fans.

But I do like Radcliffe's remark that, “I'm so out of the loop when it comes to pop culture that I kind of don't even try anymore.”

That's great. You get no points in life for being up on the latest silliness. Some people would probably argue that such an attitude could leave Radcliffites (Radcliffians? we need a word here ...) at a loss in party conversations. But I think instead it means that his conversations are probably more interesting than most people's.

It reminds me of when Playboy's longtime executive editor Arthur Kretchmer said upon leaving his post after decades at the top, "Let me put it this way: At this point in my life, I don't care who Weezer is. And that's not fair to Weezer, that's not fair to Playboy magazine."

Now, I would argue that the fact that he knew enough to know that Weezer is unimportant is exactly the reason he should continue to edit a magazine. But I still applaud him for deciding not to fake enthusiasm for the latest passing fad and instead pursue his own interests.

I suspect Kretchmer and Radcliffe could have a very interesting conversation.

Magazine History: A Penthouse Editor in the 1960s

[Note: Bob Guccione obituary is here.]

The August 2009 UK edition of Esquire magazine features two noteworthy articles, each probably aimed at different audiences. The cover story is about cute Harry Potter film star Daniel Radcliffe, and later in the magazine is "A Star Is Porn," the unoriginally titled article by writer Lynn Barber recounting her years as an editor at the original Penthouse magazine in the UK in the 1960s. There's not much titillation in the article -- sorry, boys -- but for magazine geeks, it's a great behind-the-scenes look at how magazines start, growing from shoestring organizations to large staffs, big offices, expense accounts, and world fame.

People who are not in the magazine industry probably labor under the illusion that magazines are published by big companies in skyscrapers and run by normal corporate drones. Some are. But Playboy was started on Hugh Hefner's apartment table, Starlog began as a one-time publication by two publishers who paid the bills by winning at poker and holding private film screenings, and -- Barber tells us -- Penthouse began in a "a tiny terraced house on Ifield Road" in London.

The front room contained a dolly bird receptionist called Maureen and piles and piles of cardboard boxes -- these, I was to learn, were the Penteez Panties "erotic gifts" [the magazine sold to pay the bills in its early days] -- with another room housing the Penthouse Book Club at the back. Upstairs, the back bedroom was Bob [Guccione] and Kathy [Keeton]'s office, and the front was "editorial," a largish room containing the art director Joe Brooks and a very small cubbyhole containing [editor] Harry Fieldhouse.

Barber stumbled upon her job at Penthouse after interviewing the controversial Guccione, during which he off-handedly suggested she come to work for him. Soon, she did, and she became one of the first employees of that young magazine, seeing it through its early years in the UK and helping to launch its U.S. edition, which is where Guccione would really hit the jackpot (at one point amassing a fortune of about a half-billion dollars -- all of it would be frittered away and the company eventually sold in bankruptcy). Along the way, she did a little bit of everything:

I also had to attend some of the Pet shoots, not with Bob [Guccione], but with an American photographer called Philip O. Stearns. My duties at the shoots included putting music on the stereo, squirting scent round the room, and powdering the girls' bottoms. In between, I did The Times crossword.

Her Penthouse editorial duties would also include, at one time or another, begging local shops to let her borrow clothing items (or diving suits) for nude Pet photo shoots, editing sections of the magazine, and smuggling material into the United States to get it to the Milwaukee-based printers of the new American edition of Penthouse. This was definitely not a cubicle job.

Barber doesn't say it in the article, but it sounds like it was a lot of fun to be on the ground floor of a rapidly growing magazine, seeing it add staff, circulation, advertising, spinoffs, and more. She doesn't say how long she stayed at the job or why she left, but the magazine and Guccione would go on to huge success in the United States, spawning a magazine empire (including Omni, a science/science-fiction magazine that reached a circulation of more than a million in the early 1980s, before declining and being canceled in the mid-1990s), only to founder under the intense pressures of the internet and the religious right. Guccione pushed his flagship magazine into hardcore pornography for a few years, but that not only didn't save the title, it reportedly lost him a huge number of distribution outlets. The fact that he kept on with that approach, nonetheless, tells you something about his poor business sense.

When I was in high school in the 1980s, pretty much every boy read Playboy or Penthouse. Yes, even gay folkses like me read one or the other, because, I think, it was a way of getting to know what adults were talking about, what was really going on, what was really happening. (And, for the straight kids, the nekkid folks, of course.) But we Playboy readers thought the Penthouse readers were weird. That's probably because Penthouse itself was weird; almost every article was a conspiracy about some deal or another, and there was an unshakable devotion in that magazine to fetishes and oddities. Nonetheless, both magazines were a part of growing up for millions and millions of American boys, and if most of those readers read their copies because they featured scantily clad (or unclad) women and stories of (as-yet) unexperienced pleasures, they also were probably the first place most of those readers were exposed to the articles and ideas of William F. Buckley Jr., John Updike, and Ayn Rand, or where they actually read articles about politics. That's often used as sort of a punchline, but I think it's true, too.

Barber's article makes the August UK Esquire a must-read for anyone interested in the history of a once-powerful men's magazine, and it's a great look for all of us who are in the magazine industry at just how some magazines are launched and how they grow. None of it's "by the book," because there is no book.