Starf*cker: a Meme-oir (29 page)

Along with gay and straight porn, Mavety published family-friendly “one-shots.” One-shots were one-time-only magazines devoted to single topics. Before I came on board, they had had some success with a Beatles special, but then ran into serious trouble with back-to-back losers—a whole magazine on George Burns turning 100 and another one on First Lady Hillary Clinton, pre-Senate bid, back when everyone kinda hated her. Both had miserable sell-throughs, so I pitched doing a magazine on Madonna, who was about to star in
Evita.
I got it approved, Madonna’s publicist was on board, and it was a decent success. I also did three issues of the self-explanatory
Hollywood’s Hottest Hunks
, did a tribute to
Titanic
’s Leo DiCaprio using a slew of pre-fame photos we bought for a lump sum (his old pal Soleil Moon Frye called me up to bitch me out before realizing the photos had been paid for), and finally, I cooked up the idea of publishing a recurring teen magazine.

Yes, I wanted the porn company I worked for to publish a teen magazine. And I was young and stupid enough to think it would work, but mature and smart enough to make sure it did.

Like, O-M-G, I have enough stories from my, like,
years
running a teenybopper magazine to fill a book or two all on their own. I also would
never
reveal anything that made the former owners look bad in any way.

That means you’ll get three chapters instead.

On October 15, 1998, I launched a teen magazine. It was the first American teen mag of its kind to be entirely in color and on glossy paper, and I was the only gay man, out or otherwise, to run a teen-entertainment magazine in the U.S.

I did these things while working for a pornographer.

And nobody noticed.

The magazine was in the same vein as
Tiger Beat
, the ultimate teen mag ever created, but had a dash of the U.K.’s
Smash Hits
—which meant it was a little cheekier. Not as cheeky as the
Tiger Beat
of the ’70s, whose cheerfully skin-baring pinups looked like something recovered after a police sting, but the mag I created—like its editor—did have an appreciation for shirtless photos. So did our readers, though I learned early on that little girls usually prefer their heartthrobs to be boys who verged on being girls as opposed to guys with any sign of facial hair or muscles. The prevailing theory is that little girls get turned on, but being confronted with an actual man represented a potential threat—it wasn’t just flirtation and romance if the dude looked like a soap stud because then the specter of intercourse was raised. Even if many of the readers were blissfully ignorant about sex, they still instinctively fell for harmless-looking mop-tops…not a few of which were secretly mop-
bottoms
in real life.

Getting hot photos for the magazine was a never-ending, rarely achieved goal, since by the late ‘90s, publicists had taken over Hollywood like a virus, one that intuitively said “no” to any requests from magazines that did not fit into a carefully arranged plan for a client’s public-image trajectory. And the male nipple was reserved for one’s first appearance in
Vanity Fair
, and not to be handed out to a teen magazine.

My slide into the teen-mag world was, in some regards, right up my alley. I was Mr. Pop Culture thanks to my books on Madonna and the ‘80s and I had experience with magazines thanks to the porn company’s dabbling in non-sex titles (an update of their previously published Princess Diana mag that I completed in 12 hours on a weekend following her untimely death resulted in over a million sales, for which I was paid $800). But if I thought those items on my CV and my own devouring of teen mags in the ‘70s would prepare me for the roller coaster I was hopping on in the late ‘90s, I was wrong…baby, one more time.

For the first issue of the magazine, I knew I wanted an original photo shoot. The reason I wanted it was more to broadcast to the industry that we were players, because frankly, little girls only care if a picture is
hawt
and fresh, whether it cost you thousands of dollars and was produced during a day-long shoot or was given to you free by a record company. At the time, the home-schooled Hanson was more popular than Jesus—I found out a rival publication had paid $10,000 for one photo set of their blond blandness, whereas I was supposed to fill 100 pages (not counting the pullout posters) with words and pictures for half that amount. Since they were so in-demand, there was no chance they’d pose for us. I skimmed through all the established teen-entertainment mags (
Tiger Beat, Bop, Teen Beat, 16,
and countless others that by and large no longer exist) and decided that newcomers 98° would be the cutest and most potentially popular new act who might work with me. I didn’t know it, but from Day One I was establishing the magazine’s (and my) rep as a discoverer of talent; 98° was having some minor success, with a #12
Billboard
single, and they had a pretty decent ratio of cuteness to uncuteness, so I looked up their rep and wrote him a pitch.

The man in charge of 98° was a gentleman by the name of Paris D’Jon. When he called me up to accept my offer of a cover shoot—the mag would pub a month after they released their breakthrough single, “Because of You”—I was gobsmacked that with a name like that he wasn’t a black drag queen. He was an amiable Italian businessman (messy lawsuit happened later on) who had said the boys would be available and gave me their schedule. Because he liked my style, he eventually gave me his new act Jessica Simpson for the magazine, too. She was a good Christian girl saving herself for marriage, but looked like a centerfold, so we shot her in boxing gloves and a tube top. I doubt the photos did much for our readers, but Jessica later admitted her future husband Nick got off on them. She humbly told me she shouldn’t be compared to Mariah Carey, “I’m more like Whitney.” Okay, then.

Flipping, I reached out to a young fashion photographer nicknamed “Chunky,” real name Chiun-Kai Shi. Chunky was a short, cute, bubbly Asian guy with an artsy edge to his portraiture who was probably the exact opposite type of photographer who should have been shooting the cover of a pinup magazine. But that’s what I wanted and what I did many times over with the magazine, hire high-end shooters, use second-rights images by even higher-end shooters (Herb Ritts, Terry Richardson—sorry, I didn’t know). I even hired a male couple who juggled their teen-mag shoots for me with shoots they were doing for
Playgirl
and gay porn mags. A Nickelodeon actor and his mommy once went to the wrong studio and were treated to penises for miles; luckily, they were among the few non-uptight kid-actor families.

Which reminds me to point out that teen magazines and porn magazines, as opposite as they might seem, are actually the same: Both are filled with immediately recognizable favorites and both just keep giving the reader what they want over and over.

“Overkill” exists neither in teen-mag publishing, nor in porn.

My very first photo shoot was booked to happen partly in Chunky’s studio and partly at a seedy bar on Houston in the Village. 98° showed up to the bar first, and things got uncomfortable immediately—the place had lots of areas with great texture for backdrops (velvet couches, gaudy balustrades, shiny-black walls), but it was also decorated with scatological paintings of naked ladies. Boy bands are supposed to be unimpeachably virtuous—their fans want them to be horny for girls but virginal—so presenting them with so many hairy vaginas in so many different colors while press (that’s me!) was around was a challenge for the beefy boys from Ohio.

Back at Chunky’s studio, the next culture clash occurred. When the boys were presented with the sexy clubwear Chunky had worked with their stylist on pulling (I swear to God something from the Tom of Finland line was selected), they got a little nervous. Jeff Timmons, the buffest boy in the band, was openly panicked.

“We don’t usually do stuff with our shirts off,” he announced as Chunky snapped candids of them while they were changing.

“And now…” (snap-snap-snap) “…you do!” Chunky said cheerfully.

Jeff had nothing to worry about. His pecs look like basketballs in those photos, and we were all dribbling over them. It’s hilarious how ill-at-ease they were when within months they were starring in a poster in which they were gussied up as randy firemen, an image every bit as cheesy as Chippendales at its best-worst. Funnily enough, Jeff, who became a pal of mine over the years, definitely loosened up about flaunting his killer bod—15 years later, he was the headlining, shirt-shucking singer of the
Men of the Strip
male strip revue.

I was early with Jeff’s willingness to show off, and early with 98°—my first issue didn’t sell fantastically well. To be fair, it was a mixed bag. We had an adorable and stylish 98° cover shot, then name-checked every male singer I could think of just to hedge our bets—what girl is interested in Ricky Martin, Mase, Backstreet Boys,
and
Jakob Dylan? I didn’t quite understand yet that variety is not what little girls look for in their reading material, but it did endear me to publicists and record companies, who began sending me press kits to get their acts a piece of the scattershot action.

For our second issue, I got Tatyana Ali to agree to be our cover girl, in a pretty, feminine fashion shoot done by Tony Cutajar, a total pro who shot every teen and R&B act to ever exist and who appreciated my aesthetic. He liked that I was open to creativity, and I liked how user-friendly he was with artists—he was a regular Joe with daughters, a drama-free demeanor, and a ponytail. Tony could work with anyone easily, from volatile girl groups like 3LW (one of whom would engage in reality-testing by walking around topless at shoots while still years away from adulthood) to rising superstars like Usher to demanding divas like P!nk. Everyone loved Tony, with the possible exception of Mandy Moore, who during a last-second shoot in a Buffalo hotel banquet hall was told by him to keep her “one lazy eye” open. She was also the artist we were shooting when we got word that JFK Jr. was missing, so she had to suffer the indignity of a dead dude stealing her focus—I left to crank out another 12-hour tribute magazine.

When I went to Mavety’s New Jersey office to talk up our second issue with Tatyana Ali on the cover to the sales reps, their weathered faces (these guys and gals physically traversed the country, hand-selling porn magazines to bodegas) looked concerned.

“A
black
girl?” someone asked. “What kind of magazine
is
this?”

I’d innocently stumbled into a major issue that had long plagued magazine publishing—readers would never cop to being racist, but black faces on covers frequently led to decreased sales. Decreased sales made it harder to publish future issues and harder to collect ad revenue. It hadn’t occurred to me, but the early issues of my teen mag were daringly integrated, with the worlds of hip-hop and pop intertwined in a way that other teen mags rarely did. As for a single cover subject who was black, it was unheard of—even when the Jacksons and Whitney Houston and Tina Turner ruled in the ‘80s, they weren’t usually the dominant faces on the white-bread titles. I fought it and won.

But by the time sales figures for the second issue began trickling in, it was clear that, for whatever reason, I needed to recalibrate—we were only selling in the neighborhood of 20%. In magazine publishing, you can break even pretty easily in the high 20s, 35% is pretty solid, and anything more is clearly successful, depending on your budget. Yes, it’s extremely wasteful, but most of what you print is pulped.