Mandate: The Gay Playboy

The Vision

Mavety's ambition for Mandate was precisely stated: the gay equivalent of Playboy. This meant, in practice, a magazine that combined explicit erotic photography with cultural journalism, fiction, interviews, reviews, and genuine editorial intelligence. The Playboy model — sex and culture, desire and conversation, the erotic and the intellectual in the same publication — was exactly right for the moment. Gay men in 1975 had plenty of desire and plenty of cultural sophistication and no publication that took both seriously.

Mandate provided that publication from its first issue. Under founding editor John Devere and subsequent editors including Joseph Arsenault and Sam Staggs, the magazine combined beautiful photography of the male nude with reviews of gay books and films, interviews with artists and activists, coverage of gay political developments, and the kind of erotic fiction that the best gay writers of the era were producing. At its peak, its circulation exceeded 100,000 — making it, by any measure, the most important gay magazine in America.

The photography was exceptional. Mandate worked with the best photographers in gay erotic publishing and presented the results with a production quality that matched its editorial ambitions. The images were not simply explicit; they were made with genuine aesthetic attention, in the tradition of erotic photography that runs from physique photography through the studio photography of Colt and Falcon. The magazine treated the male body as a subject worthy of serious visual attention, and the photographers it employed delivered on that treatment.

The Mavety Empire

The success of Mandate created both the resources and the justification for expansion. Mavety launched Playguy in 1976 — a younger-demographic publication with a similar formula — and Honcho shortly after, targeted at the masculine and leather-adjacent reader who wanted something with more edge than Mandate's mainstream polish. Torso and Inches followed, covering more specific niches. The Mavety Media empire, at its height, was the dominant force in American gay erotic publishing, with titles covering the full range of the gay male audience's desires.

Each title was distinct. Mandate remained the flagship — the prestige product, the one that most clearly expressed Mavety's Playboy ambition. Honcho developed its own aesthetic and its own loyal readership. Playguy found a market among readers who wanted something more youth-focused. The diversity of the portfolio reflected a genuine understanding of the gay audience as heterogeneous rather than monolithic.

The story of how Mavety acquired the Playguy title is itself revealing of the era's publishing culture: the original British Playguy, published by Alan Purnell, had failed to pay Mavety for photographs he had supplied. In retaliation, Mavety simply took the title and made it his own. The publishing world of the 1970s operated on these terms, and Mavety was a formidable operator within it.

The AIDS Crisis and the Long Decline

Mandate and the Mavety titles navigated the AIDS crisis with more seriousness than many of their competitors. The magazine covered the epidemic directly, ran safer sex information, and treated the devastation of its readership as the genuine emergency it was. This editorial responsibility did not save it from the commercial consequences of the crisis — the loss of advertisers, the deaths of readers and contributors — but it maintained the magazine's reputation as something more than simple erotic publishing.

The digital revolution finished what AIDS had weakened. As the internet made photographic content freely available and the economic model of print magazine publishing collapsed, the Mavety titles found themselves without a viable commercial future. George Mavety died of a heart attack in 2000. The titles he had built continued under the Mavety Media management for nearly a decade after his death before the entire empire — Mandate, Honcho, Playguy, and the remaining titles — folded in 2009.

The end of the Mavety empire marked the end of the golden era of American gay erotic publishing. The tradition it had built — the serious gay magazine, combining erotic content with genuine cultural journalism — has not been revived in print form. What remains is the archive, and the culture it built.

BoysDo carries a version of the same conviction that George Mavety brought to *Mandate* in 1975: that gay male desire is worth treating seriously, that quality matters, and that the audience for thoughtful, beautifully produced content exists and deserves what it wants. The format has changed. The conviction is continuous.