For Now

In my day (which is over) kids didn’t get to see much pornography. Once the Minneapolis Morning Tribune ran an antismut ad that showed a sinister man displaying forbidden pictures to some gaping boys. To my intense regret, the man never made it to my schoolyard (perhaps he saw the ad and lit out for St. Paul). We had Playboy, when we could get it; usually we stole it—not because we were poor, but because the guy behind the counter at Ortie’s Korn Shop wouldn’t sell it to kids. Every so often one of us would rip a backlit nude out of his father’s copy of U.S. Camera, and along about the ninth grade a dog-eared copy of Peyton (“Her nipples were like diamonds”) Place circulated, with the relevant pages marked. Once in a blue moon an issue of Sun Era, American Nudist or whatever would turn up—all fortyish Rotary and Eastern Star types playing volleyball in sepiatone, and with What We Really Wanted To See carefully airbrushed out.

When we were a little older occasionally we’d see Real Hot Stuff: I remember almost being clobbered for losing someone’s copy of The Debauched Hospodar by Guillaume Apollinaire; I recall a set of French (we could tell they were French because what clothes the people had on, looked funny) pictures that were rather educational; and I’ll never forget a deck of playing cards featuring obese Mexicans that would have made Casanova celibate.

CS

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C. H. Simonds

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In my day (which is over) kids didn’t get to see much pornography. Once the Minneapolis Morning Tribune ran an antismut ad that showed a sinister man displaying forbidden pictures to some gaping boys. To my intense regret, the man never made it to my schoolyard (perhaps he saw the ad and lit out for St. Paul). We had Playboy, when we could get it; usually we stole it—not because we were poor, but because the guy behind the counter at Ortie’s Korn Shop wouldn’t sell it to kids. Every so often one of us would rip a backlit nude out of his father’s copy of U.S. Camera, and along about the ninth grade a dog-eared copy of Peyton (“Her nipples were like diamonds”) Place circulated, with the relevant pages marked. Once in a blue moon an issue of Sun Era, American Nudist or whatever would turn up—all fortyish Rotary and Eastern Star types playing volleyball in sepiatone, and with What We Really Wanted To See carefully airbrushed out.

When we were a little older occasionally we’d see Real Hot Stuff: I remember almost being clobbered for losing someone’s copy of The Debauched Hospodar by Guillaume Apollinaire; I recall a set of French (we could tell they were French because what clothes the people had on, looked funny) pictures that were rather educational; and I’ll never forget a deck of playing cards featuring obese Mexicans that would have made Casanova celibate.