Why Handjobs Magazine (Still) Matters

Feelings of isolation and outsider statuses only ease when humans can see that others are so very like them and want the same things.

Growing up when and where I did (the American South in the 80s and 90s), I wasn’t often exposed to extremely sexual situations, or even sex in general with any regularity. I knew what it was, like every good precocious homeschooled kid knows the mechanics and all the names for all the parts. But we didn’t have internet access in my early years and weren’t allowed or couldn’t afford cable, and the idea of who had sex and with whom and for what reasons – these weren’t questions I had clear answers to, or even questions I could articulate well. But also like any precocious child, I had a vivid and thorough imagination, and a deep desire to understand better what sex was really ABOUT.

Also, a desire to see any and all penises that might be accidentally made available to me at any given moment or day (it was Florida and lots of men wore baggy shorts with equally baggy, sometimes entirely absent, underwear – a kid had a decent shot of some covert up-leg spying).

I carried no shame or really baggage of any kind about my own genitals – they were like any other part of my body and my child brain assumed that everyone was just as fascinated with seeing and touching as I was and simply never spoke about it. I remember thinking my penis was great and spending long hours alone in my room or in the bath viewing and touching it different ways and stretching and tugging on my foreskin.

As I moved into my young adult stage and came to understand more about sexaul engagement and its myriad non-reproductive activities – and very particularly after I mastrubated myself to ejaculation for the first time in my treehouse at age 11 – I found myself in a desert of fresh information and practical instruction. I had a vague awareness that these things were happening all the time, but where was I supposed to learn or see them demonstrated? I had some particularly child-of-lesbian-mom books about my “changing body” and they featured some crude line illustrations of boners and penetrative vaginal sex, along with rotely reassuring passages about nocturnal emissions and the okness of fantasy about friends of same or differing genders. That was something.

There were also some early 90s magazines – one Hustler and one issue of Penthouse – I had swiped from an uncle’s bathroom, upon which I meditated furiously, looking for guidance or clarity about all the things I felt I didn’t understand. I remember liking Hustler the best because it featured photos of penetrative sex, which meant that men were present, naked, and aroused. That those men never seemed to make it into other magazines seemed like a real miss on the part of the smutty magazine business. “There’s only so much a single naked lady can accomplish or convey in a photo spread,” I would think to myself. “I get it – you’re naked and surprised. Now what?”

We had a computer but no internet for a couple of my childhood years. When my begging and collection of mailed promotional CDs finally overwhelmed my parents’ better judgement, we found ourselves, like much of America, on a 4670 hour free AOL trial, with the modem sharing one overworked cord with our house’s single phone line. But that was all I needed. I quickly figured out how to use AOL to download and power a separate browser – RIP Netscape Navigator – whose history I could control and erase (that my mom never added up why my AOL usage history was so immaculate is a mystery in and of itself). And I never looked back.

I don’t remember how I first came to Handjobs Magazine, specifically. I know I searched endless combinations of “gay sex,” and “how to,” and “penises+every celebrity name,” leading me to lots of unbearably slow-loading images and mpeg files. One of these sites must have mentioned Handjobs in passing and in searching I must have found my way to avenueservices-dot-com (the ultra-inconspicuous home of Handjobs Magazine online, once upon a time).

And for that, my life wasn’t ever the same.

Handjobs, whose content was ostensibly endlessly controversial (if not completely problematic) in nature, immediately represented something bigger for me than comics and stories about incest and intergenerational relationships. I knew instantly in reading it that it didn’t equate a 1-to-1 example of what I wanted in my own life. The idea of sexual engagement with anyone in my family was flatly repellant and preposterous to me. I didn’t play sports, so I didn’t have any coaches in my life, and (once I finally made it to private school) my teachers were all women.

But this underlying idea that someone more adept than me, someone older, might eventually offer some kind of guidance or assurance about my penis and my thoughts was transformational.

It was, of course, impossible for me to make it through an entire Handjobs issue in one sitting then, furiously masturbating and cumming every two pages or so. And I only acquired them occasionally, usually having to settle for the monthly previews sampled on the Handjobs website (kids should be allowed to have credit cards for this exact reason). But the ideas contained in those pages swirled around in my head for days and hours afterward. I had suddenly found myself some answers to who was having sex and how. And in so many of the comics and stories it was often people who were, for all intents and purposes, like me! They were more handsome than I believed myself to be, and always more fit. They were also surrounded by men and masculine energy that was nothing like what I knew in my waking life; these genial, avuncular gentlemen who smiled and laughed and treated sex the way I imagined it to be: all joy and frankly not that big a deal, big-picture-wise.

This is significant.

Handjobs Magazine did not present stories or comics with any frequency that were about rape, or force, or even coercion. And we’ve talked about that a lot in stories by writer/illustrators like Josman or Bruno. These stories are quite often about uncharted territory and mutual exploration (Bruno’s works especially push the limits of what most people enjoy or want), but almost never do you hear anyone say “no,” or feel as though the ‘more responsible’ participant ought to just stop all this cold (particularly in Bruno’s works where both older and younger parties are equally unfamiliar and startled by the lust and curiosity fueling their actions). That is crucial to note because it serves as a clear delineator between reality and fantasy.

Handjobs strove to curate and cultivate an imagined world, painted out by their talented stable of writers and particularly their illustrators, where older men were valued and desirable in equal measure to their younger counterparts, and where those counterparts themselves never did anything they didn’t expressly want to do. Indeed they were instead offered a kind of validation of who they were and the desires they suppressed or feared to articulate; these were morality plays demonstrating the gratifying rewards of learning to be who you really are and living honestly. This wasn’t a chickenhawk, predator/pray scenario where old lecherous monsters stole the virtue of young and clueless boys. It wasn’t a NABLA playground where “society” simply “misunderstood” the nature of “love” between middle aged men and preadolescent children.

It was a thoroughly imagined world where sex simply didn’t have the crushing weight imposed by religion, and disease, and misogyny, and heteronormative social structures. Where men, who were governed (as we all are truly governed) by biology and chemistry, not just allowed for, but rather celebrated their sexual selves. And let other men see them and witness their sexuality without “what does it all mean?!” drama superimposed. Their sexuality and its tetherless nature felt as organic as any depictions of eating or sleeping or speaking or pissing. It just was, without judgement or qualification.

Sex and sexuality were undifferentiated in their presented morality and everpresence from any other thing human animals could do alone or together. The idea that people of same gender could find enthusiastic physical pleasure with one another was as normal and wholesome feeling as any of the Norman Rockwell paintings so many of these graphic illustrations sought to subvert.

It was never about literal father and son or familial incest, which in reality could never escape the black hole of emotional and psychological damage that occurs with such imbalances of power and autonomy. I hope never to be mistaken in my writings or endless fawning over Josman and the Nifty Archive on this point. I don’t long for a world where boys are subject to abuse or unwanted interactions with anyone. But I do lament growing up with sex being treated by society and adults like a huge, threatening secret, about which (like all teenage boys) I could never stop thinking. And I lament having nobody I trusted there to say “eh. Penises are pretty cool and you can just do whatever you want, and it doesn’t have to MEAN anything. The rules are all made up and you’re fine inside.” I do long for a world where boys are made to feel ok about who they are inside and to embrace the exciting and vibrant pleasures of maleness.

Looking at the landscape of sexual fantasy and pornographic entertainment available today, I hope that people are able to find works and performers and art that comforts them and extends an invitation to be reminded that they are not alone. That was the most important gift this magazine truly provided to me: the understanding that not only I was I not alone, but that there were so many other weirdos like me out there they had made a whole magazine! And people were so moved by the weird thoughts inside of them and what those thoughts did to their boners that they wrote and illustrated stories about it! And they used those fictional spaces to embrace and make beautiful all the things we can’t talk about because they’re not acceptable!

I still work to live in this fictional world a little bit today. I see so much pornography and sexual content that wittingly or not, reinforces all the exclusion by race and age and body type, and all the insistence that sex is solely defined by heteronormative, role-based, penetrative action. Things that should be making us see we are all alike and all want similar things, but instead only root in deeper the idea that sexual joy is not for you if you are old, or fat, or a father, or a grandfather, or not muscular, or not a top, or not a bottom, or not interested in penetrative sex at all, or too young, or differently abled, or not white.

Handjobs Magazine wasn’t about being a politically correct and balanced utopia, but it was about the possibility of a world where men in your life could simply acknowledge their sexuality and yours, without it costing anyone anything or deserving reproach. Without it being a threat or precursor to an unknown and scary more, or a precipice or purity from which one could never return. Where we (men) weren’t forced to compartmentalize our desires and our very biology, because sex wasn’t confused with marriage, or religion, or even love! It was an athletic and energizing activity shared by human animals where everyone involved parted without shame or conflicted feelings about what it meant or said about their masculinity or their relationships.

Sex is one of the best things we get as people. To box it in with labels and rules and shame serves none of us. Especially when sex is for all of us. Handjobs Magazine was for all of us.

-t