Father’s Day: A Long Talk with Dad, the Creator of Handjobs Magazine

Dad would like to share with you the storied history of this peculiar publication.

A few weeks back I finally managed to publish a long-form piece about what Handjobs Magazine meant to me as a young man, and why it was more than just another of the “jack off rags” that it accompanied on the shelves of gay bookstores. For those, unfamiliar, Handjobs was an illustrated monthly collection of stories purporting to be about “daddy/boy” and “older/younger” relationships, and was the sort of thing that makes “conservative” voters’ buttholes tighten up just to think about. Had it been a photo journal, or a Penthouse Forum style platform for people to share “guess what happened to me!” stories, it would never have lasted beyond the first issue.

But Handjobs Magazine fully divested itself from this world’s sordid and troubled sexual realities, instead preferring to gently escort readers to a place where fantasy reigned unchecked, and sexuality was fluid and fundamental. Rather than a dogmatized component of a monogamous relationship or a bottom-shelf/brown-paper-bag shameful necessity of human experience, in the hands of the writers and illustrators of Handjobs, sex became a joyful and consequence-free expression and celebration of fraternity (the fraternity of Penis, not necessarily literal fraternity. Although with HJ, sometimes literal fraternity); a way for men to shake the bondage of polite society and acknowledge the humanness in their brothers (again, only sometimes literally their brothers).

Nothing so magical could last forever, though, and the magazine ceased publication in 2014. Because of the fervent and deep current of love for this monthly collection of fantasies and ideas, it has lived on as a paid newsletter (the link is at the bottom) titled Dad’s Bedtime Tales, and mailed each week from an address that reads simply: dad@

This Father’s Day, I’m pleased to have the chance to speak with the creators of the original publication and the ongoing newsletter (who answer collectively to “Dad” and prefer the anonymity this preserves in their lives). I have a million questions, of course, after obsessing over this publication since the 90s. But I’ve winnowed it down to just some important things I think are worth knowing and preserving about the story of how Handjobs came to be.

Come and sit next to Dad with me and let’s chat:

First off, I can’t even explain how unexpected and amazing it is to be talking with people involved in the creation of this publication I’ve so admired for so long. In my previous essay about Handjobs (and in the myriad stories and comics I’ve already shared on this site), I talked a bit about the ways it made me feel excited and aroused, of course, but also less alone and less weird. That was a big deal! And it seems to have been for a lot of people, based on the comments and replies.

Would you mind sharing a little bit about how this magazine came to be, once upon a time?

Handjobs Magazine started in our bedroom, a daddy-boy couple living in Mountain View in 1991. We met in Seattle in 1983, in a health club. It was love at first sight between a 44 year old romantic man and a shy but adventurous 26 year old. We celebrated our 37th anniversary this month. For a long time, we set Mothers Day as our anniversary as that was around the time we met, but after getting legally married on June 6, 2013, we changed our anniversary to June 6.

That’s amazing! Congratulations! Sorry to interrupt!

It all began when we used to write each other bedtime stories and hide them under each other’s pillows so we could discover them when we went to bed. In April 1991 we had enough of these stories to photocopy them at work, bring them home, and fold and staple them together into crude magazines. We were living in Mountain View, California, and took ten to a Different Light Bookstore on Castro in San Francisco. The magazine buyer at the time, Rachel Pepper, bought ten of them on the spot and put them on the magazine rack while we watched in disbelief.

We called a month later. She told us they had all sold and asked could we bring more. And so Handjobs was born as a monthly magazine. We published every month from April 1991 through the October 2014 issue.

In a way, the genesis of Handjobs happened decades earlier, back in the 1970s. I grew up in a very religious family, a missionary family, raised overseas. We were back living in the US in the early 70s. I longed to return to the country I grew up in so much that I spent much of my last years of high school, alone in my bedroom. My older brother kept paperback porn novels underneath his mattress. I discovered these novels and read them voraciously. The opportunities to sneak these novels out of my older brother’s bedroom were few and far in between. So I started writing my own erotic stories which I kept hidden in my bedroom.

My religious upbringing and that we were living in a small, religious community – where everyone knew what everyone else was doing, where who had dinner at whose house and what was on the menu was in the weekly newspaper, where a car couldn’t drive by without someone saying, “There goes so and so. I wonder where they’re going?” where the old men spent their days in the one cafe in town, deciding who their grandchildren should marry and such – made it impossible to contemplate doing any of the things I read about in my older brother’s porn paperbacks. I did hear rumors about this one farmer who did things with the high school boys who worked for him, but was too afraid to ask which farmer it was so I could go work for him.

*Laughs*

I heard that the father of my sister’s boyfriend, woke his sons up if they slept in too long by going into their bedroom and pulling on their balls. I sure wished something like that would happen to me. Writing about the things I wanted to do was a guilt free, harmless, risk-free escape.

One day my mother found these stories. She made me burn them and promise that I would never write such things again. She also told me that she would not tell my father about them. I kept writing the stories and hiding them. A short time later my father found them. He too made me burn the stories and promise not to write them anymore. He said he would not tell my mother about them. He asked me if I’d done the things I mentioned in my stories because my writing described the acts so well. I assured him I had not, which was true.

I kept writing the stories and found a hiding place where they would never be found.

My parents have passed away but I still don’t know if they ever told each other about these stories that I wrote. I guess I was destined to start Handjobs Magazine.

One direct inspiration for Handjobs Magazine were the Straight to Hell booklets [authored and edited by the infamous Boyd McDonald]. I first encountered them at A Different Light Bookstore. The raw, unfiltered, unvarnished accounts of guys’ sexual experiences in them were a model to follow when I wrote stories. Capturing the pure joy a guy experiences when he discovers how much fun it is to play with his dick, and how special it is when he finds a man who enjoys playing too, is what I attempt to write. We all need more joy, love, and tenderness.

That is such a clear translation! Now that you’ve shared that, STH is a pretty obvious jump-off for what you would go to on to create and collect. And it feels like you’re speaking to me directly about the joy, love, and tenderness. I think you hit this idea out of the park in so many of your works. 

I love that Handjobs was an OG zine, way back when! Guerrilla marketing and production style – work copy machines, hand stapled, and hand delivered to outlets. That’s wild. And so appropriate that it should come about in such a loving way, rather than as the product of a corporation or brand trying to sell a product. How long did it continue that way, before it was professionally published? And do you have any of these hand-crafted editions laying about in a glass case or something? Ready for their eventual trip to the Smithsonian?

We do have these earliest editions. They are rare. We only made ten to a dozen of the first few issues. I don’t ever expect them to go to the Smithsonian. I’m waiting for the earliest editions to pop up on an episode of Antiques Roadshow. Here are the covers of the first five April issues. They give you an idea of the development of the magazine.

By 1992 we needed to stop using the office photocopier. We were sneaking into the office on weekends and using too much paper. We were living in Mountain View, California, at the time and found a local printer who could duplicate them for us. But once we got into the hundreds of copies, we had to find another printer. There is more about this history further down.

By 1995 we were starting to look like a professionally produced magazine. We went from a stapled magazine to a perfect bound magazine with the April 1995 issue.

I can’t explain how badly I want to own all of these. Seeing these covers makes me want to touch them and smell them and then be left alone with them for an afternoon or so. I’m so happy you managed to keep them all this time.

I’ve always been curious, if there was more than one person involved, what discussions about ethics or rules looked like back then? Were there talks about where “the line” was? No violence? Or no scat? No abuse? Or did you all just take it in stride and leave imaginations unchecked? Were there ever any “too hot for Handjobs” stories or comics that ultimately didn’t see the light of day?

There were just the two of us writing the stories and putting the magazine together so we wrote what we wanted and never sat down to discuss ethics or rules. We didn’t have any talks about where to draw the line. Handjobs Magazine has never been a formal enterprise with committees, rules, and meetings. I had enough years working in corporate America, attending meetings ad nauseam. The intention never was to become big and have many employees, or to turn into a typical corporation.

Friends and acquaintances heard what we were doing and wanted to contribute stories. As the magazine spread, we started getting submissions. Perhaps because the guys sending in submissions liked what they read in Handjobs, they sent in stories that were about the subject matter we printed. We did reject stories that were hard to read, very poorly written, or in some cases were just the rantings and ravings of the insane, which occasionally came in the mail. In fact on our Personal Ad Order Form, after getting one too many of these rants, we added the line: “The rantings and the ravings of the insane will not be published.”

Wow! I can’t even imagine. What a thrill, though, to be one of those random fans who sent in a story that worked for you! To be able to be part of that legacy would be very cool. 

I’ve never met anyone who knew the publication who didn’t immediately light up in talking about it. But I imagine that probably wasn’t universal. Were there ever any serious challenges to making and distributing the print magazine? Did it ever seem as though there might be trouble outside of just printing and shipping logistics?

Finding printers was a challenge. Our second printer was a lesbian with small printing press in San Jose. When we outgrew what she was able to print, we found a large printer in Albany, California, run by a lesbian couple. They were great to work with. But their son took over the business, and his uncle, who made the film to put on the printing presses did not like outputting our material, and in 2000, refused to create any more film for our publications, a necessary step when printing on an offset printer. We tried a few months printing a final proof on paper in-house at 1,000+ dpi, sending that to our printer, and having him reproduce from that, but the quality was terrible. We were back in Seattle at the time. Fortunately, we found a prepress company in Seattle who had no trouble outputting the film for our publications.

The experience made us search for a new printer. We looked high and low for a printer who would print our material. We lucked out finding a printer in the Chicago area run by two brothers, one of whom was gay. We sent him copies of Handjobs, he called back to say he loved it. We first had him print some of our Handjobs Anthologies. We were pleased with the quality of their work. Shipping the books from Chicago to Seattle worked. We turned over the printing of the monthly magazine to them starting with the August 2001 issue. They printed the rest of the Handjobs Magazines through the October 2014 issue.

From 1991 into 1996 we were in the Bay Area in Mountain View and later in San Jose, California. By 1995 Handjobs Magazine provided enough income that we could quit our day jobs. In 1996 we moved back to Washington State where we were from.

The logistics of printing, trucking the magazines from California and later from Chicago to our location in Washington State were challenging at times. We mailed Handjobs using First Class Mail. Our target mailing day was the 20th of each month. If the 20th was on a weekend, we’d do it the Friday before or the Monday after. But it didn’t matter when we mailed it, by the 20th we’d start getting phone calls from subscribers wondering when their Handjobs Magazine was going to arrive. A few times, subscribers called and swore they always got their issue on the 18th, which was impossible, because the earliest we ever mailed it was the 19th. Being a day or two late mailing out Handjobs was not an option if we didn’t want our phone to ring all day long.

The aftermath of 9/11 created a crisis for us. Our trucking company had already picked up the October 2001 issue from our printer. Like always I started tracking the shipment. For days there was no tracking information. The day before the shipment would have normally arrived, our trucking company told us they lost the shipment. It took them days to find out where the shipment had gone. They found it in one of their terminals in Houston, I believe. We received it a week later than usual.

For the most part we never encountered any flack from publishing Handjobs. We seldom received hate mail or phone calls. We had a few situations where women ordered Handjobs Magazines or placed personal ads in the name of their ex husbands or bosses to get them in trouble.

Perhaps the most troubling incident was when the pastor of our part time bookkeeper discovered where she worked, He threatened to call Child Protective Services and have her children removed from her home if she continued working for us. Fortunately, the church members rallied around her and nothing came of his threats. We did contact Child Protective Services to get their view on the matter, and they assured us that she had nothing to worry about.

That is such a peculiar thing to do to someone who seems so marginally involved! How odd. I don’t envy your being on that call to CPS, but how responsible of you to look after her that way. 

What was the scale, at the magazine’s peak? I don’t know how else I could find that information with a publication like this, but I’ve always been curious. You can ballpark, too. I’m not collecting stats. I always imagined it must have been hundreds of subscribers, outside of bookstore sales. But was it more? Thousands? Tens of thousands?

At its peak, our print run was over 7,000 copies. That was during the late 1990s and early 2000s. Eighty percent went to distributors and stores, twenty percent to subscribers. When we’d receive the magazines, we’d spend the first day stuffing envelopes and getting the subscriber issues mailed. The following days, we staggered shipping the magazines to our distributors and bookstores so that all the distributors and bookstores would get them pretty much on the same day.

I doubt readers realize what a tiny operation Handjobs has always been. We had no employees until 1996 when we hired our editor, at first part time, and then full time. At our busiest, there were five of us, us two who started it, our editor, our guy doing the orders and shipping, and a part time book keeper. Everyone helped with the monthly mailing to subscribers. From 2013 until we stopped printing in 2014, there were just three working, us two and our editor who also helped with the orders and mailing the monthly magazine.

That is incredible. I had no idea it was happening at that kind of volume! 

How did you keep track of the contributors and their work, pre-email? Was everyone just local? And how much would you say you personally contributed, story-wise? It’s a bit difficult to keep track of from outside, with often only common first names attributed as authors.

We had very few contributors the first few years. Most of the contributors were friends or readers of Handjobs. We had so few that corresponding with them by mail and phone was easy. Since 1996, our editor kept track of the contributors and handled corresponding with them.

Even as contributions increased, we still wrote 20 to 40% of the material. The stories in Dad’s Bedtime Tales Newsletter are written by us, though we have recently included original comics by Madakou. To keep it simple, we are not accepting story submissions at this time. We welcome story ideas, and we enjoy hearing from readers what they would like to read.

I imagine it probably became a bit like a job having to juggle contributors and publishing and any problems that arose. I bet the DBTN readers are probably just fine with you guys taking it a little more low impact with that publication. 

The illustrators are another story because their work is so immediately visually identifiable. How did you find these guys originally? Did they come to you? Or did you see their work elsewhere? Was it a knows-somebody-who-knows-somebody sort of situation?

The illustrators came to us. One of the earliest artists, Julius, sent us a fax with illustrations. He had seen Handjobs Magazine in New York City on a visit, drew a few sketches he thought we would like, and faxed them to us. Other artists mailed in illustrations. Later some emailed them to us. I think the only illustrator we approached was Josman. We saw his My Wild and Raunchy Son comic on a site he had. We emailed him to ask if we could publish the series, and if he would illustrate for us.

That’s amazing! I had no idea that was the sequence of events. I had assumed all this time that Josman and the MWARS series happened because of you guys! I never knew he was publishing those stories on his own beforehand. 

Somehow Rolando Mérida discovered us in 1996. He’s been our most productive artist and we are forever grateful to him. Michael Mitchell sent in artwork in late 1999. Lord Iron sent us a packet with stirring illustrations in 2002. These artists are still sending us art.

Rolando is a favorite of a dear friend of mine. His work is so varied, narratively, and even stylistically sometimes. 

I have trouble expressing what it is to hear you talk about these names so casually. I’ve been drooling over their art for most of my life and imagining they must be rich and celebrated artists. The struggle to find real and current info on so many of them online has been the bane of this whole blog for years and years. So many hours googling to try to find personal sites, or even articles or essays that mention where they lived (or whether they’re still living!) and what they did now or how to reach them. Not to mention lots of emails over the years asking me if I knew anything or how to find more that I had to simply say “Iunno!” to. 

Do you have a favorite edition? A favorite story? Or even just a comic or illustration that has stayed with you? Or is it all precious and you could never choose just one? (You didn’t ask, but mine is Shop Repairman from the March, 2000 issue. I can’t totally even explain why. I’ve just been thinking about that guy’s dumb luck to have stumbled upon such a magical watch repair shop, for the past 20 years of my life.)

Putting out the first Julius book, Bavarian Chronicles, was special. So was seeing the Josman book arrive. Putting out the hardcover Roger book was an achievement. The Succession by Rolando Mérida sold out quickly. I always enjoyed the editions with Valentine’s Norman Rockwell-esque illustrations, such as the illustrations in the January and May 2000 issues. Michael Mitchell’s Dr. Bumfoin illustrations in the May, October, and December 2002 are special. They depict so well a happy Handjobs boy.

It’s impossible to pick a favorite edition.

Obviously, losing the print publication in 2014 was heartbreaking. I remember I was working for Rentboy.com and was at my desk in the office when I found out about that. I was so angry – just at everything; the internet, piracy, stupid people who didn’t “get” it. I even had a conversation with my boss that very day about somehow using the company to try to buy it and rescue it from oblivion.

But Handjobs persevered, didn’t it? In the form of Dad’s Bedtime Tales Newsletter. Tell me how that came about?

We almost let it go when we stopped publishing Handjobs in October 2014. The print magazine world collapsed. Nearly all the bookstores that carried publications like Handjobs ceased. The closing of gay bookstores across the country was heartbreaking. But a reader convinced us to keep writing. We were talking on the phone after we announced that the October 2014 was the last issue of Handjobs. He said, “But you’re not going to stop writing, are you?”

If he hadn’t called, I doubt I would have started Dad’s Bedtime Tales Newsletter. From 2014 until 2019, it was an under the radar publication, something we sent out every Saturday by email. We shut our website at the end of 2014. We were hosting it in house, but the cost of doing so was prohibitive. We live in such a rural environment, that back then, just getting 3 meg up and down internet service to our place cost over $2,000 a month.

We never advertised or promoted the Dad’s Bedtime Tales Newsletter. We let our current readers know about it. Because of where we lived, with limited internet access, we weren’t in a position to start a new website. It wasn’t until 2018, that we had the internet connection in our rural location that made starting up a website feasible.

In January 2019 we took the leap to revive the website. From the way it is going, hopefully we can keep it going for years to come. If you’ve looked at our About Us page, you may have noticed that issue 1,000 will be out on December 24, 2033. We will be up to issue 300 soon, so issue 1,000 is not an impossibility.

I’ll be there waiting for it to hit my inbox.

Dad, I know you must have some understanding of the value of this strange and unique thing you’re responsible for. The magazine itself had hundreds (if not thousands) of letters and compliments full of blind, screaming praise printed at the front of every edition. But I want to express my personal sincere gratitude that y’all took the risks that you did and kept this thing alive for so long. I make a practice now out of reading each story in the DBTN, in order, rather than just scanning or jumping around. It’s become a bit of a ritual that way, reading one story every few days, when I need a distraction from the mess of the world and the hurt that none of us can really look away from right now.

The thing you’re doing still matters. Has mattered for a long time. I hope it was lucrative at some point. But even if it was always simply a labor of love, you should know that it made an impact on a lot of people and shaped some sexual imaginations for a long period of time. And it made weird kids like me feel a little less weird. That’s a real gift in this present era, where so much adult entertainment looks so similar and so uncreative and unloving.

There rather wasn’t anything like Handjobs Magazine before. And I don’t expect there will be any time soon.

Oh! Who drew the HJ logo icon? I loved that little spurting penis when I was younger, and I include it any time I share a classic story on the blog.

There were years when Handjobs was profitable. Nevertheless, keeping the cash flow going to pay our small staff, pay our printer, purchase postage, pay taxes, and such was often a struggle. It’s a struggle for many businesses. Most of Handjobs sales were to bookstores and distributors. A third of them paid reliably. A third paid, but took reminding that they owed us. And a third were chronic late payers. One time we flew out to New York to get a big distributor to pay up. The last few years when we were in print and the magazine business was in a tailspin, we drained hundreds of thousands of dollars of our savings to keep it afloat. By the fall of 2014, it was impossible to keep it going.

The Dad’s Bedtime Tales Newsletter venture is a much lighter business. Hopefully we can keep it going for many years to come.

And, we created the HJ logo. There are cut and uncut versions, light and dark versions:

I can’t say thank you enough for all the time and energy invested here. What you do is so excellent.

If you’re reading this (congrats on making it through such a long post!) and you’re interested in signing up for Dad’s Bedtime Tales Newsletter (which I highly suggest you do), you can find the order form and payment options at hjmag.com

There is a new edition every Saturday, sent lovingly from dad@.

-t

The feature image for this post was lovingly purloined from Gentlemen’s Closet, featuring the ever dadly Peter Rough. See more of him here.