We wouldn’t advise doing this but if you sit down and really think about the year 2000, it almost seems as if it was just here, and it seems impossible and a bit obscene that it was actually almost a decade ago. That decade flew by fast, boy, like it didn’t even happen. I don’t know if was because of 9/11, George Bush, the Iraq War or what, but it seems as if we’ve already lost a decade. If we lose another because of this damn recession, that is really going to suck.

Oh, well. The time has past and it isn’t coming back. But so many of us are still around and kicking, and we thought it might be cool to dredge up a little piece of the past.

We discovered this little gem, which was penned by our esteemed colleague, Ann Oui, as we were going through the staff archives. (Our staff has worked at just about every adult media outfit, including AVN, AVN Online, GayVN, XBIZ World and Video/Premiere, YNOT and others, and that’s just the adult rags. You’ll find our damn bylines scattered about cyberspace and printland far and wide.)

We have excerpted the first few paragraphs for your historical enjoyment. The title of the profile is A Million Man Site: Men Cyberclub, which was a website version of three magazines published by Caryn Goldberg, president of Specialty Publications, which recently rebranded itself as Unzipped Media. Enjoy.

The site is called Men CyberClub (www.menmagazine.com), and as of deadline was barely six weeks old, an online boy toy trying to insert itself firmly into a niche market that already contains the likes of Chisel (www.chisel.com) and Boyzone (www.boyzone.com), to name a few. In order to succeed, then, this newest venture in online gay porn will have to be extremely hardcore, right? It’ll have to go where few men have gone before, right? Wrong. The truth of the matter is that if there is such a thing as a soft niche within a hard niche, this is it. The site could in fact be rated PG. It may not even qualify as porn at all.

“For you guys, it wouldn’t,” says Caryn Goldberg, publisher of both the print and online versions of Men magazine and its brother publications. “But for a more mainstream non-sex reader, they consider anything with naked guys in it to be pornography. It’s a fine line. We do have some sets with two guys, but still, there’s no sex, no penetration and no ejaculation. There’s nothing. It’s softcore. Although, strangely enough, straight people still consider it hardcore.” But of course they do. The scientists call it Fear of the Phallus. Most men are afflicted.

“You’ve seen it out in the mainstream entertainment industry too,” continues Goldberg, definitely on a roll. “A movie that has frontal nudity of a woman gets a G or PG rating, and the second there’s a dick in it, all of a sudden it’s R-rated. And it really is no more than that. It’s just that male nudity is so much more… ‘dirty’ than female.” Preaching to the choir, baby.

But enough griping. Men CyberClub certainly has nothing to be ashamed of. It’s a solid product with an enviable stockpile of original images that should keep it cruising for years to come. And though new to the Internet, it boasts a rather distinguished offline pedigree. According to Goldberg, its roots coincide with the beginnings of the Gay Liberation Movement. “LPI (Liberation Publications Inc.) was started in 1966 with The Advocate, which never made any money. It was started the year before Stonewall as a little mimeographed newsletter produced in the dark of night in the basement of ABC Television here in LA by some gay employees; mostly to warn people about bar raids. It depended heavily on personal ads and phone sex ads, but it showed no graphic nudity, no frontal nudity at all. But it was still basically a man’s magazine, before Out or anything. It was one of a kind. Then, in 1984, they started Men magazine, which was supposed to do sexual products to help support The Advocate financially.”

Now, more than fifteen years and a million archived photographs later, Men is finally ready to venture into cyberspace along with a fistful of fellow publications. “We have three print magazines,” says Goldberg. “Men, Freshmen, which was originally a spin-off from Men featuring younger guys but basically the same format as Men, and Unzipped, a bi-weekly that covers primarily the adult gay entertainment community. However, it’s going monthly and we’re changing the focus of it to be something more broad. It’s going to be about gay sex and sexuality in general, of which porn is one manifestation, but only one. If you look at a magazine like Men’s Health, which covers all aspects of men’s physical and emotional health, this will be about gay sex and sexuality from just about as many angles, but it will still feature nude layouts and eroticism.”

The complete article was originally published in AVN Online in August 2000 and can be read here.