Somewhere behind a New Jersey housing development, a waterlogged Penthouse has been rotting under a rock for about forty years. If you're of a certain age, you can smell it from here: wet paper, and the very specific thrill of a pack of boys trying to look casual about what they just found.
But I gotta be honest, I missed this particular experience. I grew up in Chile, and the “woods porn” tradition never made it to my corner of the map. So when grown men online started describing dirty magazines stashed in the forest like a shared national sacrament, I assumed it was a bit. It turns out to be one of the best-documented secret rituals of the pre-internet world.
What is “Woods Porn”?
Woods porn is the stash of dirty magazines that kids found hidden outdoors before the internet, and the whole ritual of finding it. The classic find was a Playboy swollen from the rain, wedged under a log just off the path. Whoever found it passed it around and left the pile for the next crew. For plenty of men now in their forties and fifties, it was the first naked body they ever saw. DVDs and Pornhub killed it off, which is why anyone under thirty-five hears about it and assumes you're making it up.
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It happened everywhere
MEL Magazine ran a whole feature on the subject, and the reporter said every guy he interviewed had a woods porn story. Joe Donatelli, writing for Playboy, rounded up Hollywood's woods porn wing. Nathan Fillion and his friends found a stash in a treehouse, and Wil Wheaton tucked a July 1985 Playboy into a tree behind his house. Patton Oswalt and Tig Notaro have their own versions.
I talked to a man on Reddit who grew up in suburban New Jersey in the '70s and '80s. He asked me to keep his name out of it, and he described his first big find like this: a stack of magazines wrapped in plastic, tucked inside a hollow tree trunk. "Reminded me of a dead drop used by secret agents for microfilm," he told me. Some stranger had carefully waterproofed his care package, and a pack of kids found it and, in his words, "went wild." His theory on the owner: "a married guy or a kid who couldn't chance the old lady discovering his stash in his room." The forensics of the horny. Between the husbands and the teenagers, the woods became the town's filthiest lending library.
There was a code, too. "It was share and share alike," he said. "Whoever found stuff was obliged to share." Other guys dragged a tarp out to the BMX trails so the pages would still turn after a rain. One New Jersey crew figured out that the corner store sliced the covers off unsold magazines and tossed them in the dumpster, which gave them what one of them called porn on tap. Kids without woods made do with drainage pipes and abandoned cars.
What the gay kid was really hunting
For most of these boys, the woods were a straight rite of passage, a story they still tell laughing forty years later. My Reddit guy was crouched in the same circle with his eye on something else. "Most of it was straight porn of course," he told me, and he was more interested in the men.
Then he said the truest thing anyone has told me about this whole subject. "The gay (man/man) porn was much scarcer but more highly prized. You had to be much more careful about who, if anybody, you could trust sharing it with. It would be okay to say wow, look at the size of those dicks." Liking the gay stuff together was a different story. That told the other boy you were into guys.
That's the whole closet in a plastic bag. Marveling was allowed, practically a team sport. Wanting it was the tell. Picture one boy in that clearing giving the centerfold exactly the right amount of enthusiasm while he quietly memorizes the guy in the corner of the frame.
Any of us who grew up gay before the internet knows that math. Our porn was scarcer and more prized, and so was every other scrap of proof that we existed.
The stakes go back a lot further than our generation. Before boys were hiding magazines in trees, men were sweating over physique magazines like Physique Pictorial and The Male Figure, sold as fitness and "art reference" to anyone who didn't know better. In the 1940s and '50s, closeted men dreaded the walk to the mailbox, because the Comstock Act let the Postal Service treat any image of male nudity as obscene. Inspectors opened mail and raided studios. Some tracked subscribers down at work and told the boss what the man was reading, and men lost their jobs over it. It took a 1962 Supreme Court case, MANual Enterprises v. Day, to rule that photos of men weren't inherently obscene. Tom of Finland got his start in that same world. The gay version of the stash carried higher stakes for about a century.
Out of the woods
The internet ended the scarcity. A closeted kid today can find a thousand reflections of himself before dinner, and thank god. I wouldn't trade that back. I do get a little sentimental about how much every scrap used to be worth, and how finding your people felt like the end of a long search.
Somewhere out there is a sixty-something man who once pried a plastic-wrapped magazine out of a hollow tree, looked right past the centerfold, found the one picture that was secretly for him, and kept his face very, very still. I'd bet money he's part of the Hunky Tribe now.
Did your town have a stash spot? Was it in the woods, or somewhere stranger? Tell me in the comments.
Stay Hunky!
Sources
- The Pre-Internet Phenomenon of Boys Hiding Their Porn in the Woods (MEL Magazine)
- There Are a Lot of Girly Magazines In Our Nation's Woods (Joe Donatelli, originally for Playboy)
- Magazines provided risky outlet of desire for closeted gay men (Bob Mizer Foundation)
- The inexplicably ubiquitous phenomenon of 'woods porn' (Dangerous Minds)
- Plus one anonymous Reddit user from suburban New Jersey, who lived it and let me quote him.
