Playboy magazine may be going non-nude, but longtime metro area fans are saying the decision is no go.
“That’s just unnatural,” said a surprised customer on Tuesday afternoon at Southern Nights Video on Cheshire Bridge Road.
Other customers at the 20-year-old adult video store had a similar response when they heard the news which was announced Tuesday on Playboy.com's website.
“As you may have heard, Playboy is going to be non-nude starting with the March 2016 issue,” said the online post. “This means the models, celebrities and, yes, Playmates will not be naked for the first time since our founder Hugh Hefner laid out the first issue in 1953.”
“I always thought Playboy was very tastefully done,” said Stephanie Fox, manager of Southern Nights. “I’m 63 and I’m a woman and I would sneak into my parents’ room and look at my dad’s stack of Playboys.”
Southern Nights sells vintage copies of Playboy, Penthouse and Hustler, but Fox notes that reading in general has definitely fallen off. “Why bother buying the magazine [for nudity] when all you have to do is turn on primetime TV? God forbid if you go to HBO or Showtime, it’s there. There are shows now that I am embarrassed to watch with my teenage grandson,” she said. “I think if you want porn, you should come in the shop and rent it, not watch it on TV.”
Playboy, she said, was an alternative to all of that. “They are an icon and they have been around forever,” she said.
So why would they mess with a good thing? Last year, Playboy.com relaunched as a non-nude website and still managed to attract tens of millions of readers each month, according to the staff. While Hefner founded the company at a time when the country was more conservative, things have changed, they said. Nudity in movies, television and music is almost the norm. So Playboy is leaping out on faith that their work in that area is done. They are moving on as “a cultural arbiter of beauty, taste, opinion, humor and style.”
“You’re kidding,” said Harold Gerlitsch, a local food industry veteran known in some circles as the “Hugh Hefner of Atlanta.”
“[A Playboy] magazine with clothing? You can just buy Cosmopolitan,” he said. “I don’t think they are going to have any demand for the magazine anymore.”
At 70-plus years of age, Gerlitsch took the news particularly hard since he has lived most of his life as a self-styled version of Hefner. “When I used to go to his mansion, I wanted to live like him. He was my idol. I have a picture hanging in my house that he signed when he was younger and I look at it everyday,” Gerlitsch said.
He spent time at the Playboy mansion in the 1970’s and was so taken by Hefner’s lifestyle that he brought it back to Atlanta. His parties were legendary, complete with nude girls, dancing, bikini contests, food and more. “They got wild,” he said. But by the early 90’s, he had to pull the plug. “You can’t do that anymore because everyone is sue happy,” Gerlitsch said. As in, if things got too out of hand, someone was sure to seek financial compensation.
The parties may have stopped, but Gerlitsch who is single (and has never married) and has no children, is still partying like a playboy. “My girlfriends think I’m in my late forties,” he said. And his girlfriends are never older than 24.
“When they are over 25, they want to get married. When the m-word comes up, they are history to me,” Gerlitsch said.
Yes, his idol Hef, has been married (three times!) but that’s different. “He has babysitters and nannies. It’s more for show,” Gerlitsch said.
For Gerlitsch, the non-nude announcement marks the end of an era. “I don’t want to buy [Playboy] anymore. I’m going to cancel it,” he said. And to all those guys who said they only ever subscribed for the articles, Gerlitsch said they are full of it. “I looked at the pictures,” he said.
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