Take This Sex Magazine and Scan It

For the past several years, I’ve collected an obscure gay porn magazine called The Jockey Club (later renamed PAL’s Jockey Club). I own nine issues printed between 1986 and 1987, but based on the gaps in my collection, I think many more issues were printed that I haven’t been able to find. Out of all the vintage magazines I own, I love The Jockey Club in particular because it’s so aggressively homemade: All the early issues were clearly laid out in some version of Broderbund’s software The Print Shop, a master was created using a dot matrix printer and pasted-on black-and-white photos, and then copies were mass-produced and circulated to gay men with an interest in twinks wearing jockstraps. It’s a perfect example of the blurred lines between zine culture and traditional print magazines that existed immediately pre-internet, especially in the context of pornography.

I don’t just collect The Jockey Club; I’ve scanned and uploaded every issue to the Internet Archive so that other people can download and read it. As far as I can tell, nobody else has digitized any issues of this magazine. This isn’t a problem unique to porn, either — there are so many niche communities that had dedicated print magazines circulated among their members that are functionally lost. I got fixated on a magazine called Decoy Collector’s Guide several years ago that was printed specifically for people who were interested in the art and history of duck hunting decoys. There’s a wealth of incredible, pre-internet knowledge-sharing and community-building that’s all but invisible to us now unless someone takes the time to properly archive the full content of these magazines. And I say “archive” in specific opposition to a trend that’s extremely frustrating and all too common: selective, aesthetic excerpting.

There has been a surge of “aesthetic” vintage accounts online that only share excerpts, especially from old porn magazines. Usually, these accounts are selling the magazines for absurd prices, using decontextualized photos or cartoons as teasers, trying to entice their audience into buying the (often hard-to-find) vintage magazine if they want to see more. I find this approach troubling, especially since this trend has exploded on the heels of eBay shutting down its adults-only section, a capitulation to the anti-porn Christian right that made it much harder for amateur collectors to find older explicit and queer stuff online for non-exorbitant prices. I don’t mind reselling, but I hate the gatekeeping element that’s happening on these accounts — I say, sell the physical media, but make it accessible digitally as well. I want to honor the labor that artists and writers put into making these artifacts and keep their work from being reduced to “vibes.” The Pacific Palisades fire in Los Angeles claimed the entire archive of twentieth-century composer Arnold Schoenberg in January 2025, including over 100,000 scores and irreplaceable correspondence and mementos. Celebrated gay author Gary Indiana’s entire personal library was also destroyed by the same fires. The archival need for thorough digital backups is clear and desperate.

Before the internet, magazines were not only educational; they were frequently participatory. They had letters pages, classifieds, editorials, and listings for local events (an example from the piss fetish magazine Water Boys: “WET WEDNESDAYS. 2nd Wednesday of each month…Sleazy dress code is enforced”). Because so many queer magazines were pornographic, they were by nature ephemeral. They weren’t meant to be treated gently; they were meant to be read and handled and passed around to friends. And, as is the case with so much gay porn, they were expected to be thrown in the garbage when their owner died, when their friends or family were cleaning out their stuff. It’s amazing that so much of this material survived, and what does exist is precarious (and frequently expensive). I think it’s important to make copies of these zines while we still can!

I know that digitization can seem overwhelming, but scanning print media is especially simple. If you’re willing to do it yourself, it’s inexpensive to buy a scanner (especially secondhand), and if you don’t personally have access to or space for one, libraries often have them available for free. There are also amateur archivists, like me, who are eager to volunteer their services. There are forums of dedicated nerds who are dying to tell you what equipment to use if you want to get into audiophile levels of detail. The rabbit hole goes as deep as you want it to, but at the end of the day, something is better than nothing. A bad scan is better than no scan. One of the only existing live recordings of Woody Guthrie was made using a cheap wire recorder. It would be nice to have a crisp, perfect reel-to-reel tape recording, but instead, a tiny wire, thin as a human hair, was what preserved his voice. That wire is better than nothing. A distorted voice is better than no voice at all.

The “why” of archiving can feel unintuitive. Is a throwaway porn magazine like The Jockey Club worth the effort? What about magazines that are dumber, uglier, less artistic? What about offensive books or magazines? My answer is that readers and researchers, now and in the future, deserve access to as much material as possible. I think it’s really important to take vintage material out of the realm of the detached and “aesthetic” and engage with it seriously in the way it was meant to be engaged with — as mass-produced, populist work that deserves critical consideration. Gay pornographic media, especially, represents a mode of community-building and communication that was vital in a pre-online world. Ads, letters pages, photo sets, classifieds, and editorials let us know what people were arguing about, what was being advertised, what we now take for granted that was once new and exciting, and how it was talked about. There’s so much to be learned about how people reached out for community, how they spoke about themselves and their desires, and how they talked about their frustrations. 

It’s delightful to read back-to-back letters to the editors of The Jockey Club: the first letter begging for more photos of jockstraps and fewer pictures of briefs, the second angrily demanding an end to jockstrap pictures in favor of a briefs-only issue. And it’s interesting seeing how early bulletin board systems (BBSes, the precursor to internet forums) were advertised and explained to an audience that might not own any kind of home computer. In The Jockey Club Vol. 1, Issue 7, published in July of 1986, the editors noted that The Jockey Club BBS was up and running, and that “by just dialing our computer’s telephone number…you will be in touch with hundreds of other guys who are turned on to men in jocks, briefs and gym & swim gear” (emphasis theirs). The cost of this service was a dollar per hour for members, or two dollars per hour for everyone else. And if you, as a jockstrap fan, were on the fence about joining the computer age, they explained: “If you don’t have a personal computer to take advantage of this great service, all of the equipment necessary to communicate with the Jockey Club BBS can be purchased for less than $200.00.”

The Jockey Club isn’t a magazine that a lot of people would consider “historically important,” but it was made with effort and love and deserves to not disappear. Our shared history is full of nuance that gets paved over and flattened without access to source materials. And, as an archivist, I don’t need to know why someone will necessarily want to read it! Are they doing a survey of gay magazines? Are they looking for advertisements for early BBS groups? Are they just horny? I have no idea, but making the scan available allows other people to make their own curatorial decisions. It’s harder and harder to find physical copies of The Jockey Club, and I’m always looking — it seems like certain issues were printed in higher volumes, so it’s common to see the same issues sold online when they show up at all. But I know I’m not the only person who’s interested! In queer communities and especially the porn space, people reinvent the wheel constantly — advertising “the first” of something that’s been done over and over again — and it’s not out of a lack of interest in our history so much as a broader ignorance of what came before. Instagram infographics full of regurgitated “facts” aren’t a good way to learn about our history (and Instagram historical accounts are particularly egregious about rediscovering the same aestheticized fragments of queer history and making it seem like they’re excavating forgotten treasures). Archiving and making work accessible beyond “aesthetic” snippets lets us be in conversation with the past and integrate it into our lives instead of blurrily commodifying it without hearing what it has to say.

Carta Monir is a writer, visual artist, and sex worker living in Michigan. She was an artist in residence at the Tom of Finland Foundation, and her work has been exhibited and screened internationally. Her work deals with pain, disability, trauma, and perseverance.