A few years ago, I asked a guy, a porn star, to tell me about the first porn he ever saw. Sean Cody, he replied. Ugh. You damned kids. In the era before the internet porn — before DVD porn, even — these are the meager pickings that I was forced to cobble together in order to make showernozzle masturbation material.

1. Jim Palmer

You know that you’re hard up when you’re taking Time Magazine into the bathroom three times a day. Welcome to my 14th year. If you want to know how hard it was to find porn — or even pictures of naked men — all you have to do is look at Jim Palmer (I think he’s a golfer?) with his David Hasselhoff hair, milquetoast body, Jane Fonda weights and funderwear.

2. I, Claudius

I can’t actually find a video of the scene, but there’s a scene maybe in the 8th episode where two old men wash themselves with olive oil in a sauna. You may or may not be able to see the top of a buttcrack. Walk, don’t run, to your local library’s VHS collection.

3. Heathers

Unlike I, Claudius, I actually owned Heathers, not just because it was terribly faggy, but because there’s one scene where you can see muscle jocks — this was the beginning of straight muscle jockdom, something that didn’t really exist in the 80s outside of gay porn — stripping down for a prospective threeway with Winona Rider. They die of course, but I loved my dead gay musclejocks.

4. This Copy of Playgirl

To this day, I don’t really know who Robby Benson is, and he never got naked enough in the issue to pique my interest. But otherwise, I masturbated the hell out of this magazine. It was in my cool aunt’s magazine rack and on holidays I’d make some excuse to ‘plant it’ on someone as a gag. This would give me a chance to handle it, open it up and memorize the pictures. Later, I began ripping out pages (the Rear Views spread (below right)! The Honk if You Like Playgirl ad! Edward-Tombridge Wells (below left)) and hiding them under an old sink in an abandoned trailer.

5. The Calvin Klein Underwear Ad

Granted, this was a little before my time, but it — and it’s progeny — still appeared if you looked hard enough. In 8th grade, I won a history award from the Daughters of the American Revolution, based mostly on my fervor for looking through old magazines looking for this.

6. Undergear/International Male

Even then, it was outrageous. A catalog full of almost entirely naked men wearing things like “The Sock,” something that even a Baltimore strippers is too proud to sport. How this managed to make it into straight households across the nation — I can’t even tell you. But it was one of my most treasured possessions.

7. American Gladiators

8. The Soloflex Commercial

I was really intro Nitro — “cocky, explosive, and always aggressive.” Before this, the WWF was about as good as it got.

If I had not been afraid of baseballs and most things sports related, I might have been able to argue to my parents that I was ordering the brochure to become manly. But instead of going out for peewee football, I was home watching General Hospital, so I just settled for finding programs where they showed the commercial, and taping them.

10. Marky Mark Wahlberg

10. JC Penney Catalog

This still floors me. It blew all those old Bowflex ads out of the water, and may be the point at which I started staring at men’s tits. 22 years later (!) I’m still mouth agape at his body.

You just would pretend you could see a bulge, or any hint of more than a Ken crotch. Of all the things, I think this is the most desperate.

11. Tony Danza in The Shower

Is still masturbate to this. PAN DOWN! PAN DOWN!

What did I miss?

Related:

My First Porno: The Unabashed Queer on “The Bigger The Better”