Douglas Lambert wanted to give Playboy a run for its money. It was 1971, and Hugh Hefner's magazine had created a new mainstream market for soft-core porn. Lambert, a nightclub owner in Garden Grove, California, decided to get in on the action.

Lambert's wife Jenny saw a bigger opportunity: a magazine with nude male centerfolds. Lambert wasn't sold. What woman wanted to ogle photos of nude men, much less buy a magazine full of them? But he slowly realized Jenny might be on to something. The sexual revolution was well under way, and Lambert "sensed the woman of the '70s was eager to become part" of it, as he'd eventually write in promo copy for his new magazine. So in the summer of 1971, Lambert, along with William Miles Jr., an experienced adman who served as Playgirl's executive vice president, invested $20,000 in the project and opened a swanky, 23rd-floor office in Los Angeles's Century City.

Two years later, in June 1973, Playgirl's first issue hit the newsstand, with a mission similar to its long-standing counterpart: to feature nude centerfolds alongside hard-hitting features by and for women. On the first cover, a nude man (credited as "Eldon") sat cross-legged, his modesty preserved by shadows, as an amorous woman (credited as "Lorelei") nuzzled him from behind. One of its cover lines: "Compulsions of the promiscuous woman." It sold out, moving six hundred thousand copies in four days. At its peak during the late seventies, each issue sold around 1.5 million copies.

Playgirl's debut issue included lifestyle features and no full-frontal nudity.

Now, women could compare men's bodies just as men compared women's. "You take on the power of what was the male gaze," says Nancie Martin, Playgirl's editor-in-chief for part of the eighties. "It's now the female gaze." (That's debatable; the magazine has always been owned and published by men.)

"We were a magazine 'nobody ever bought,' but everybody read," says Ira Ritter, an ad exec for, and later the owner of, Playgirl. That readership included women and men. It's no shocker that a magazine full of naked dudes attracted the secret patronage of gay men, especially in an era when it was risky to be out.

For women and gay men both, Playgirl's true legacy is the way it normalized sexually objectifying men. Before People's panting, annual "Sexiest Man Alive" issue; before the Adonis-heavy photography of Bruce Weber; before Mark Wahlberg posed in Calvin Klein underwear; and before the boom in mainstream "porn for women," Playgirl paved the way in showing off men's bodies for the erotic delight of its readers.

That's a bold initiative for a product you could buy while on a diaper run or pumping gas.

While Lambert's first test issue of Playgirl was under development, Cosmopolitan's iconoclastic editor-in-chief Helen Gurley Brown made waves by publishing the first nude male centerfold: a teasing image of movie star Burt Reynolds on a bearskin rug. That image provided an opening for male nudity to go mainstream.

Some feminists like Gloria Steinem reviled Playboy (Steinem famously went undercover as a Playboy Bunny in 1963 for a Show magazine piece), but Playgirl was championed as progress for women, with articles on abortion and breast cancer.

"You'd have to be pretty simple-minded to think that we were in a society where men looking at pictures of naked women was the same thing as women looking at pictures of naked men," says former articles editor Zina Klapper.

The magazine in its seventies heyday.

Ira Ritter (assistant VP of advertising, VP of advertising, executive VP, and president & publisher, 1974–86): Our goal was to treat women as people. Back then, they were sex objects [presumed to be] only interested in housekeeping or serving their man. We were a very threatening magazine for men. If you came home and found your wife reading Playgirl, it would be, "You don't love me anymore?"

The newsstands were controlled by men. Jerry Falwell wanted this magazine off the newsstands. We were put in the back rack in 7-Eleven.

Playgirl's women-centric content.

Zina Klapper (articles editor, 1981–82): I was told our typical readers were college girls in the Midwest who had never seen a naked man.

Celeste Fremon (fashion and beauty editor, 1970s–80s): The idea of Playgirl, that women could have their own Playboy magazine, was—in the beginning—this grand act of rebellion. The notion was to have nude men—"We can do this, too"—and also have serious articles. The nudity seemed okay, but I thought it was a little embarrassing.

Zina Klapper: Some of the people on the editorial staff had come out of the porn industry because Larry Flynt had moved Hustler from Ohio to L.A. They cared about feminism in a different way than people at Mother Jones did. They were excited to be working for a woman and working with pro-women content in the magazine.

Dian Hanson (editor of Taschen Publishing's Sexy Book series): The first people I remember actually buying and enjoying it were the cleaning ladies at the osteopathic hospital where I worked in Allentown, Pennsylvania. These were middle-aged, working-class women who would get a copy of it every month and sit there on their break cackling and looking at it.

Ira Ritter: I was at Hanes, the ladies' nylon company, and the chairman of the board said, "I don't want to reach the women who are reading your magazine. That's not my market."

Judith Dan Madison (fashion editor, 1976): The Estée Lauders were not interested in advertising in a magazine with naked men.

Stodgy advertisers perceived Playgirl as unwholesome and a threat to the status quo. They were right on both counts.

Neil Feineman (special editions editor, 1979–83): My version of Playgirl was that after six, drugs were okay. So you'd get on the office intercom: "I have weed — does anybody have coke to share?" I think I didn't get stoned there twice."

In Playgirl's introductory issue, most of the models were modestly posed, with hints of pubic hair showing and nude shots from behind. The magazine quickly grew more comfortable with full-frontal nudity, but the question of whether to show an actual erection was…well, a hard one.

Don Stroud (actor, November 1973 centerfold): I grew up on the beach in Waikiki. Nudity didn't mean much to me. [Centerfold coordinator] Toni Holt approached me and my manager and asked if I wanted to pose naked. I had to put makeup on my balls and on my ass. I was tan at the time but had a white streak right around my privates, so I had to hire a makeup guy. He goes, "Well…I guess I'm getting paid for this."

Al Hornsby (August 1975 cover and centerfold): My shoot was in two places: on the side of the highway outside Palm Springs, and just off the fairway during an LPGA golf event—literally thirty feet from the side of the fairway, just behind the shrubs. Other than the fact that the shoots had a couple of nude shots and some shirt-off, boy-cheesecake…you weren't doing anything, just standing there trying to look attractive.

David Vance (photographer, 1974–88): It was fairly easy to get people to pose nude right off the street. I only remember one model who was reluctant to show his penis. The majority were people who didn't work out at all. They just were well proportioned. Now, every 12-year-old has abs.

Centerfold Don Stroud in November 1973.

George Maharis (actor, July 1973 centerfold): [First editor-in-chief Marin Scott Milam] asked whether I'd do a centerfold. Nobody told me it was a nude centerfold! But I was game.

We were doing the shooting and [the photographer kept saying], "Well, you can't show that." I said, "For Christ's sake, man, if it's gonna be a nude centerfold, that's what I was born with."

Marin called and said, "The one that I chose shows a bit of… you." I don't know how many they printed, but they got a call for so many more that they turned everybody face-forward after that.

Greg Louganis (Olympic gold medalist, August 1987 model): My mom loved [my pictures]. At her memorial, her bridge club mentioned Mom had brought the magazine out, boasting, "This is my son."

Dick Baney (Major League Baseball player, February 1977 centerfold): It's been over 40 years and I am still being asked [about] my decision. [Legendary Dodgers coach] Tommy Lasorda's wife asked me, "What were you thinking?"

Christopher Atkins (actor, September 1982 cover, "The Best of Playgirl" 1982 cover, December 1983 model): People love to ask, "Why did you do that?!" I don't know; they told me to take my pants off, so I did.

Ira Ritter: Our biggest problem was [that our male models] had only a history of Playboy, so our photographers and the men themselves would pose like they had seen in Playboy.

Dian Hanson: They were photographing men as if they were women, lounging around on sofas. "Here's a guy lying on a sofa with a soft dick." It's like, what's he waiting for? He's waiting for you to pay him, I'm assuming.

A lounging man from November 1973.

Neil Feineman: In 1979, at my first meeting with the editors, there was this huge argument about whether [models] should have hard-ons. We were in a restaurant and I'm sitting there with all of these women, three martinis into it, listening to them fight. I remember the waiter looking at me like, "What the hell is going on here?" I said, "It's my first day at work. I have no idea. And I'm mortified."

Brian Dawson (April 1978 centerfold): They didn't want a full-on erection, so the photographer shot pictures as I went down…giving them the opportunity to select the degree of erection.

Simón Cherpitel (photographer, August and October 1974): Their rule was, if I showed a penis and it was erect, it needed to be floating on water or something, so they could say, "This is not an erect penis."

Neil Feineman: One of the reader-favorite centerfolds called, enraged because there was a three-month period where erections were used, and a model he felt competitive with had a hard-on. I said, "I'm looking at your photograph and you have nothing to be ashamed of." He said, "Get a ruler and I can prove to you that I'm at a disadvantage."

A magazine teeming with naked men would seem to present a golden marketing opportunity: Why not target women and gay men at the same time? But bowing to the prevailing negative view of gay men — homosexuality was classified as a mental disorder by the American Psychiatric Association until 1974 — Playgirl aggressively downplayed that crossover in its press and marketing. In its first year, the magazine claimed 94 percent female readership. Over time, that number has been internally described to employees as more like 80 percent...or 50 percent...or less.

Ira Ritter: I can assure you I tried to not have gay men in the magazine.

Neil Feineman: The art directors, [most of whom] were straight, were going to the bathhouses with business cards to get the centerfolds.

Randy Dunbar (designer, 1978–79): Photographers like Herb Ritts used to shoot for Playgirl all the time using noms de plume. You weren't out and proud; you were talented and inside.

At first, the magazine didn't overtly market to gay men.

Lorenzo Lamas (actor, July 1983, November 1993, and May 1996 covers): I was approached to do a centerfold for Playgirl when I was a trainer at Jack LaLanne Health Spa in 1976. My girlfriend at the time agreed to be in the pictorial. It was pretty no-holds-barred. The photographer was a client of mine. He said there was a chance to win $2,500. When I was 18, that was more money than I made in a year. We shot it.

I told my dad, [MGM star] Fernando Lamas. He went through the roof and got a sharp attorney who went to Playgirl and said they could not release the photos. They said, "We have a contract," but the attorney said, "I don't care. It has the potential of ruining whatever clean-cut image he has as an actor." The lawyer got the negatives. I think she showed my dad the pictures and he burned them.

My dad thought the magazine targeted gays. He thought that would be harmful to me. [Lamas's covers all followed his father's 1982 death.]

Joyce Dudney Fleming (editor-in-chief, 1977): Lambert kept insisting that it was a magazine for women, and really wasn't attuned to the fact that a lot of people perceived it…as a magazine for gay men.

Joe Spondike (May 1981 centerfold, "Playgirl's Sexy Men" covers May 1981 and January 1982): I was getting really weird calls from guys. One guy called me up and said, "Money's no object, I wanna fly you out to Europe and do some shots." I'm young, I don't know what's going on, but then I got hip to it after they started coming on to me.

Christopher Atkins: There was supposedly one shot where I was standing in the pool and it was something about a shadow at the bottom of the pool that made me look "massive" and… [the photographer] was offered lots of money for that slide. I always thought that it was a magazine for women, but men were trying to buy the slide.

Neil Feineman: Management was in massive denial over it. Closeted men comprised…certainly a very large part of the readership. Subscriptions weren't in people's right names — it was always initials. It was "M. Jones."

Ira Ritter: I heard from friends years later that Playgirl became popular with the gay community. I had no clue. My goal was to create a magazine that reached women.

Randy Dunbar: Why was there such a large gay audience if there was gay pornography? I think a lot of guys who were probably still in the closet could go to the supermarket and say, "It's for my girlfriend." There was a legitimacy to picking up Playgirl.

George Maharis: A lot of guys came up to me with [my centerfold] and asked me to sign it for their "wives."

Ira Ritter bought Playgirl from Douglas Lambert in 1977 and stopped relying on male nudes in favor of clothed-celebrity covers. Following a split with his business partner, Ritter sold his share in Playgirl in 1986. The magazine filed for Chapter 11 and was taken on by Drake Publishing, helmed by New York publisher Carl Ruderman, who owned men's magazines like High Society and Cheri.

After a brief experiment banning frontal nudity in 1987, Playgirl pivoted back to sex and moved from Century City to Manhattan. The magazine began a tumultuous transformation from what then-editor-in-chief Charmian Carl deemed "a fun, quirky feminist statement" to unapologetic soft-core porn.

In the eighties, Playgirl changed direction, favoring celebrity covers.

Charmian Carl (art director and editor-in-chief, 1990s): When I first got promoted [to editor-in-chief], Ruderman said, "Congratulations, Mrs. Carl…I hope you don't think you're gonna make this Cosmo." I said, "Nope." I wanted to make it more like Vanity Fair with beautiful naked men in it.

Charles Hovland (prospective photographer, 1990s): Playgirl's staff changed a lot. One female art director said, "The dicks are too big. Women don't like to look at big dicks. It's like a weapon." A couple of months later, I brought in more Polaroids, but she said, "Oh, this guy, his butt is too big. Women don't like the whole butt thing." They tried to steer it away from the gay and then they changed their minds. When I came back, they said, "These dicks aren't big enough."

Sher Bach (administrative assistant, 1992–97): Imagine working for a company where the morning topic is, "What's wrong with this guy's balls? Looks like somebody took a hammer to 'em."

Charmian Carl: One time, Ruderman came to a postmortem [editorial meetings to discuss the success of the prior issue]. He said, "What women want is hairy asses." I looked at him and said, "No. We're all women here. We don't wanna see that. Trust me." Usually, when people are talking, they're talking about themselves. I'll leave it at that.

Douglas Cloutier (photographer, 1980s–00s): It was a lot of candles and flowers and stuff. Women don't really care to see it. They would rather read about it. Girls don't wanna see a guy's asshole. Gay guys? Different story.

Charmian Carl: In 1994, I flew to Chicago and met with Christie Hefner, who I adore. I told her it was unfair that Playgirl was not going in the direction it should after 21 years…Women have never been empowered to feel free to explore their sexuality; they feel dirty if they do. Women need a place to be able to explore and get excited. I still think we deserve it. I said, "Woman to woman, we should not let this disservice happen." She totally agreed with me, but said, "We really can't take that risk. I wish you all the luck in the world." The unfortunate part of Playgirl is it was never owned by a strong woman.

Dian Hanson: They tried to hire me to edit Playgirl in 1991 and again a few years later. The guys who ran the magazine, asked, "Okay, what would you do to make girls buy Playgirl?" I said, "It would be easier to make this magazine work better than it already does for gay men." They looked at me in horror and said, "Men don't buy this magazine! We don't want to make a magazine for men to jack off to!" But…they already did.

Mainstream magazines have always shied away from black cover subjects for fear of turning off white readers, and Playgirl was no exception. While a small handful of black celebrities won covers, including L.A. Law's Blair Underwood (July 1996) and Days of Our Lives actor Marcus Patrick (September 2007), black male models were usually consigned to small spreads inside the magazine. By the mid-nineties, black men were featured on group covers, including the magazine's popular roundups of college guys.

Dean Keefer (photographer, 1997–present): We never found that many handsome black men wanted to pose for the magazine. Budget was the biggest issue about getting models. They all thought Playgirl and Playboy were the same company and thought they should be paid $5,000 to pose for the magazine.

Douglas Cloutier (photographer, 1980s–2000s): There was never talk about it. Maybe it was the mind-set at the time that black guys weren't as prone to take their clothes off for publication?

A collection of spreads from the seventies and eighties featuring black men.

Charmian Carl: Blair Underwood was very proud to have done it. I bumped into him a few years later at a [Directors Guild of America] Awards dinner. He was so ebullient and thrilled to introduce me to his wife. I loved that he did not have regrets.

Dian Hanson: The notion at all the sex mags I worked for was that blacks were a much smaller demographic than whites. And if you put a person from any small demographic on the cover — be it black, Latin, or Asian — you risked driving away the majority of white buyers. They just never wanted to accept that fantasy crosses racial lines.

[Gay magazine] Black Inches got something like a 75 percent sale on the newsstand, an unprecedented percentage. I can imagine the older white men running Playgirl thinking, "White women don't want to see that," when deep down they really thought, "We don't want to know that white women want to see that."

In August 2000, Crescent Publishing (formerly known as Drake Publishing) was consumed by a $200-million federal credit-card-fraud suit. Crescent settled for $30 million and became Blue Horizon Media. It limped forward until calling it quits on the print edition in early 2009, amid the industry-wide decline in magazine sales spurred by the explosion of free porn on the Internet.

A year later, the magazine returned with a highly touted cover and layout featuring Levi Johnston, the father of one of Sarah Palin's grandchildren. The magazine went all-out to promote Levi's cover, hosting one of their legendary issue-release parties. Despite the headlines Johnston's cover generated, Playgirl stopped regular publication on the print edition for the second time, publishing quarterly or less every year since. In 2011, porn giant Magna Publishing Group acquired the print rights.

Gone are the days of stories on breast cancer and marital rape, and interviews with Maya Angelou. Today, Playgirl.com is largely targeted to gay readers.

"At the end of the day, we all know the end [of the print incarnation] is near," says Playgirl's current vice president of marketing, Daniel Nardicio. "It's the law of diminishing returns." Part of what hurt Playgirl was something the magazine itself had pioneered: the normalization of male nudity. Posing nude wouldn't necessarily hurt an actor's career anymore, says Nardicio. And they could also exploit their nudity in far more lucrative or attention-grabbing platforms.

Nicole Caldwell (managing editor and editor-in-chief, 2006–2015): We put on these insane parties where we would invite models to come hang out with everyone, topless. We gave out dildos, condoms, lube. There were lines around the block to get in. Cake companies made us penis cakes. People were running around with vibrators, talking very openly about sex. We have these shackles, "Women aren't to take pleasure into their own hands, women aren't to be sexual about the naked male body," but these women were animals.

Daniel Nardicio (vice president of marketing, 2004–present): I have to credit Andy Cohen because he had Levi on his show [Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen] and asked him if he would ever do porn. That got me thinking, "He'd be great." I timed the shoot to the same day Sarah Palin was on Oprah, so they had to address it. I felt like Palin was going around touting this holier-than-thou-family thing, but meanwhile her daughter was having kids out of wedlock—it was a political moment for me that I got to orchestrate. I really wanted to re-create a modern-day Anita Bryant moment.

Greg Weiner (photographer,1995–present): Levi was quiet. I knew he was nervous. It took a long time to get into positions where his penis wasn't showing.

Colleen Kane (senior editor, 2005–07): When I told my parents I was taking a job at Playgirl, my mom just laughed for, I don't know, maybe ten minutes. I was like, "You're not crying, right?"

I went from this feminist, light-filled loft of super-smart, sarcastic, funny women at Bust to an interview in a corporate-cubicles situation dedicated to turning out hard-core porn. I'd walk past these monitors of genitalia magnified at 200 percent, getting color-corrected.

Jill Sieracki (associate editor and editor-in-chief, 2002–06): We'd seen the issues from its heyday in the seventies. That was the magazine we wanted to work for. There were these great, smart, strong women who wrote for the magazine back in the day…We were owned by men; none of them were on board with a feminist magazine.

Nicole Caldwell: We would sit in the conference room with the [men] and they'd be saying, "Women don't watch porn." We would be raising our hands, "Actually…we do."

Jessanne Collins (managing editor, 2007–08): Our boss would always be pushing for more dicks. To me, that was not the way you'd assemble porn for women. I think women like more of the reveal.

Nicole Caldwell: I was perpetually running into people who would say, "Playgirl still exists? Isn't that a gay magazine? Does anybody actually read it?" And I'd say, "Yes, to all of those."

Scott Merritt (out gay model, June 2003 cover and centerfold): Maybe I can say I brought Playgirl out of the closet. They were in a lot of denial. If I told them in advance, I probably wouldn't have gotten the gig.

Michele Zipp (associate editor, managing editor, and editor-in-chief, 1999–2005): Carl Ruderman went to Europe with his wife and while in Europe they saw a gay magazine and said, "This is what Playgirl should be." It was so strange, because it's exactly what I wanted to be doing. Because he'd discovered it on his own, they were going along with the (gay) idea.

Colleen Kane: I don't think I've ever seen [Ruderman], but I believe there was a bronze sculpture of his head on the floor the porn people were not allowed on.

Michele Zipp: We did a major revamp in 2002. I handed in the final product and we got it back with a Post-it on it: "Eight penises!" They counted only eight penises through the whole ninety-six-page book and were very upset. They wanted a penis on every page.

Daniel Nardicio: When I first went into the offices, it was all straight men and they had titles like Barely Legal. Playgirl was the bastard stepchild that they didn't focus on, because they're guys, so they don't gravitate towards cock. I very much gravitate towards cock.

Whenever I sat down in a meeting with those straight guys, they'd say, "You wanna make Playgirl gay!" and I'd say, "I wanna make Playgirl for cock-lovers, from cock-lovers. As long as you like dick, this is the magazine for you."

Nicole Caldwell: Playgirl has a lot of really funny content and set titles, but I truly believed in the feminist mission behind it—of having someplace that women could go and be unabashedly sexual. I still feel like that's, for the most part, missing. How is it possible that there was only one magazine that had that?

Edited by Whitney Joiner • Photography by Corey Olsen • Design by Kevin Peralta • Senior photo editor Jennifer Newman • Copyedited by Sarah Probst