Maybe Next Year

When I was a kid I would peruse my papa’s Playboy magazines and think to myself, MAYBE NEXT YEAR…. You see, I got no boners, no tinglies, NO NOTHIN'.  I thought that I just hadn’t reached that stage of puberty yet. The stage when I’d finally realize what the big deal was about seeing nude women on the printed page. Only later, when issues of the catalogue International Male arrived in our mailbox (many thanks to the mailman of my youth!), did I realize that the time had come. Ultimately, time wasn’t the issue — my budding sexuality was. 

Many years later, I found myself eagerly purchasing a Playboy with fevered anticipation. (My papa would be SO proud!)  This visceral impulse wasn’t driven by a desire to get some whack-off material, though. Instead, my urgent need for straight-boy porn was fed by a sex symbol whose power reigned over the straights and gays alike: Kate.

Kate Moss came into my consciousness in the ‘90s, with her work for Calvin Klein. Waif-y and titty-free, she was a soft compliment to the hardness that Marky Mark (né Mark Wahlberg) embodied in the ck one ads of that era. While I longed for the masculinity that he oozed, Kate— small, delicate, almost in need of care—  was the perfect foil to his cute but brutish demeanor in that campaign. Soon after, she became one of the original “Supermodels”, that storied international gang of muses whose job it was to seduce an unsuspecting public into glutinous consumption of finite resources. Lol.

With this anniversary Playboy cover, Moss shows us all that she’s still got what it takes to sell a cover, henny. And, as a maker of things, I  really can see what Moss has accomplished. Kate Moss, Inc. works on many levels. She is beautiful and glamorous and nothing if not aspirational: straight boys and gay girls want to fuck her, straight girls want to be her, and the gay boys…? The gay boys just fucking love her.

To me, The Kate cover of Playboy symbolizes that “one day” that I was hoping for as a young pre-adolescent. It eventually arrived, maybe not in the way that anyone expected; but, finally, I got a boner from a copy Playboy magazine.