For Men Only (magazine)

For Men Only was a men's magazine published from at least the 1950s to the 1970s. It began as a men's adventure magazine but became a pornographic magazine in the 1970s. It was published by a New York based company called Magazine Management (later known as Marvel Entertainment) which published similar magazines like Stag and Male.

Writers

Because it employed young writers in New York City, many of its former staff and contributors became well known later in their lives. All of them wrote under pseudonyms while writing or editing For Men Only. Novelist Martin Cruz Smith described writing for the magazine in the 1960s when a team of two editors - junior and senior - created the entire magazine each month. At the time the magazine featured a photospread and centerfold but the female model was not nude.^[1] Cruz worked at the magazine from the mid-1960s to 1968.^[2]

Donald Bain wrote for the magazine in the early 1960s at a time when other writers contributing to the cluster of men's magazines included Mario Puzo, Mickey Spillane and Bruce Jay Friedman. Bain described writing for the magazine as a sought-after job for writers at the time because "the money was good and the writing was easy".^[3] He said that while the stories were usually billed as being true, it was common practice for writers to completely make them up, including quotes from fictitious experts. Likewise, many of the stories billed as excerpts from upcoming novels were actually just double-length articles written specifically for the magazine.^[3]

References