Friday, Jul 25, 2008
Reliving the glory days of Jaybird, the mid-'60s magazine for randy nature lovers.
Apr 11, 2003 | Jaybird was a hippie nudist magazine that published in the 1960s, back when the bunnies in Playboy couldn't show their pubic hair, let alone their vulvas. But the law allowed so-called "nudist" magazines to show a chick's whole enchilada.
So Jaybird claimed it was a hippie nudist magazine. And it was, since in a Republican nudist magazine, you'd probably see photos of naked men and women playing volleyball or digging up crabgrass. In Jaybird, a hippie dude would blow his girl's pussy like a kazoo while another flower child flashed her pudendum -- and anus too -- giggling madly below a poster of John Wayne.
Taschen has just reprinted the best of Jaybird in one trilingual edition (English/German/French), compiled by the legendary dirty magazine editor -- of Outlaw Biker, Juggs and Leg Show -- Dian Hanson. Salon spoke with her by phone.
How did you get involved with this project?
I work for Taschen now. I'm the sexy book editor. I had been the editor of Leg Show and my publisher died a year and a half ago. And some very unpleasant, disreputable people took over the company. Benedikt Taschen had been a friend for about nine years, so he was the first one I called. He was kind enough to take me on. He said, "Come up with ideas." I had someone who had bought a lot of material -- photographs, proof sheets -- from a magazine company in California that had gone out of business. He said, "I have a whole lot of stuff and then there is Jaybird." I said, "What is Jaybird?" He said, "Ah, it's a disgusting hippie nudist magazine." I went, "Ding ding ding. Let's see this." Of course, they were wonderful. When I started digging in to it, it immediately made me curious. "How did something like this come to be? How were they ever allowed to publish it? How were they given the freedom to make something this peculiar?" Benedict went for it right away. It's just what he likes. He loved to see happy, earthy nudism and sexuality where men and women are quite equal.
Jaybird wasn't a legitimate nudist magazine, was it?
The people who started it were nudist. In fact since the publication, one of the Jaybirds who worked on it contacted me. He is still a nudist today -- a nudist in the Jaybird fashion, that is a day-to-day nudist walking around naked in his living room in the San Fernando Valley. As funny as the magazine seemed to be, there were people who took it seriously from beginning to end, even when it went completely crotch-centric. But you have to go back to 1958 when the nudists won the right to show pubic hair in their magazines when it couldn't be shown anywhere else in America. It only took a couple of years before sex magazine publishers began making nudist magazines so they could take advantage of this. But the people who started Jaybird in 1965 were really nudist. They were just into "swinging nudism." And that still goes on. I don't know if you've ever been to a nudist park, but --
Have you?
Yes I have. [Laughs.]
You just disrobed and did it?
Yeah.
Was it cool?
Mildly, but as the day went on it warmed up. [Laughs.] I don't get the feeling that some people do -- and certainly we had this Jaybird party in New York, and I hired a young man and young woman to walk about naked as jaybirds, and immediately this inspired other men -- I won't say it inspired any women -- to take their clothes off. These guys were walking around saying, "I feel so free. I've never done this." I'm not that much of an exhibitionist. For me, I kept worrying about my posture -- flexing my buttocks as I walked.
When you were at the nudist camp?
Yes. When I was at the nudist camp. The problem with nudity -- it was more fun in the old days to go to Plato's Retreat -- which had a more libidinous atmosphere -- and take my clothes off, and walk around knowing that it was openly sexual. In the nudist camps there was this sense that people were all covertly eyeing each other and pretending that they weren't. One of the guys who worked on Jaybird who wasn't a nudist said, "They're just intellectual exhibitionists. They can't openly admit that they want to show off so they have to come up with a philosophy for their exhibitionism."
Is Jaybird legitimately a hippie esthetic? I'm looking at a picture where there is a woman's crotch with a bongo drum between her legs and a woman is beating one bongo, and a man with a bad overbite wearing a clown head is beating the other.
His teeth are terrible. We have other pictures of this man. He was a real reject.
This is like no other dirty magazine that's ever been printed. Was this true hippie stuff?
They tried to make it a real nudist magazine, but in late 1965 publisher Milton Luros won this case in Iowa -- it was a real Comstock sting. They got Milton to send Jaybird through the mail. He had to go out there for trial, and he got away with it. He said, "If they let me get away with that in Iowa, I'm just going to push the envelope on pubic hair. If America wants more pubic hair, then I'm going to show it." He told all the photographers to get the models, men and women alike, to assume positions that would show more pubic hair. The old nudist ploy is that the models weren't just posing naked, they were doing useful activities like playing volleyball, barbecuing. So, when Milton started spotlighting the pubic hair, the real nudists pulled out. He replaced them with people who were available in North Hollywood at the time -- hippies. His company was so wealthy at this time, and he was starting to go into retirement, so he wasn't around to supervise the shoots. The photographers were hippies too, and they just started running wild.
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