Mr. Hefner, You are a Lousy Indoctrinator

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Dear Hugh Hefner:

I don’t know whether to thank you or sue you.  For decades you’ve been blanketing America with acres and acres of pink, blemish-free female skin.  You’ve been hawking the Playboy lifestyle of sophistication, erudition, and expensive electronics.  You’ve been responsible for more elevated mattresses than Serta, Sealy and the Craftmatic Adjustable Bed combined.

But you had an agenda.  You were trying to make me gay, weren’t you?  (And I thought that’s what Details Magazine was for.)

According to Michael Schwartz, chief of staff for Senator Don Coburn (R-Okla.), all pornography is homosexual, even the straight stuff.  Speaking at a “Values Voters Summit” sponsored by the Family Research Council this past weekend, Schwartz asserted that a “very good friend of his” who had been “in the homosexual lifestyle” had given him an epiphany:

He said, “all pornography is homosexual pornography because all pornography turns your sexual drive inwards.”

He’s got a point, Mr. Hefner.  In my impressionable youth, I only read your magazine behind a locked bathroom door, which is pretty inward.  But I’m confused.  Some anti-pornography activists have argued that smut turns people into rapists, which, it would be hard to dispute, is definitely more outward.  So, which is it?  Were you trying to make me an inward homosexual or an outward rapist?  Was there some sort of editorial change of direction you didn’t bother to tell anyone about?  Pretty sneaky.

Here I am, a practicing heterosexual in middle age.  Did you succeed in your little scheme to make me gay?  Apparently not.  Am I happy to be living a heterosexual lifestyle?  Almost always.  Do I try and stay in practice?  You bet.

So, do I have you to thank for it, or should I hold you accountable for your failed indoctrination attempt?  The highest single-copy sales Playboy ever had was 7.1 million copies of the November 1972 issue.  If you had been doing your job correctly, my entire eighth grade class would’ve been gay at some point in their lives.  I’m pretty sure this didn’t happen, but I intend to bring up the question at our next reunion.

But the tables are turning on you, sir, and everyone else in your little indoctrination army.  Mr. Schwarz has conceived of a way to use your smut — which by masquerading as heterosexual material to entrap innocent hets is actually creating homosexuals — to keep our country’s young people straight as an Oklahoma highway.  He will defeat you with your own weapons.  He will hoist you on your own petard (which sounds kinky no matter which side you’re on):

“It’s been a few years, but not that many, since I was closely associated with pre-adolescent boys, boys around 10 years of age. But it is my observation that boys of that age have less tolerance for homosexuality than just about any other class of people. They speak badly about homosexuality. And that’s because they don’t want to be that way. They don’t want to fall into it. ….And if you tell an 11-year-old boy [that all pornography is homosexual], do you think he’s going to want to get a copy of Playboy? I’m pretty sure he’ll lose interest. That’s the last thing he wants! You know, that’s a good comment, it’s a good point, and it’s a good thing to teach young people.”

Check and heterosexual mate, sir.  Do you think any 11-year-old boy is going to seek out a copy of Playboy now that your plan has been revealed?   I’d be eager to test this theory out at our neighborhood school right now with a stack of magazines, if it weren’t for those pesky 1500-foot-radius laws.

I’m glad Mr. Schwarz has brought your secrets into the light.

And I’m glad he validated my sneaking suspicion that public policies are often written with an 11-year-old in mind.