Remembering Playboy's Hugh Hefner – the man who taught us about sex

Growing up in 1990s India, where sex was as taboo as Pahlaj Nihalani's CBFC, Hugh Hefner’s Playboy was for many young men the first place they saw naked girls.

The magazine was a distant utopia and an educative guide for adolescent boys, more so for those like yours truly, who grew up in a boys’ boarding school devoid of any female company.

I still distinctly remember the first Playboy cover I saw when I was in school – February 1990 which featured a breathtakingly beautiful woman called Pamela Anderson, a lady who would go on to make slow running the most watched pastime in years to come.

We had a cupboard full of Playboys, passed on from generation to generation of boarders, a treasure we would zealously guard against the attention of our hockey-wielding housemaster. It wasn’t uncommon for one of us to stand guard, as another one flipped through the pages of Hefner’s tome while sneaking a cigarette.  

 It was our only form of sex education in a country, where the biology teacher would start sweating simply when describing the workings of genitalia.

So, we learned about coitus from Hugh Hefner’s Playboy, its Indian counterpart Debonair and Penthouse, and its literary supplement Letters to the Penthouse.

Having grown up in households where sex was a topic that was never discussed, the sheer nakedness of the aforementioned magazines, was what an MBA graduate would call a paradigm shift.

Playboy was representative of America, the promised land. A Camelot where hot women frolicked in the sands, a testament to the greatness of a democracy as opposed to cold hard stare of Soviet Russia. And if Playboy was our Bible, then Hefner was our prophet, our own personal hero, an icon.

While it’s not uncommon to hear people say that a celebrity’s death had left a huge void in their lives, there’s no doubting – and millions of men across the world will agree – Hugh Hefner’s death represents the end of an era.

Growing up in a repressed family (in his own words), Hefner used that inhibition to turn male libido into a raging business. The first Playboy cover came out in 1953 featuring as center-spread, the immortal Marilyn Monroe, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Long before we were hit with  internet porn, Hefner braved attacks from the Left (who accused him of sexually objectifying women) and the Right (who felt the nudity was against culture) to bring us portraits of nude women. Despite protests from across the political and cultural spectrum, Hefner became a towering a figure in American culture.

But despite jokes to the contrary that no one ‘read’ Playboy, the magazine had some of the best political and cultural articles for its time. The likes of Kurt Vonnegut, Joyce Carol Oates, James Baldwin wrote for them, even as they had landmark interviews with historical figures like Martin Luther King Jr, Malcolm X, Fidel Castro and John Lennon (who revealed he became a house husband in 1981), Playboy became a cornerstone of the sexual revolution of the 1960s in America, a generational change as the country shed its conservative outlook which coincided with the age of sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll.

 The British Invasion started with The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. The Oral Pill made sex without the fear of pregnancy a reality.  The protest against Vietnam War, where youngsters refused to pick up arms against an unknown enemy, raged through the country.

The seeds of Civil Rights movements were planted and by the end of the decade, the Stonewall Riots would cement the modern-day fight for LGBT rights, culminating with the legalization of same-sex marriage. And Playboy was there, documenting and supplementing this cultural awakening, helping make nudity mainstream while battling the conservative mores of its day and age.

Interestingly, what’s not known is Hefner was a staunch and early straight ally of the LGBT movement. A vocal supporter of LGBT rights including same-sex marriage, a short story by Charles Beaumont was published in 1955 in which ‘homosexuality was the norm and heterosexuals were persecuted’. In response to angry letters, Hefner defended the short story saying: “If it was wrong to persecute heterosexuals in a homosexual society, then the reverse was wrong too.”

In 2012, he vehemently defended same-sex marriage in an editorial, writing: “Today, in every instance of sexual rights falling under attack, you’ll find legislation forced into place by people who practice discrimination disguised as religious freedom." 

Hefner led life on his own terms, and for better or worse, influenced millions of us across the globe. To borrow a phrase from Frank Sinatra, he did it his way. Or as Hefner put it in himself, “Life is too short to live someone else’s dream.”

As numerous Twitter users put it on learning about his death, ‘no one will say he’s in a better place’. RIP Hugh Hefner and please forgive the Lord if his party doesn’t live up to what you experienced on earth.