After Dark Magazine (September, 1982) After Dark was an entertainment magazine that covered theatre, cinema, stage plays, ballet, performance art, and various artists, including singers, actors and actresses, and dancers. First published in May 1968, the magazine succeeded Ballroom Dance Magazine. Daniel Harris describes the founding of After Dark as "One of the strangest reincarnations in journalistic history. Catering to musically inclined blue-haired old ladies and golfers in Hush Puppies, Ballroom Dance Magazine was a recreational journal for the geriatric set. It was out of the ashes of a periodical devoted to such topics as waltzes, rumbas, and turkey trots that After Dark, an audacious mass-market experiment in gay eroticism, arose like a phoenix in all of its subversive splendor" Although not described as a "gay magazine", After Dark regularly covered topics of interest to the gay community. The magazine contained substantial advertising for gay restaurants, accommodations, nightclubs, bathhouses, guides, books, pornographic movies, and other products. (Source: Wikipedia) The issue above is my first issue of After Dark and bought at a local drug store. Like stated earlier, it wasn't advertised as a Gay publication and as a not out yet teenager in a small city in Texas I wasn't familiar with the Gay lifestyle but something drew me to it. Like GQ magazine in the 70's and early 80's, I knew, instinctively that it was made for me.
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