A notch above just naughty

by Gin Lee

  As Bob Guccione, Jr. ships the final pages of Gear's last bimonthly issue—July/August, which is being packaged as the de rigueur "Sex Issue" of men's magazines—the editor/publisher reflects on a "wonderful" year.
   "Our Daryl Hannah issue [March/April] outsold Details on the newsstand," Guccione says with fatherly pride, "and we're only in three-quarters of the newsstands they're in."
   Gear's newsstand take with the surfboard-toting Hannah was 200,000, though its subscriptions stand at a less-than-impressive 40,000. But Guccione says that's soon to change. He's about to pump $1 million into a campaign to lure more subscribers to the Guccione vision of a young man's must-read mag.
   In a not-so-subtle gibe against his competitors, the 44-year-old Guccione says, "The notion that you have to dumb down men's magazines is wrong." So the sex, beer, T&A formula that has propelled Maxim to a 700,000+ circulation won't work? "The novelty will wear off." Guccione believes "18- and 19-year olds want what's naughty, but guys over 20 want to feel better about themselves. They think more of themselves."
   So alongside Gear's layouts of attractive women and the latest gadgets are pages devoted to serious journalism on topics like Kosovo ("We pegged this one. We knew that once the weather cleared up, they would go at each other's throats. Of course, we didn't know NATO would start bombing."), Japan's underworld Yakuza, and eco-terrorism, in which the magazine received a letter from Public Letter Writer #1, Ted Kaczynski.
   Add to the mix excellent writers, such as William Vollman, as well as scribes with a certain Q-factor in publishing—Bret Easton Ellis scribbling movie reviews, Candace Bushnell writing about (what else?) sex—and Gear seems entitled to an invitation to the standing-room-only party of men's magazines.
   It's a category getting more crowded—and chaotic—in recent years. Icon, launched in 1997 by twentysomething entrepreneur David Getson, is having trouble paying its writers. Maxim may be "the hot book right now," according to Martin S. Walker, chairman of Walker Communications, a magazine consulting firm, but the industry is waiting to see if its new leader Mike Souter, late of Europe's FHM, can translate his British sensibilities into American appeal.
   The book Guccione sees as his primary competition, Details, has struggled to find an identity and hold onto editors-in-chief (something not entirely unprecedented at Conde Nast). Ex-Maxim pooh-bah Mark Golin is running the show now, which leads Melissa Pordy, senior vice-president and director of print services at Zenith Media, to believe "we'll see a Maxim revisited." Which is? "A lighter read, not in-depth articles. Fun, quick sound bites that are good for cocktail party chatter," Pordy says. To put it diplomatically, reading Maxim "is not going to get you into Harvard."
   For his part, Guccione says Maxim isn't even his competition. "I'm friends with Felix Dennis [Maxim's publisher] and we respect each other. But we feel we have very different magazines. Gear is a style book for young men. Maxim is irreverent and funny for even younger men. We're like the Northern and Southern Hemispheres."
   Neither is Guccione gunning for the elder statesmen, GQ or Esquire, though Pordy, who says Gear is "being received very well," sees the potential for Gear to be "a hybrid of the two, with a sprinkling of the edginess of Details."
   September will be the magazine's first anniversary issue, as well as its first monthly run. "To be a magazine about pop culture," Guccione says, "a magazine has to be a part of pop culture. And to do that we needed to be monthly."
   Though magazine consultant Walker says "Gear doesn't have a lot of buzz now," and the current issue contains only 40 ad pages (down from the premiere issue's 70), Guccione is prepared to surprise his readers every month. Gear's May/June issue carries a piece on women's rights in Afghanistan.
   A story about women's rights in a men's publication? "Mavis Leno, wife of Jay Leno, is a writer and activist," Guccione, Jr. explains. "She wrote about a very serious issue with very manageable language." And as Guccione believes, "once you stimulate men's minds, they will read about something like this."