'70s Playgirl Models I Would Like to Wrestle: Enriched and Fluffed Up Edition

February 19, 2011

'70s Playgirl Models I Would Like to Wrestle: Enriched and Fluffed Up Edition

Ah, the seventies! My college years--undergraduate and graduate. Grad school kept me busy, though not chaste. The seventies cinched my tastes, for better or worse. My tastes in men, most definitely. It's the decade of my favorite movies (Shampoo, Nashville, Annie Hall), my favorite music (prime Rolling Stones, danceable funk, Emmylou Harris, and early Talking Heads), and my discovery of wrestling--in dorm rooms and on Championship Wrestling from Florida on TV.

More importantly, it was the decade when sex--exciting, scary, and strange--lurked around every corner, it seemed. Russ, Matt, Brandon, Vance, and Greg--names that still smell like J&B and Winstons to me--rise out of the shadows of my memory. There was no place you couldn't have sex back then. I remember foreplay--if not the deed--between the pews at church. Devout believer I was back then, I stacked my bible on top of the latest issues of After Dark magazine--it was the beginning of the end of something for practically everybody who lived then ... and it was the last decade when the word "new" meant anything at all to me. At the stoplight on a particular intersection of Peachtree Street in Atlanta, hawkers would spread porn mags for sale on the windshields of waiting cars, the lurid but juicy centerfolds right at eye level.

Playgirl, Cosmopolitan, Bruce Weber, Calvin Klein, and Chippendales popularized the objectification of men's bodies--and for that they have my eternal gratitude. Speedo introduced nylon/elastane swimwear for athletes and poolboys--and the world was never the same again. So, in honor of the decade I love so much, here's an enriched and fluffed-up version of my earlier post, "'70s Playgirl Models I Would Like to Wrestle." These are the guys I only wish I had crossed paths with back in my twenties--the ones who, in a retro Heaven produced by the fevered brain cells of my senile dementia, I will one day strip down and face on the mats--or fight to the death in some hot tub on the cliffs of the California coast.