New VIP perk: Keeping Our History Alive.

Some of our history is sitting in cardboard boxes, tucked into closets, or stacked on shelves. And when those collections disappear, the stories inside them can disappear, too.

I’m talking about the magazines that documented our bodies, our communities, and our lives long before everything lived on a screen. Publications that gave men a place to see themselves, discover other men like them, and realize they weren’t the only ones who wanted to take their clothes off and feel a little more free.

I’m building a historical magazine repository, and access will be a new perk for our active GoNaked VIP members at no additional charge.

First up is an issue of Naked Magazine. It’s our first chance to show you the care we’re putting into this project, because preserving a magazine means making something you can actually read and enjoy.

Jefferson will be scanning each page at 400 DPI. I’ll then work through those scans, sharpening the images to help make the text crisp and clear before assembling the pages, in order, into a PDF. The goal is to let you spend time with the magazine as a complete issue, with its articles, photographs, advertisements, and all the little details that place it in its moment in history.

Those details matter. An advertisement might remind you of a business you once visited. A letter to the editor might bring back a conversation we’re still having today. And a photograph might remind you that men were finding joy in their bodies long before anybody invented an Instagram filter.

Now, a little patience, gentlemen. Each magazine is currently taking almost three hours to scan and produce. That’s a fair amount of time spent getting one issue ready for you. I hope we’ll get faster as we settle into a routine, but this is going to grow one carefully prepared magazine at a time.

My hope is to work through the entire run of Naked Magazine. That’s the ambition, and there’s plenty of scanning ahead of us.

I haven’t decided whether I’ll eventually sell access to people who aren’t VIP members. For now, what I can tell you is that this collection will be included with an active VIP membership.

I want these magazines to have a future beyond the shelf they’ve been sitting on. There are stories in those pages worth remembering, and I’m looking forward to putting them back into readers’ hands.

Become a GoNaked VIP member here and join us as we bring a little of our history back into view.