Magazines: Rear-Garde

Publisher Ralph Ginzburg blazed such paths of prurience in advertising his magazine Eros that he was haled into court on obscenity charges and given a five-year sentence that was later upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court. Still free pending a hearing for a reduced sentence, Ginzburg is anything but penitent. For months he has been expensively promoting a new magazine, Avant-Garde, which promises to emulate if not outdo Eros. One page of a recent ad shows a girl, eyes shut, mouth open, in ecstasy. On the opposite page is prose to match, describing the magazine's contents: "An orgasm of the mind. Total immersion in sensual pleasure. Love on a mink blanket."

In the first three issues of Avant-Garde, promise has outrun performance, prudence has conquered prurience. The magazine is more rear-garde than avant. Its graphics are stylish, but its contents are strictly remembrances of erotica past. Issue 3, out last week, contains a story by Norman Mailer, The Taming of Denise Gondelman, about the heroic efforts of a blond Aryan to bring an intellectual Jewish girl to her first orgasm. It was published in 1959 as The Time of Her Time. A tale by Roald Dahl of a wily Arab who lures eligible young men to his home to make love to his daughter, a leper, appeared in Playboy three years ago. For the avant-garde in politics, the magazine offered a profile of Richard Nixon. For the latest in poetry, the verse that Ho Chi Minh cranked out in a Chinese prison in the 1940s:

I've never been very

excited about poetry.

In prison

there's nothing better to do.

The world of films is represented by a portfolio of Andy Warhol girls, whose cliches are beginning to rival Hollywood's: "My best scene with Andy so far was a rape scene. I think sex and nudity in films are completely right because that's the way it is in life."

Despite 420,000 subscribers snagged by intensive promotion, Avant-Garde's future may be a bit precarious. Nothing Ginzburg puts his hand to seems to last very long. When Eros folded in 1963, it was followed a year later by Fact, which bogged down in exposes of everything from the danger of contact lenses to the uselessness of circumcision —not to mention a psychoanalysis of Barry Goldwater, sight unseen, by a group of overeager psychiatrists. Barry sued for $2,000,000, and the case is set for trial next month. Finding Fact too "grim" for his taste, Ginzburg folded it last summer.

Avant-Garde, he is convinced, is much more in tune with his sunny nature. Yet the onrushing sexual revolution may have passed him by. For frantic sex Avant-Garde is miles behind Evergreen (TIME, March 29) and not far ahead of Cosmopolitan. But Ginzburg protests that Evergreen's sex is "somewhat excremental," while Avant-Garde is pitched at the "genital level. Sexy, yes. Dirty, no." To prove his point, he says that forthcoming issues will carry an eight-page super-fold-out of a life-sized woman, as well as details on a private collection of pubic hairs garnered from celebrities.