Gear Magazine's Intelligent Tits

Your readers don't want what I write, Tosches says. Gear is "all tits and ass."

"That's not true," Guccione fires back amiably. "Have you read it?"

Tosches pauses a tic. "No," he concedes.

Guccione shrugs it off and turns back to his lunch of chilled raw oysters and scallops. He likes Tosches as a writer (who doesn't?), and besides, he says he's used to getting attitude from people who've never cracked a copy of Gear. His job is to convince them that Gear has more than tits and ass?that it has brains, too.

"I make no apology for this magazine being sexy," he tells me. "But I also make no apologies for it being intellectual."

It's a line I've seen him use with the press before. I don't know that I'd go so far as to call Gear an "intellectual" magazine?yet?but I've been pleased to see the effort the 45-year-old editor and publisher's been making in that direction over the past several months. This week, Guccione is celebrating Gear's second birthday. He has some things to celebrate?not least of which is the simple fact that the magazine's still around to be feted. Watching its rocky startup and seeing some desperately thin issues in its first 18 months or so, I often worried that the magazine was not going to survive.

"You were worried!" he laughs. "How do you think I felt?"

But since last spring, he claims, Gear has been on an upswing. He says circulation of the monthly is up to a little over 400,000 copies, roughly three-fourths of that subscriptions, the rest newsstand. He claims new subscriptions lately are coming in at a healthy clip of 1000 a day. (Circulation figures are unaudited; Gear has applied for but not yet received Audit Bureau of Circulation membership.) The new October issue, while nothing like GQ's telephone-book-size fall fashion tome, has a lean glow of health about its 156 pages. Ad pages and ad revenues are up about 15 percent over last year.

That's not turbocharged growth, but it is growth. When Guccione launched Gear in the fall of 1998 (having sold Spin, which he'd launched in 1985, for $43 million the previous year), it was against the sudden floodtide of new "lads' magazines" imported from the UK or modeled on them?Maxim, FHM, Stuff, etc. The biggest of them, Maxim got all the credit for thinning the herd of young men's magazines in the U.S., and for killing off both Details and POV (both terrible magazines that deserved death).

Maxim is still giving all outward signs of going strong, with a circulation of approximately two million and reported ad revenues of more than $40 million for the first six months of 2000, dwarfing Gear's reported $2.4 million through September. But the "beer and babe" magazines faded with overfamiliarity in the UK last year, and it won't be surprising to see the same thing happen here, say a year from now. Insiders suggest they've already peaked. Maxim won't be the first to go?FHM looks weaker?but its glory days are probably behind it now that the novelty and buzz have worn off.

Guccione, not surprisingly, agrees that those magazines were a "temporary infatuation." The analogy he uses is to those "high class" strip clubs that were opening up all over town a few years ago. If you'd taken a snapshot of that market in 1998, you'd have thought that was a go-go industry (sic) with a big future ahead of it. Today, it's a dead zone. Guys went once, twice, and then never went back. They got bored.

The lads' magazines face the same problem, he says. The young men in that all-important 18-to-35 demographic are quickly bored and easily distracted, needing a constant flow of new stimuli. If you're just showing them pretty girls in their underwear month after month after month, Guccione argues, they're going to become jaded and drift away.

That's why he's been trying to make Gear more than, in Tosches' put-down, tits and ass. He looks back to the great men's magazines of the past?he cites Playboy, Esquire and the Penthouse of the 70s. Those were men's magazines that gave you something pretty to look at, but also gave you articles to think about?Mailer in Esquire, say, or Playboy's famous interviews. They gave a man the pretty girl pictorials and the advice on Italian loafers, but also good writing. Tits on the cover, intelligence inside.

"Intelligent tits, if you will," Guccione grins.

That's his model, and his strategy for distinguishing Gear not only from the Maxim crowd, but from fat, established competitors like GQ, which he calls "a magazine in the midst of a midlife crisis." (He has a wait-and-see attitude about the revived, revamped versions of Details and Esquire. I don't suppose the former, with its boy toy covers, should be as closely competitive as the "new" Esquire, which he concedes is taking a somewhat similar back-to-traditions approach to the business of putting out a gentleman's magazine.)

I first noticed Guccione beefing up the writing in Gear last spring, when the same issue that had the spectacular Jessica Biel cover and photo spread?the single issue that, he readily admits, kicked Gear's public recognition to new levels?also ran one of Celia Farber's provocative attacks on the AIDS industry (which had been a regular feature in Guccione's Spin). Starting with the September issue just passed, he's rejiggered the design and reorganized the content to make the smart stuff more immediately evident. He's moved movie and books reviews to the front, shuffled the fashion spreads toward the back, and is using the center well for long, thoughtful features?a big (naturally) and provocative William Vollmann report on American gun culture; a set of short pieces from a selection of black males reflecting on their lives in white America; a sweaty, gritty piece on Olympic wrestling by Fight Club's Chuck Palahniuk. He's got Jonathan Ames writing for him now, and has been getting celebrities like Tony Bennett, Bill Maher and John Mellencamp to write surprisingly good one-offs.

The big buzz generator in the October issue is the nude photo of Roseanne, accompanied by a funny interview conducted by Guccione. The newer issues visually evoke the golden-era Esquire in the use of some very high-quality black-and-white portrait photography.

For all that, Guccione admits, you've got to have that pretty girl on the cover if you want to sell the thing. It's the old salesman's bit about the sizzle and the steak. The one issue where he tried to buck the market and put Pedro Martinez on the cover tanked. Had he put Roseanne on the cover of this issue, he says, "It would have died." (The arresting covers are most important, obviously, to newsstand sales, which for Gear get up to around 130,000 on a good month, he says. These come mostly from bookstores like Barnes & Noble, record stores and lobby shops in office buildings, which tend to leave an issue racked all month, so it can keep selling. Newsstand guys can get antsy and yank a title after a week or two if it hasn't sold out. For all magazines, these "premature returns" are a painful cost of doing business with the newsstands.)

In a recent interview in the (now destaffed) online magazine Ironminds, Guccione said publicly for the first time since he sold it what he thinks about Spin today. Though choosing his words with care, he lit into the magazine for pissing on what he considers (and I agree) one of the best parts of its own legacy, those dissident AIDS dispatches Farber wrote during his reign. This July, the new Spin dissed the Foo Fighters for supporting the dissidents' right to be heard. Guccione called this "pathetic" and "a travesty," noting, "frankly, our AIDS coverage was far more meaningful than anything we ever did musically. So it's sad for them not to even acknowledge their own role in history."

I tell him I was always impressed with Spin for running regular AIDS dissident writing in a rock magazine. I thought it took real balls.

"That's what it was," he smiles, "balls. Not genius. Balls."

He goes on to tell me something else he feels is wrong with the post-him Spin. In the old days of Rolling Stone and Crawdaddy, he posits, the newly formed rock press took itself and its job very seriously, but the rockers didn't, and the dissonance made for a creative frisson. Spin under his reign was the opposite, he says: rockers had come by then to take themselves very seriously, but Spin didn't, so there was still a dissonance that kept things lively. Now, he says, both the new Spin and the musicians it covers take themselves too seriously, and it falls flat.

When I ask him about his fellow British transplant Tina Brown, he tells me he hasn't been "blown away with anything she's done since Tatler" back in London. The "sassy" Tatler style and infatuation with the doings of the upper class at first translated well here; that, and the backing of Conde Nast's huge budgets, created "an artificial sense that she channeled the zeitgeist" during her Vanity Fair reign. Under her stingier Disney-Miramax bosses now, he argues, she has "not produced as interesting a magazine" at Talk. It lacks "editorial vision," he says, "an editorial identity."

I don't think you could say that about Gear. Like Spin before it, Gear wears its editor's interests and predilections quite openly?pretty girls, smart writers, sports, toys and controversy?and sometimes all at once. (I'm thinking of that nude photo of soccer star Brandi Chastain that raised such a fuss last year, even though the affect was more chaste Olympian than centerfold cutie.) Time will tell if he can singlehandedly resuscitate the slightly clubby, inoffensively randy gentleman's magazine of yesteryear at the dawn of the 21st century, but personally I will enjoy watching him try.