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Old 02-21-2004, 01:39 PM  
m00d
So Fucking Banned
 
Join Date: May 2002
Location: Parts Unknown
Posts: 3,129
And that would be a look-but-don't-touch form of lust: Taggart is married, and Adams has a boyfriend. Taggart says her husband, whom she's known since she was 13, knows she's always been boy crazy -- she used to fanatically paper her bedroom walls with pictures of Johnny Depp, River Phoenix, and, uh, Kirk Cameron -- so he isn't fazed by her job. He's actually helped recruit. Adams, however, had to talk it out a bit with her boyfriend (who eventually ended up in the magazine -- which unit is his we can't say). "I just kind of explained that that's the way I am," Adams says. "My personality is flirtatious and outgoing. It may be one of my weaknesses, but with the magazine I was trying to use that in a positive way."

For instance, she is now able to redirect the well-meaning though potentially annoying attentions of art supply store security guards. "I was in this store," she says, "wearing a sweater that you could see through a little bit -- I must have been dressing in the dark. I don't know what I was thinking. So the guy at the door was following me around the store with this grin on his face that said, How you doin'?" The guard finally asked her if she had a boyfriend. She said she did, but showed him the mock-up of the magazine and told him, "I can't date you, but my friend and I can take a picture of you naked." She gave him her number, and sure enough, within minutes he was calling to say he was up for a shoot.

Not everyone's been that easy. One of the downsides to fetishizing the relatively well-adjusted hipster guy next door is that, though he may pose for free, he tends to have scruples. "We're not finding people that are going to have sex in front of us," says Adams. "So for the first issue, we did what we could with what we had -- which was a couple of really cute guy friends who said they'd pose." One of the first volunteers later decided not to have his pictures run because his mother would die if she found out. To soothe the nerves of another, they took him to a nude beach on Fire Island where he'd just be one of many in the buff. ("We had to convince him," says Taggart, "but he loved us trying to convince him.") They do retain a single girlfriend for fluffing. "But basically the guys have to fluff themselves. We have a hands-off approach -- you know, we have to take the pictures. We fluff on a level that's more cerebral. We're very encouraging verbally."

The magazine's first cover boy, Josh Slater, who, with black ringlets hanging in his sleepy eyes, could pass for one of the Strokes, appreciates their M.O. He says the shoot, which took place at Adams' apartment, was never sleazy or raunchy. "They were really sweet and positive about the whole thing," Slater says. "They were like, "Awesome! You did it!"' Slater, 25, an artist who recently moved to Portland, Ore., from Brooklyn, found his way into the magazine via his roommate, who is a contributing writer. He says that he wasn't sure about posing at first, but since he'd done work as an artist's model, and, he says, "it's not like I'm running for Congress, or plan to," decided there was nothing to lose. (Getting liquored up a bit helped.) Some friends made fun of him for it, he admits, "but once they saw that the magazine wasn't trashy, they stopped." Would his mother die if she knew what he'd done? "The first thing she said when she heard about it was, 'Josh, promise me you won't go into prostitution.' But for the most part she's been weirdly positive, saying, 'Oh, maybe this will lead to something!' She's sort of psyched. I think she thinks I'm doing nothing with my life."

Taggart and Adams paid for the first issue themselves (contributors were paid through bartering and received some of Adams' jewelry). There was a fundraiser in September, and they solicited a few ads from female-friendly sex-toy shops, local bars and bands -- and as with most DIY enterprises, credit cards have been maxed out. One-third of the 3,000 copies they printed have been sold, and they say the magazine has already made back half of the nearly $10,000 they laid out for producing and printing it. They're gearing up to print 5,000 copies of the next edition, a music issue, which is due out in May. There is also talk, somewhat tongue in cheek, of building an empire. Says Adams: "We won't stop until we get a Sweet Action mansion in Mexico!"
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