Language: English

Title: Sex Magazine.

Sub Title: Monthly Magazine.

Other titles: Sex / Sex Monthly Magazine

Publication Date: 1926—Publication Ended: 1928? Periodicity: Monthly

Location: New York, NY.

Editor: H. K. Miller (Henry Knight Miller).

Publisher: Dawn Publishing Company.

Succeeds: Psychology (1923-1940)

Succeeded by: Dawn: Psychology of Eugenics, Art, Love (1926-1928); The Square Deal (1926-1929); Psychology (UK) (1937-1970s)

Description: 1/1, September 1926-2/9, June 1928 (?) 48-64 pp., 25 cents a copy; sold only at newsstands (presumably to avoid censorship by the Post Office, although mail subscriptions were later offered at a yearly basis at $3.00, probably after a change in the publication's policies) or in bulk. The fourth issue in December 1926 was announced to appear in larger format with a color cover and 30 “art study” photographs, attesting to the success of the publishing idea but apparently the promised improvement never took place.

This was the work of Henry Knight Miller (1891-1950), a failed Brooklyn Methodist hellfire preacher turned New Thought “practical psychologist.” On him, see the note under Psychology (NY). The journal was what by modern standards would be considered a soft-porn pulp magazine, but its supposed serious intent was emphasized in its “Our Platform”:

“We oppose the conspiracy of silence on the subject of sex because not ignorance but understanding will safeguard morals and happiness. Likewise we oppose the conspiracy of shame whereby the beautiful and God-ordained fact of sex has been made to appear horrible and vile. We oppose the conspiracy of repression because psychoanalysis has clearly shown that to repress an impulse does not kill it but produces nervousness, morbidness, depression, shame, a sense of inferiority, sickness and insanity. When rationalized, frankly faced and understood, sex energy may be sublimated and used up in constructive activities leading to splendid achievement.”

That last sentence, tossed off in passing and not discussed, is a version of the fundamental New Thought rule that sexual energy was the basis of all spiritual and psychic development and human prosperity. Miller, ever the preacher, rationalized the mild prurience of the journal by equating sex and love:

“Be a spendthrift of love. Some sin perchance thru uncontrolled misdirected love, but by far the more fatal fault is insufficient love. Pour forth floods of affection upon family, friends, enemies. Let this tender emotion obliterate every distinction of name, sect, country, creed. We know God not thru musty books, barren creeds, spiritually bankrupt ecclesiastical organizations competing for membership, property and power, but thru unselfish and unstinted love. Sometimes even the demi-mondaine is nearer God than the high dignitary of the church, for tho she err, she errs thru love, even though it be prostituted and misdirected . . . .”

Despite the high-minded sentiments, what the journal carried was a number of photographs of scantily clad, frolicking young women. Naked breasts were apparently allowed, but little beyond that, and the journal very occasionally carried art photographs of semi-nude men to emphasize that it was indeed a serious production. To establish what at the time must have been considered the journal's “redeeming social value,” it also printed a number of serious, non-pornographic articles on marriage, “Can Men and Women Be Friends?,” “Sex Rivalry,” and Miller's “Alchemy of Love” and “The Reason Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,” by Winnifred Harper Cooley, who was a noted pioneering feminist:

“The question of why men always have seemed to prefer, not literal blonde damsels but the shallow, heartless, and amazingly shrewd immoral girls, is one that clamors for investigation. The answer forces itself upon the logical mind—'BECAUSE THESE GAVE THEM WHAT THEY WANTED!'”

Despite the protests about seriousness and morality, it is more than doubtful that anyone plunking down his quarter at the local newsstand did so to obtain the ruminations of Winnifred Cooley. The journal appears to have ceased publication in early 1928 because of the “moral outrage” and public protests engendered by an “eminent divine's” publishing such smut. Dawn Publishing Company also published Dawn: Psychology of Eugenics, Art Love, which Miller also edited and which printed again his article “The Alchemy of Love,” and other art photo magazines as well as Sex Stories (or Sex Story Magazine—>Venus) with which Miller may have been involved, but there is no evidence that he was.

Category: Psychology, Sexual Elements, New Thought.