By Jericho Slade, WPS News, Ad-Hoc Historian

When I was nine years old—around 1966—I found myself in a neighbor’s garage with a friend, flipping through a dusty old Stag magazine. We were just kids, barely old enough to understand what we were seeing—but we knew it was something we weren’t supposed to. Around that same era, my catechism teacher confidently told us that our fathers and grandfathers—the GI Generation—were God‑fearing, moral men who saved the world and came home clean.

But I knew better.

Years later, I saw the photo. My father, in 1961–62, sitting casually in a green Naugahyde chair in his barracks on Kwajalein Atoll. Behind him, tacked proudly to the wall, was a Playboy centerfold. It wasn’t hidden. It wasn’t taboo. It was just there—part of the backdrop of American masculinity, post‑war style. That image shattered the myth I’d been sold.

Millions of returning WWII GIs came back with what we now know as PTSD—trauma from battlefield carnage, loss, and prolonged stress. But in the 1940s and ’50s there were no treatment programs, no diagnosis, no therapy. Many men coped by chasing escapism—booze, bars, and, yes, the rise of the skin‑mag industry (Dean, 2003). Publications like Stag, Rogue, and Cavalier hit the shelves in the late ’40s and ’50s, mixing war stories, pulp fiction, and cheesecake photography.

Then, in 1953, Hugh Hefner released the first issue of Playboy—and lit the fuse on a cultural explosion (Fraterrigo, 2009). With its blend of highbrow interviews, cocktail recipes, and airbrushed nudity, Playboy sold a fantasy of urbane sophistication wrapped in softcore rebellion. And millions of American men—especially veterans—bought into it. The Playboy Club, the Playboy key, the “James Bond” persona—these weren’t just trends. They were coping tools, status markers, and, often, quiet cries for a kind of freedom the war had denied.

The sexual revolution didn’t begin with hippies. It began with disillusioned soldiers and working‑class men who had seen death and wanted pleasure. And magazines—particularly Playboy—built the bridge from repression to rebellion.

So no, the Greatest Generation didn’t all come home with clean minds and quiet devotion. Many came back searching for escape, control, and intimacy in a country that wasn’t ready to listen. What they built—the centerfolds, the clubs, the culture—would lay the groundwork for the revolutions of the ’60s and beyond.

References

Dean, M. (2003). The mad, mad world of vintage men’s adventure magazines. Taschen.

Fraterrigo, E. (2009). Playboy and the making of the good life in modern America. Oxford University Press.

Luigi Novi, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

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