Image Credit: CNN.com

Hugh Hefner died on Wednesday, September 27, aged 91. We here at the NiteFlirt blog usually keep things light, with fun stories and joke lists and whatnot, but Hef was a pioneer for free speech and sexual expression in the United States. And Playboy wasn’t just a men’s magazine with sexy pictures and implied smoking-jacket-casual manhood; it left a mark (or burn mark, depending on your personal ethics) on the landscape of American culture.

Playboy launched and solidified artists and writers like Ray Bradbury and Kurt Vonnegut Jr. It provided in-depth insight into the US and world economies. The women featured in its pages were launched into the public eye, and a few like Pam Anderson and Jenna Jameson were launched into the friggin’ stratosphere. Was it kitschy and misogynistic? Could easily be (and has often been) seen that way, but it did lend a hand in casualizing – normalizing – the thing that keeps our species making more of our species, as an unofficial godfather of the sexual revolution.

The original playboy himself wasn’t some saint, both standing up for LGBTQIA groups in the 1950s and civil rights in the 1960s while being accused of being a pimp (could be argued) and a corruptive influence on “the youth” (seriously, what impactful person HASN’T been accused of corruption of those nebulous “youth”?). But we here will remember him for his contributions to not only publishing, but enjoying a little sexy fun in private without a government hovering over our collective shoulders about it.

So our hats (and pants) off to the late head of the magazine that millions of growing teenagers hid under their beds, kept dads hiding that cardboard box in the back of the closet, and changed the USA one sticky-paged free speech fight at a time. Come celebrate the fun of that sexual revolution he embodied, right here at NiteFlirt, and keep the good times rolling!