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A year has passed since Genevieve and I launched Hooksexup from our telephone booth-sized Manhattan apartment; now, panning our new headquarters in a downtown loft (five of us, each cocooned in the grip of oversized headphones, frantically typing), it is clear that Hooksexup is prospering. We're delighted (and somewhat surprised) that our oxymoronic subtitle, Literate Smut, has proved comprehensible to so many. Several million different readers have been through Hooksexup in the last year, and a few hundred thousand of you return each month. No doubt our choice of subject matter has something to do with this success -- it's always effective, after all, to appeal to a primordial urge. But as our loyal readers know, for all its sexiness Hooksexup plays less to the groin than the gray matter, and for this there is a smaller market -- or so say the sales seers. Of course little is more satisfying than proving them wrong, and towards this end we are doubly obsessed with assembling the most comprehensively stimulating magazine around.
Much is afoot in the Hooksexup offices. In the last couple months we've launched HooksexupLink, a database of sex-related websites, and Hooksexup.de , a German version of Hooksexup. This fall we are scheduled to unveil a community space (HooksexupCenter), a line of Hooksexup merchandise (including sheepskin rugs, silk pajamas, and Twister sets, if you can believe it), as well as the Hooksexup: Literate Smut book (due out from Broadway Books in September).
In order to make sure you are aware of the full breadth of Hooksexup offerings, Joey Cavella, our design maestro, has created a new highlights page. After noting that most people's attention spans have shrunk with the national deficit (prosperity is distracting, after all), we have added a daily Curio, which will consist either of a brief quotation ("The last time I was inside a woman was when I visited the Statue of Liberty" -- Woody Allen), definition (mysophilia: arousal from chewing on sweaty apparel) or factoid (male ostriches have penises so large they use them alternately as walking sticks).
We are also using our new highlights format to introduce special issues, each centered around a common theme. The unifying thread in July was the freakish spectacle of sex on talk shows. David Futrelle's book review (The Springer Hearings: A Case for Talking Trash) addressed tabloid television's unwitting contribution to sexual revolution; James Hannaham, meanwhile, delivered the risible tale of a drag queen talk show brawl (Tragedy in Burgundy). In late July we slipped in a feature on Lolita, the book, the film and the complex.
August brings our post-marital sex issue. Married readers have been writing us for months, insisting that marriage is not the erotic Alcatraz it's made out to be. We thought this was splendid news, so we've enlisted the novelist/poet duo David Teague and Marisa de los Santos to dispatch his/her reports from the bowels of betrothal and Amy Keyishian to describe the novel comfort of post-conjugal coitus. Rachel Greene, meanwhile, conducts the first Hooksexup Interview with a young woman who, in the name of art, married four men in one year.
As always, we hope to hear your , whether harrumphs or hallelujahs, and hope to see you in the HooksexupCenter community space this fall, where we can strum chins together over these and other aspects of modern (and not so modern) sexuality.
-- Rufus Griscom, August 1, 1998
| ABOUT THE AUTHOR: |
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Rufus left his reliable salary and position as an editor and director of new media at Cader Books, a publisher of bestselling humor and entertainment titles, in order to co-found Hooksexup in 1997 with Genevieve Field.
Before working at Cader, he was managing editor for two years at August House, a publisher of contemporary storytelling and folklore. Earlier still, he was book review editor at The Free Press in Little Rock, Arkansas. His writing has appeared in Publishers Weekly, The Baltimore Sun and The Wall Street Journal, among other places. He graduated from Brown University in 1991. |
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