Author Sam Staggs (Did You Sleep With The Models?): “I Looked Up And There Was Al Parker…”

Show Notes

Dennis is joined by author Sam Staggs whose Substack newsletter “Did You Sleep With The Models?” documents the five years he spent as Editor-In-Chief of the gay magazines Mandate, Playguy and Honcho in the early 1980’s. Sam talks about how the project began as a book that he wrote during the pandemic and then evolved into a Substack newsletter with photographs and illustrations pulled straight from the magazines. He also discusses what it was like to oversee three gay porn magazines just as AIDS was starting to ravage the community. Sam also discusses two of his Hollywood-related books; All About All About Eve and Finding Zsa Zsa: The Gabors Behind The Legend. Other topics include: the many upsides of publishing on Substack, his friendship with film critic Pauline Kael, interacting with gay porn icons like Al Parker, Casey Donovan and Kristen Bjorn, the dishy lunch he once had with actress Joan Fontaine, the rumor that Nancy Reagan gave good head and the gay agent who passed on representing Did You Sleep With the Models? because he thought it should be primarily focused on AIDS.

https://samstaggs.substack.com/