Adithya Sambamurthy/The Bay Citizen

Robert Mainardi and Trent Dunphy at The Magazine on Larkin Street on Friday, April 8, 2011

When Trent Dunphy opened The Magazine on Larkin Street in 1973, soda fountains were being crowded out by porn theaters, and hustlers were replacing the neighborhood’s middle-class retirees. San Francisco was leading the sexual revolution, with the Tenderloin at the epicenter.

Print publications – from Rolling Stone and the Berkeley Barb to more provocative material, like J. Brian’s Golden Boys and the Falcon Files were flowing of the Bay Area, and Dunphy thought there might be a living to be made reselling them.

For aficionados like Dunphy, and his partner of nearly forty years, Robert Mainardi, magazines involving sex weren’t any less significant than those about any other aspect of life.

“We always felt that magazines were magazines,” Dunphy says. “Now, National Geographic is still a wonder -- and any one who has a subscription to it gets lucky every single month -- but National Geographic was also where you used to go to see nudity.”

In the past few weeks, iconic spots like A Different Light, a GLBT bookstore, and the famous Eagle Tavern have been threatened with closure, The Magazine is part of a shrinking of list of gay-owned businesses that have remained open since the transformational decades of the ‘70s and ‘80s.

And bookstores, like the legendary Le Salon, once lined the streets of the Polk and Tenderloin. Now, The Magazine is one of the last, and the two wonder if a whole segment of the culture is in danger of disappearing. 

“It's particularly the low-end that's being forgotten,” says Mainardi, who got his start working at the Bonanza bookstore in the Palace Hotel, “The stuff that wasn't taken seriously. Not just the smut and the fluff but things like Popular Mechanics, which is just such a dimension to a different time.”

So is the Magazine itself.

Since 1973 the Magazine has maintained a delicate – some might say San Franciscan — balance highbrow and hardcore.

Meticulously organized copies of Life and Architectural Digest fill the front stacks of the store. Vintage advertisements for defunct hotels, tear sheets from early Hollywood fanzines and remnants of interstate car culture line the hardwood shelves.

But Dunphy and partner Robert Mainardi have never shied away from sex. No one would confuse the store’s shelves with the fluorescent displays of the stereotypical XXX bookshop, but the flesh in this at the heart of The Magazine’s identity. When Dunphy opened the store, San Francisco was reviled as the “Smut Capital of America,” the birthplace of "porno."