Still Spurting
Back in September 1992 a small A5 rough and ready fanzine was launched.
Unlike other fanzines at the time which dealt with sport, celebs and music this one was dedicated purely to lovers of underwear. The first edition of SPURT was born and in January 2011 it celebrates its 100th edition. As long time fans of this brilliant little fetish-mag Bent caught up with its editor Ben Lawrence to find out how it all began.
When we launched SPURT! I don’t think we had great expectations for it to last the distance: we weren’t sure how many underwear lovers were out there, nor how many of them wanted our kind of magazine. Our first mail out was to 63 subscribers who we’d gained from an advert in BOYZ. We thought that if we made it to issue 10 that might be quite an achievement! But as the editions came and went the readership numbers gradually grew from hundreds to thousands, and the subscribers showed a real dedication to the SPURT! style. The letters rolled in and they were a great boost to us as the guys told us how much they loved what we were doing, how much they liked our different kind of gay man’s magazine, and most of them seemed genuinely surprised and delighted at just how popular underwear pleasure was with gay men. Guys started sending in their own erotic confessions and sex-tales, then their photographs, then they started to visit us in Manchester to get photographed by us for the magazine… the letters became more lively… and I think we realised that there were more gay underwear lovers out there than even we imagined!
Why is it only available by subscription?
We wanted to produce a magazine that would be fun and informative, would turn underwear-lovers on, and perhaps inspire them with their underwear desires, and let them meet-up with like-minded guys. Right from the beginning we wanted this to be more than just another contact sheet, so from day one our mission statement was to: inform, inspire, delight and excite gay underwear lovers by publishing a lively, horny, all-action erotic magazine to turn guys on and massage their underwear love. An erotic magazine that was going to be packed from cover-to-cover, a magazine that was going to be more than just a ten-minute read. We decided early on not to include any trade advertising in the magazine and we wanted to be different to that… we just wanted a magazine dedicated to underwear. We also wanted a magazine that was more interested in content rather than clever-clever style, and I think the fanzine-style that we adopted allowed us to achieve that, and it has always been well received by our readers. By being a privately published magazine we’ve been able to be much, much more erotic than other magazines might be.
So what makes SPURT! so special?
Each edition is crammed with our subscribers’ true-life experiences, some very erotic fiction and sex-tales, loads of features to inform guys about what’s happening in the ever-changing world of underwear, pictures of some of the horniest guys showing off in their underwear (many of which are our readers), and we still have a really lively mix of contact adverts from our readers. During SPURT!’s 18 years we’ve witnessed the growth of the internet to come and dominate the porn industry, and we’ve seen plenty of other erotic magazines disappear from view, but our readers seem to still love our kind of lively underwear magazine. We currently have over 2500 subscribers regularly spurting with us. Our 100th edition (published on the 2nd January) is obviously a major landmark for us, and we’re intent on bringing a very special mix of our kind of eroticism. We’ve got some very special features planned, without sinking into any kind of nostalgia trip. We’ve got a few special interviews planned with celebrities talking about their underwear, some great photoshoots of extra-horny guys in and out of their undies but mostly we are planning that SPURT! 100 should be an intense underwear experience.
An annual subscription to SPURT! is £36 (for 6 editions).
The address is:
NEW HORIZONS,
P.O. BOX 54,
MANCHESTER
M60 7AB