Playboy features its first ever queer male cover star

The magazine has since gained a cult following, thanks to celebrity features and lucrative merchandise collections.

Throughout the early 2000s, pink bunny cushions and velour sweatsuits were a mainstay for many teen girls, and the brand still rolls out wildly popular clothing capsules year on year.

Playboy’s transformation into a global brand, ‘Playboy Enterprises’, may have ensured its appeal across gender lines. But collaborations with high-end brands like Supreme and famous figures like Kim Kardashian and Kate Moss have failed to unpick the magazine’s overtly heterosexual presence.

Bretman Rock’s stint as Playboy’s latest cover boy marks a crucial turning point for the publication. For a magazine plagued with controversies, including the illicit use of women’s photographs without consent, Playboy represents a pre-‘Times Up’ Hollywood.

On top of that, its audience is changing. Not only are young people having less casual sex than before, but the devastating impacts of pornography are fuelling a rejection of graphic content amongst Gen Z and millennials.

This comes at a time when largely white, male dominated corporations face pressure to transform their business culture. A ground-breaking study by insights agency Bigeye, found that 50% of Gen Z view traditional gender roles as outdated.

Bretman hopes his stint as a Playboy star will provide queer youth with the same representation he lacked growing up. ‘For Playboy to have a male on the cover is a huge deal for the LGBT community, for my brown people community and it’s all so surreal’ Rock was quoted as saying on twitter.

The diversification of sexual entertainment is, in large part, down to digital growth. Playboy ended its 66-year print run in 2020, after a major editorial overhaul in 2019 that resulted in what The New York Times called ‘a woke-er, more inclusive Playboy’.

Rock’s cover marks another rung in this transformative journey, affirming digital capacities to democratise once exclusionary cultural spaces.

Not only has a social media-based approach enabled Playboy to stray from its heterosexual (at worst, misogynistic) norms, but Bretman Rock’s internet success highlights the immense power queer people now hold over a world that once rejected them.