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5 / “For He Who Is”: Players Magazine and the Reimagining of the American Pimp In one of the early issues of Holloway House Publishing Company’s Players magazine—the first commercially successful men’s magazine targeted specifically toward African Americans—a reader provides an insightful analysis of the significance of the publication’s title: “Players is not a ‘demeaning’ name for the magazine for it is not really saying that all Black men are pimps and hustlers. To me, it is saying that we all, Black Men and Black Women, are players in our own right. For it is true that we all have roles to play in life. We are all actors. Not just the Black race, but all people on this earth are players.”1 In part, the reader’s defense of Players’ title recalls William Shakespeare’s famous lines from As You Like It, in which the melancholy Jaques states, “All the world’s a stage, / And all the men and women merely players: / They have their exits and their entrances; / And one man in his time plays many parts.” While consciously or unconsciously channeling Shakespeare, the reader here also emphasizes the theatrical quality of the black urban identity. Extending the definition of player to mean more than simply a pimp or hustler—though still overshadowed by the pimp’s preence—the reader emphasizes the idea that the player is essentially an actor who survives the perils of white society by self-consciously playing black urban identity as a role. This expansion of the idea of the player to mean something more universal than “pimp” or “hustler” is emblematic of Players’ larger contribution to African American cultural production. Although drawing on the representations of the pimp and hustler figures invented in the pages of Robert Beck and Donald Goines, Players rearticulated these 128 / “for he who is” figures of black cool as legitimate icons of upward mobility in American society. This chapter investigates how the über-utopian space of the men’s magazine was utilized to promote the figure of the player as a logical expansion of the protagonists in black crime literature. It examines the diverse ways in which black writers and editors at Players transformed the pimp, hustler, and revolutionary into politically charged figures of cosmopolitan black identity. As we have seen in previous chapters, with the publication of dozens of black novelists by the early-to-mid 1970s, Holloway House gained a significant foothold in the marketplace of black book publishing. Its stories of pimps, hustlers, prisoners, and revolutionaries launched an underground literary renaissance of black literature that was culturally and geographically distinct from mainstream America. Confined to inner-city neighborhoods and prisons across the country, many black readers turned to these black crime narratives of Robert Beck, Donald Goines, Joseph Nazel, Odie Hawkins, and others as a form of entertainment and imaginary escape, thereby constituting a new black urban literary scene. Holloway House and black crime writers formed a troubled coalition to create a new popular genre of black literature, offering a wide range of literary expressions of the black criminal experience from the grittily realistic to the fantastically utopian. It was at this very same moment in the early 1970s when Holloway House was cornering the market of black mass-market fiction that it also launched Players, a men’s magazine targeted specifically at African Americans . Originally subtitled “For He Who Is,” Players was imagined as a cross between Playboy and Ebony. At first, it contained a hundred pages of fiction and nonfiction, black political and social news, interviews with black celebrities, film and music reviews, advice on grooming and fashion, and nude images of black women. The publication initially sold for one dollar per copy, and it was published at first bimonthly and then monthly between November 1973 and 2000. During its heyday in the mid-1970s, Players was printing just under half a million copies of each issue, and it featured one of the most wide-ranging collections of criticism, art, and entertainment found in any American publication. It included the editorial work of poet Wanda Coleman and novelist Joseph Nazel, monthly columns by Stanley Crouch and Julian Bond, nude pictorials of black movie stars Pam Grier and Roz Miles, fiction by Ishmael Reed and Robert Beck, and celebrity interviews with countless black personalities, including Gil Scott Heron, George Foreman, Maya Angelou, Sam Greenlee, Don King, James Baldwin, O. J. Simpson, and Dizzy Gillespie. [18.217.144.32] Project MUSE...

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