Playboy Is Now Being Run By A Gay Man. Yes. THAT Playboy.

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Playboy Is Now Being Run By A Gay Man. Yes. THAT Playboy.

For generations, few American brands screamed heterosexual male fantasy quite as loudly as Playboy.

Now the Bunny is being run by a gay man.

And not just any gay man.

Phillip Picardi built his career helping transform Teen Vogue, launched Condé Nast’s LGBTQ+ publication Them and later became editor-in-chief of Out.

In March, he added a rather unexpected publication to that résumé (Instinct).

Playboy.

Picardi became the iconic magazine’s editor-in-chief and chief brand officer as part of an attempt to reinvent Playboy for an era when nobody exactly needs to buy a magazine to see naked people anymore.

His stated goal is wonderfully simple.

Make Playboy “playful again.”

What Does Playboy Even Mean In 2026?

That is actually a surprisingly interesting question.

Playboy launched in 1953 and eventually became one of the defining symbols of heterosexual male sexuality in American culture.

There were famous interviews, serious journalism and fiction alongside the centerfolds, of course.

But let’s not pretend generations of teenage boys were hiding copies under their mattresses for the articles.

The internet rather dramatically changed that business model.

Playboy stopped regularly publishing its U.S. print magazine in 2020 before returning to print in 2025.

Picardi understands that trying to compete with unlimited online pornography would be rather pointless.

“You no longer need a print magazine for that,” he recently told The Times.

Instead, his Playboy is trying to become something closer to a provocative cultural magazine about sexuality itself.

That means relationships.

Dating.

Loneliness.

Modern masculinity.

And what Picardi describes as a strange cultural moment that manages to be simultaneously prudish and pornographic.

From Them To The Bunny

There is something wonderfully unexpected about Picardi being the person given this assignment.

He came out at 14 after growing up gay and Catholic in Massachusetts.

Years later, at Condé Nast, he became the founding editor of Them, creating a publication specifically designed around LGBTQ+ voices.

Now he is trying to broaden the worldview of a publication historically built largely around straight men looking at women.

Picardi has been clear that this does not mean turning Playboy into a queer magazine.

Women remain central to the brand.

The nudity remains.

The Bunny isn’t going anywhere.

But who Playboy imagines might be interested in sex, pleasure and culture is getting considerably wider.

“Queer rights don’t exist without women’s rights,” Picardi has said.

“These things are connected.”

The Change Is Already Visible

Playboy’s Spring 2026 issue, featuring Colombian superstar Karol G, was the first under Picardi’s leadership.

Its features went beyond traditional Playboy territory to examine subjects including male loneliness, the so-called sex recession and how artificial intelligence is changing intimacy.

Then came Cara Delevingne.

The openly lesbian model and actor became Playboy’s Summer 2026 cover star, photographed by Zoey Grossman.

She was the first openly lesbian woman to appear on the magazine’s print cover and the first supermodel to wear Playboy’s famous Bunny Costume for the magazine since Kate Moss in 2014.

For Picardi, that mixture of old Playboy iconography and a very different cultural perspective appears to be precisely the point.

A Gay Man Reinventing Straight Male Fantasy

The easiest joke here is that Playboy hired a gay man to save Playboy.

And admittedly, we’re not above making it. 😂

But Picardi’s appointment also says something interesting about how dramatically ideas about men and sexuality have changed since Hugh Hefner created the magazine more than 70 years ago.

Modern masculinity is not simply heterosexual men looking at beautiful women.

Men are navigating dating apps, loneliness, pornography, changing gender expectations and entirely new conversations about sexuality and relationships.

A gay editor may actually have a particularly useful perspective on what happens when the old rules about masculinity stop working.

Picardi isn’t throwing away Playboy’s past.

He seems to be asking whether the Bunny can loosen its bow tie a little and become curious about considerably more people.

And after spending much of his career making queer media more visible, Phillip Picardi now has an altogether stranger assignment.

Making one of America’s straightest magazines interesting again.

📷 @pfpicardi / @playboy

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They Attacked Him With Gay Slurs. He Responded By Coming Out.

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They Attacked Him With Gay Slurs. He Responded By Coming Out.

Mitja Zubin arrived at the European Athletics Championships hoping people would notice how fast he could run.

Instead, some people decided to talk about whether he was gay.

The 20-year-old Slovenian hurdler was making his European Championships debut in Birmingham after recently achieving a major milestone in his young career.

On July 1, he ran the 400-meter hurdles in 49.85 seconds, breaking the 50-second barrier for the first time.

But after an enthusiastic post-race interview with the Slovenian Athletics Federation was shared on social media, the comments quickly became ugly.

There were insults about his appearance.

There were homophobic slurs.

And Mitja decided not to quietly scroll past them.

He Showed People The Hate

Mitja shared a screenshot of some of the abusive comments on his Instagram Story.

He described them as a small example of the online toxicity athletes can experience behind the scenes.

“I didn’t realize how much hatred there was at home,” he wrote.

Then something rather remarkable happened.

Instead of Mitja being left to deal with the abuse alone, Slovenian athletics publicly stood behind him.

The Slovenian Athletics Federation condemned comments attacking personal characteristics or insinuating about someone’s sexual orientation as offensive and unacceptable.

Then support came from somewhere even more prominent.

The President Of Slovenia Spoke Up

Slovenian President Nataša Pirc Musar addressed Mitja directly in a public statement.

She told him that the support of the vast majority of people was louder than those trying to insult and humiliate him.

“There is no place for homophobia, hate speech and discrimination in sports in our society,” she wrote.

And amid the national conversation that followed, Mitja decided to say publicly something that the people closest to him had known for years.

He is gay.

“Maybe Someone Younger Won’t Be Ashamed”

Mitja told Outsports that this was the first time he had publicly spoken about his sexual orientation.

It wasn’t his first coming out.

He had told his mother, younger brother and close friends when he was 16.

“I never felt the need to broadcast it to the world,” he explained.

But being confronted with homophobia gave him a reason to do something different.

“I came out so that maybe someone who comes after me, someone younger, won’t be ashamed of it,” he told Slovenian sports newspaper Ekipa.

That motivation has become central to how Mitja now talks about what happened.

He wants younger gay athletes to have something he understands can make an enormous difference: somebody visible ahead of them.

“Growing up, having a visible role model can make all the difference,” he told Outsports.

He wants young athletes struggling with who they are to understand that they are not alone — and that being themselves does not place a ceiling on what they can achieve.

He’s Just Getting Started

That last part matters because Mitja is not looking back on a finished athletics career.

He is 20.

His 49.85 personal best in the 400m hurdles came only last month.

He represents Slovenia internationally and is among the country’s promising young athletes.

His ambitions now include reaching the World Championships.

And perhaps one day, the Olympics.

He was surprised to learn from Outsports that he had been the only publicly out gay athlete competing in the men’s category at these European Championships.

Rather than making him uncomfortable, the distinction gave him pride.

“Representation matters deeply because everyone should feel safe, welcome, and valued for their athletic abilities,” he said.

And ultimately, athletic ability is exactly what Mitja wants people to judge.

“I want my results to speak for themselves,” he told Outsports.

“Being gay is just one small piece of who I am — it doesn’t define my entire identity or my limits as an athlete.”

The people posting gay slurs beneath Mitja Zubin’s interview apparently thought his sexuality was something they could use against him.

Instead, they gave a talented 20-year-old athlete a reason to tell younger gay people something much more powerful.

You can be gay.

You can be yourself.

And you can still dream about standing on the biggest sporting stage in the world.

📷 @mitjazubin

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What Happens to Bear Culture When Everyone’s on Ozempic?

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What Happens to Bear Culture When Everyone’s on Ozempic?

The bears aren’t disappearing.

But apparently they’re ordering smaller T-shirts.

That was one of the more fascinating details to emerge from a recent Advocate look at how GLP-1 weight-loss medications are affecting gay bear culture.

Frank Mahoney, president of the Provincetown Bears, said registrations for this summer’s Bear Week were running ahead of the previous year.

So much for the extinction of the bear.

But organizers had noticed something else.

Where larger T-shirt sizes once dominated orders, more attendees were requesting small, medium and large.

It’s a wonderfully mundane detail that hints at a much bigger cultural question.

What happens to bear culture when the bears start losing weight?

More Than A Body Type

Bear culture emerged within gay male culture in the 1980s, partly as an alternative to beauty standards that often privileged youth, thinness and carefully sculpted bodies.

Academic research into bear identity has found that bigger and hairier bodies became not merely accepted within the community, but desirable.

For some men, discovering bear culture meant discovering that characteristics they had been taught to dislike about themselves could actually make them attractive.

That can be enormously powerful.

But it also helps explain why Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro, Zepbound and similar medications have created such an interesting conversation.

Some bear-identified men are now losing substantial amounts of weight.

Some use these medications to treat diabetes or other medical conditions.

Some want to lose weight for other health reasons.

And some simply want a different body.

None of those men should have to justify that decision to the rest of us.

Can You Lose The Belly And Keep The Bear?

Richard Jones of Bear World Magazine has lost weight while using Mounjaro to manage type 2 diabetes.

He still considers himself a bear.

And perhaps that shouldn’t be surprising.

Bear culture has never had an official weigh-in.

Its sprawling vocabulary alone — bears, cubs, otters, muscle bears, polar bears and plenty more — suggests a community that has always contained different bodies.

Research has also described bear identity as involving belonging, masculinity, maturity and self-acceptance rather than simply physical measurements.

A man’s body can change enormously between 30 and 60 without his friends, relationships or sense of community disappearing with his waistline.

So why should losing weight automatically revoke his bear card?

But What About The Chasers?

There is, naturally, another constituency in this debate.

The men who really, really like bears. 🐻❤️

If bigger bodies are genuinely part of what attracts you to someone, watching those bodies shrink may produce some complicated feelings.

Hence the jokes about Ozempic making the bears disappear.

But there is an important line between attraction and ownership.

Nobody owes a boyfriend, a hookup, a dating app or an entire gay subculture a particular body.

A man choosing to lose weight isn’t betraying people who find larger men attractive.

Equally, a man choosing not to lose weight shouldn’t be treated as somebody waiting to be “fixed.”

That may be where this supposedly silly question becomes genuinely interesting.

Body Acceptance Has To Work Both Ways

Bear culture’s most valuable contribution may never have been convincing gay men that bigger bodies were better.

It was showing many men that bigger bodies could be attractive at all.

That distinction matters.

Body acceptance stops being acceptance if it requires somebody to preserve the same body forever.

And bear culture itself has never been as simple as fat men with beards.

Not every bear is large.

Not every large gay man identifies as a bear.

Not every bear is hairy.

And the community has never been completely free from its own arguments about who is bearish enough to belong.

GLP-1 medications haven’t created those questions.

They’ve simply given the community a new reason to ask them.

So Where Are All The Bears Going?

Judging from Provincetown, nowhere.

They’re still going to Bear Week.

They’re still finding one another.

They’re still building friendships, having sex, falling in love, dancing, partying and creating community.

Some of them may simply be doing it in smaller T-shirts.

And perhaps that tells us something important about what bear culture became after decades of existence.

It may have started partly around bodies that mainstream gay culture failed to appreciate.

But somewhere along the way, it became bigger than those bodies.

Maybe GLP-1s aren’t killing bear culture at all.

Maybe they’re revealing what was underneath the belly all along.

A community.

📷 @ptownbears

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They Wanted To Become Dads. The Law Said They Were The Wrong Kind Of Couple.

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They Wanted To Become Dads. The Law Said They Were The Wrong Kind Of Couple.

Trent and Brad Dunn wanted to become dads.

They had a surrogate willing to help them create their family.

They were prepared to go through the demanding process required to make that happen.

But there was one requirement the married Australian couple could never satisfy.

They were two men.

Now, after a legal battle stretching over three years, Trent and Brad have become the first same-sex couple to receive approval for a surrogacy arrangement from Western Australia’s Reproductive Technology Council.

And they can finally concentrate on what they wanted in the first place.

Trying to become parents.

“The Fact That We Were Two Men”

Western Australia’s existing Surrogacy Act dates from 2008.

Under the law, a couple eligible for a parentage order was defined as two people of opposite sexes who were married or in a de facto relationship and unable to conceive a child.

Single women could also qualify under certain circumstances.

Male same-sex couples and single men could not.

For Trent and Brad, that meant their path to parenthood effectively stopped before it could begin.

Brad told WAtoday that the couple met every criterion except one: “the fact that we were two men.”

So rather than simply accepting that answer, they challenged it.

A Three-Year Fight

The Dunns argued that Western Australia’s restrictions discriminated against them because of their sex and conflicted with federal anti-discrimination protections.

In May 2026, Western Australia’s Court of Appeal agreed.

The court found that relevant provisions of the state’s Surrogacy Act were inconsistent with federal law and therefore invalid to the extent of that inconsistency.

That decision opened a door that had previously been closed to the couple.

Now the Reproductive Technology Council has approved their surrogacy arrangement.

According to WAtoday, they are the first same-sex couple to receive that approval in Western Australia.

The Law Was Already Changing — Just Not Fast Enough

There is an unusual twist to Trent and Brad’s story.

Western Australia has already decided that its old restrictions need to go.

The state parliament passed sweeping new assisted reproductive technology and surrogacy legislation in December 2025.

When it comes into effect, access will no longer depend on a person’s sex, relationship status, gender identity, sex characteristics or sexual orientation.

Same-sex couples and single men will explicitly be able to access assisted reproductive treatments including surrogacy.

But implementation is not expected until mid-2027.

For couples who have already spent years waiting to start a family, another year can feel very long indeed.

“This has been a really long journey for us and for our family,” Brad told WAtoday.

He described repeatedly being told to wait and be patient while knowing that the obstacle was not their suitability to become parents.

It was their sex.

Now They Can Focus On Becoming Dads

Trent and Brad have now begun treatment with their surrogate, her wife and a separate egg donor.

They know there are no guarantees.

Surrogacy and fertility treatment can bring plenty of challenges even after the legal barriers disappear.

But those are finally the challenges the couple want to be thinking about.

“We know plenty of challenges still lie ahead of us,” Brad said, “but we are overjoyed to be focused now on the wonderful opportunity of parenthood.”

And after fighting their own case, they are trying to make the road easier for the families who come next.

The couple have created a template document based on their arrangement that others may be able to use.

For Brad, helping another couple avoid the same experience would give meaning to what they went through.

“If it means that someone doesn’t have to experience that same pain… then this has been worth it,” he said.

Three years ago, Trent and Brad were fighting a law that told them the kind of couple they were made them ineligible to take the next step toward becoming parents.

Today, the law is changing, their case has opened a door early, and treatment has begun.

They still don’t know exactly where the journey will end.

But at last, the biggest question facing them isn’t whether two men should be allowed to become dads.

It’s whether their dream of becoming dads is about to come true.

📷 Trent and Brad Dunn on change.org

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Neil Patrick Harris Reveals What Really Pushed Him To Come Out As Gay

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Neil Patrick Harris Reveals What Really Pushed Him To Come Out As Gay

Neil Patrick Harris remembers preparing himself for the possibility that publicly coming out as gay could make for a very bad week.

Instead, almost everyone seemed remarkably unsurprised.

Nearly 20 years later, Harris can laugh about that.

“I was a little bit offended that more people weren’t surprised,” he joked in a new interview.

The actor has opened up about his 2006 coming out during an appearance on Jamie Laing’s Great Company podcast.

Harris was already famous from his childhood role in Doogie Howser, M.D. and had recently begun playing Barney Stinson on How I Met Your Mother.

Barney was famously written as an almost absurdly enthusiastic womanizer.

Harris’ private life looked rather different.

He had already begun dating actor and chef David Burtka before auditioning for the sitcom.

The people working on How I Met Your Mother knew Harris and Burtka were a couple.

The wider public did not.

Harris recalled the peculiar compromises that required.

The two men could attend movie premieres together, but Harris would walk the red carpet while Burtka avoided the photographers.

They could tell themselves that they were simply keeping their relationship private.

Both men had careers, after all, and neither was obligated to make their personal life part of a publicity campaign.

But Harris now recognizes another consequence.

While he received the public treatment afforded to a celebrity, Burtka effectively had to disappear.

Harris said that arrangement risked making the man he loved feel “less than.”

It was also becoming increasingly difficult to maintain.

This was the mid-2000s, when celebrity gossip blogs had enormous influence and speculation about supposedly closeted gay actors had become its own form of online entertainment.

Harris remembers reading posts inviting audiences to guess which famous actor might secretly be gay.

He worried he could become the next target.

Eventually, the speculation moved directly toward him.

A journalist asked one of Harris’ publicists about his sexuality.

According to Harris, the publicist responded that he was “not of that persuasion.”

Harris had not personally made that denial.

But once the remark was publicly attributed to his camp, it created a new problem.

People who knew Harris was gay began questioning why he appeared to be denying it.

At that point, Harris says he could see what was likely to happen next.

He feared gossip outlets would begin actively soliciting people who had dated or slept with him.

Instead of waiting for that story to develop around him, he decided to take control of it.

“I’ve gotta get ahead of the story,” he remembers thinking.

Harris worked with his agent and publicist on a statement that he felt accurately represented him.

On November 3, 2006, People published it.

Harris described himself as “a very content gay man” living his life to the fullest.

Today, a major television star publicly acknowledging that he is gay may not sound particularly extraordinary.

In 2006, the calculation could feel considerably different.

Harris was playing a major role on a successful network sitcom.

He had spent much of his life working in an entertainment industry where openly gay actors still faced questions about whether audiences would accept them as romantic leads.

And public hostility toward gay people remained highly visible.

Harris remembered thinking about anti-gay protesters who placed hateful signs outside people’s homes.

He knew there was at least a possibility that his announcement could turn ugly.

Instead, relatively little happened.

“There was indifference at best,” Harris recalled.

That left him with an unexpectedly comic complaint.

He had anticipated at least some shocked reaction.

Perhaps people would ask how someone as seemingly masculine as Neil Patrick Harris could possibly be gay.

They did not.

Harris joked that he was almost offended by how unsurprised everybody appeared to be.

Behind the joke, however, he recognizes why his experience was easier than it might have been for actors who came out before him.

Those people had already absorbed much of the punishment.

Each visible gay actor had made the next announcement slightly less extraordinary.

Harris believes their experiences helped create the relatively muted response he received.

His own coming out would subsequently contribute to that same process for actors following him.

Harris went on to become one of American television’s most visible openly gay stars.

He remained on How I Met Your Mother through its nine-season run and won multiple Emmy Awards during his career.

He also hosted the Tony Awards, Emmy Awards and Academy Awards.

Meanwhile, the private relationship he once tried to keep away from photographers became very public.

Harris and Burtka became parents to twins Gideon and Harper in 2010.

They married in 2014.

The couple have now been together for more than two decades.

Harris’ new recollection also serves as a reminder of how recently outing was treated as entertainment.

Celebrity blogger Perez Hilton was among the figures who publicly speculated about Harris’ sexuality during that period and encouraged readers to provide information about closeted celebrities.

Hilton has since said he regrets those tactics and has described his past efforts to out gay celebrities as cruel.

He has also said that he later apologized to Harris.

Harris did not center Hilton by name in his new interview.

Instead, he described the broader gossip culture that made him feel increasingly certain that someone else would tell his story if he did not tell it first.

That makes the phrase “forced to come out” slightly more complicated than it initially sounds.

No one physically compelled Harris to issue his statement.

But the possibility of retaining genuine control over whether his sexuality became public was rapidly disappearing.

He chose to speak before the decision was effectively made for him.

Today, Harris sees enormous progress.

He pointed to a culture in which LGBTQ+ actors and same-sex relationships are increasingly visible across mainstream entertainment.

There is still pressure surrounding coming out, particularly for young public figures.

But the consequences Harris feared in 2006 no longer feel inevitable in quite the same way.

And perhaps the funniest detail in his story is also the most hopeful.

Neil Patrick Harris spent days worrying that America might discover he was gay.

America’s response was essentially:

Yes, Neil.

We know.

📷 @nph

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