There’s an old cover of the Erotic Review (Issue 100 from June 2009) that depicts a birthday lunch to celebrate the magazine’s 100th edition. The scene is one of revelrous, risqué chaos: women with their tops off pop bottles of champagne, sex toys — seemingly given out as party favours — are strewn across the furnishings, and one woman, seen only from behind (her skirt hoisted up to reveal her stockings, suspenders, and rather sexless knickers) is, to put it crudely, sucking off a man under the table while simultaneously fondling another out of shot.

The spectacle, a pastel-hued illustration by erotic artist Tom Sargent, is, presumably, imagined. But if rumours and anecdotes from attendees are anything to go by, it might not be toofar-fetched a portrayal of the real Erotic Review lunches of the late 90s and early 00s.

These lunches (or, as described in a 2006 Independent article, “marathon drinking sessions”) were first held at ER founder Jamie Maclean’s house and then at the Academy Club in Soho. “It was very conducive to people sitting around a table, drinking, and losing their inhibitions,” Maclean said at the time. (Later, he tells me “the ghastly Boris Johnson” even made the odd appearance.) On occasion, this loss of inhibitions reportedly led to, as per another Independent article, “steamy antics” between staff and guests, including an assistant allegedly being handcuffed to a chair and whipped with a cat-o’-nine-tails.

These lunches epitomise the ethos of the original Erotic Review: a titillating, tongue-in-cheek good time for a British elite that knows their Van Maëles from their Von Bayros'. Or, as it’s been described by the press, “sex… with a hefty side helping of cheesy end-of-pier smut”, “titillation for libidinous Bufton Tuftons”, and “the nation’s only genuinely intelligent journal of eroticism”.

It’s probably hard to imagine the magazine you’re holding previously being a vessel for, as its former ‘editrice’ Rowan Pelling once described it, “boys’ school smut”. (As Pelling herself wrote of those lunches and their questionable workplace dynamics in 2020: “I’m not sure there will be so many belly laughs now at a scene where an author brings a small leather flogger to an Erotic Review lunch and carries out a little corporal punishment on my startled, but not unwilling, deputy editor.”) But this relaunched Erotic Review is just another era in the title’s 30-year history. Across its various iterations — of which there have been many — the ER archive is a time capsule of changing sensibilities in the UK.

First and foremost an art and literary magazine, and therefore not concerned by the goings on of mainstream pop culture nor celebrity scandals (unless political), it is nonetheless impossible to divorce the Erotic Review from the sexual backdrops against which it thrived or languished. There’s its launch in 1995 as a newsletter for fans and buyers of erotic art; its heyday during Pelling’s reign of 1997 to 2003 — years defined, outside of the magazine, by in-your-face sexual excess, rabid heterosexuality, and the false promise of girl power; its lad mag-adjacent top-shelf era of the mid-00s; its waning relevancy and eventual disappearance by the 2010s amid the arrival of freely-accessible online porn and fourth-wave feminism; and its return in 2024 — a post-MeToo, politically divisive time — as this, an international, intersectional, less madcap, biannual journal for exploring desire.

My own journey with The Erotic Review began in 2022 at an antique store near Leeds, where I discovered a pile of old issues for sale. As someone who writes about sex for a living, I felt like I’d found a goldmine. I thumbed through issue after issue, each filled with raunchy, Carry On-style illustrations, cheesy innuendos, and, shall we say, of-its-time language (one sentence in the May 1999 issue goes, ‘Any number of pert-titted, tight-fannied, brainless, novice bimbettes are on offer, but fallen breasts and wide experience are in jolly short supply’). There were features on courtesans in 19th-century art, criticisms of modern obscenity laws, essays on the sexcapades of 18th-century intelligentsia, and rankings of the UK’s sexiest politicians as well as erotic fiction, reviews, and classifieds.

I’d never read sex writing like it; it was simultaneously absurd, funny, offensive, engrossing, objectifying, and, in many ways, out of my league. You can practically hear the RP voice it was written in; Pelling summed up its intended reader playfully in a 2017 interview with Sotheby’s as: “People living in Georgian rectories, manor houses, and Holly Tree cottages all over the home counties and shires [whose] respectable, conformist exterior often conceal wanton flights of fantasy.”

It may not have been for me, then, but I was still intrigued. And so, I feel very lucky to have been allowed to peek behind the curtain and tip-toe up the stairs of Erotic Towers (the nickname for ER’s original offices) to find out how it all began. But be aware: I’m going to focus on the period between the Erotic Review’s launch in 1995 and its purchase by the publishers of Penthouse UK in 2004. What happened after that is, frankly, not as interesting.

*

In 1985, art dealers Jamie Maclean and Timothy Hobart hosted the first thematic exhibition of erotic art in England, called Forbidden Images, at The Maclean Gallery in London. It was the last exhibition that the gallery ever held — but not because, as Maclean had fretted, it got shut down by the police. In preparation, he had asked a lawyer friend for advice. “He was happy to supply this in return for a saucy print or two,” Maclean wrote in an unpublished 2005 article. “His counsel was reassuring, but he told me that the gallery blinds must remain firmly down [because of] a law dating from the late 19th century that forbade shopkeepers to have so provocative a display in their shop window that crowds would spill off the pavement and into the path of oncoming hansom cabs and omnibuses.”

Maclean was justified in his apprehension. Two high-profile obscenity law trials from the last decade — over the countercultural magazine Oz (1971) and porn actress Linda Lovelace’s autobiography (1976) — still cast a long shadow, while cultural censorship, notably the ‘video nasties’ controversy and the 1984 raid of London’s Gay’s the Word bookstore, continued to define the 80s. At the same time, the feminist art movement was becoming more vocally critical of the portrayal of women in art. An exhibition of erotic art, then, could be at risk from lawmakers and activists alike.

But there was no need to worry. The exhibition was a triumph, nobody was hit by an omnibus, and Maclean and Hobart went on to host two more exhibitions dedicated to erotica: first illustrations, and then books. Emboldened by this success, by 1994 the pair had launched The Erotic Print Society — a mail-order catalogue that sold facsimile prints, which they advertised in newspapers — and had been dubbed by The Independent, “the world’s most prolific publishers of erotic art”.

The Erotic Review soon followed in 1995, at first as The Erotic Print Society Review. Initially, it was just a few pages folded together and printed in black and white, given away as a freebie with the catalogues. The first issue contains an exploration of Jean-Antoine Watteau’s place in the history of erotic art, a fake news story about a woman abducted by aliens for sex, and a poem about penis envy. Its stated intention was to explore “all aspects of human sexuality… discreetly, wittily, and with an emphasis on good writing”.

When I meet Maclean — a lofty, soft-spoken man now in his 70s — on a blazing Friday in July at his grand, art-filled south London home, he tells me that The Erotic Review was established in part to “counter puritanical views”. “We all thought it was ridiculous that post the 1960s so-called sexual revolution, in this country we were still, in many ways, floundering around in a sort of 1950s morality,” he explains. “During the war, everyone had been kind of promiscuous, but by the end, they wanted stability. The 60s, 70s, and 80s were very puritanical in what was allowed in terms of writing about and showing sex, which I think we imported from America. So we said, ‘It’s high time we started doing something about this’.”

Beyond that, though, he and Hobart had simply spotted a gap in the market. “We knew there was a big audience out there of old colonels who longed for this sort of thing,” Maclean continues. “For a bit of erotica that wasn’t pornography and that had slightly more intelligence behind it than the top-shelf magazines.” Besides, he adds, this was the mid-90s and, while lads mags like Loaded and FHM flirted with the idea, genuine “hardcore pornography was still incredibly difficult to get hold of”.

The Erotic Review, of course, specifically wasn’t porn, even if its editors did take great pleasure in referring to themselves as ‘pornographers’. While it contained arousing fiction and illustrations, it was more about eroticism, desire, and longing than sex itself; readers would be more susceptible to laughter than sexual pleasure while perusing its pages.

This was especially true from 1997 onwards when the Erotic Review was truly born, both in name and spirit. Pelling, previously the assistant editor, took over from Maclean as editor that year, starting from Issue Eight. Naughty illustrative covers started to appear, as did big name writers, like Auberon Waugh and Barry Humphries. The whole thing, though still art-focused, became much more of a ‘romp’. There was more sex; more classifieds; more smutty double entendres.

The drawings became more vulgar — massive cartoon dicks, eye-popping bottoms, a lot of cunnilingus — and began to parody real people or artworks. Covers from 2000 and 2001 include a reimagining of Gustav Klimt’s ‘The Kiss’ where the figures are 69-ing, a drawing in the style of William Hogarth that sees Tony Blair being carried into Westminster by hordes of naked women, and a take on one of Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s portraits, but the subject is about to deep throat an asparagus. Eventually illustrations were swapped for nude photographs; celebrity contributors and interviewees, like Malcom McLaren, Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, Anthony Bourdain, and Nick Cave, began to pop up. And alongside the editor’s letter, a photo appeared of Pelling in her underwear, smiling, notebook in hand. (“I don’t regret it,” Pelling says now. “Worse than that was a naked picture of me in the gents loo at the Chelsea Arts Club.”)

The magazine boomed; Pelling, later described by the Evening Standard as “the grand dame of the erotic arts”, brought it from relative obscurity to a circulation of over 30,000. “Rowan just seized it with both hands and ran with it,” says Lisa Moylett, a literary agent and the owner of The Erotic Review from 2014 to 2017. “She was writing about sex in a way that no one else was; it was fun. And then she got on all these incredible writers. The alumni who used to write for The Erotic Review is like a who’s who of the British literary scene from the 90s through to the present day.”

Pelling and I meet on a dark November evening at the Academy Club. Founded by Auberon Waugh and Andrew Edmunds, whose acclaimed restaurant is downstairs, the club is a relic of old Soho. It’s an intimate place: one small room with yellow panelled walls covered with framed drawings, tables lit by candlelight, and a bar to the side. Tatler once described it as a “dinner party with a till”. It’s strangely exhilarating to be in this space, which Pelling calls ER’s “spiritual home”. She tells me to take note of how small the toilet is, because a couple once had sex up there at an Erotic Review party. “I often felt like I was creating a forum for mayhem,” she says of these events. “They were really wild and almost anything could happen.”

Pelling has, in the past, been reluctant to talk about her time at the Erotic Review. “It still feels too raw,” she shares. “You’re doing something and it’s your everything and it gets taken away.” And she doesn’t want her tenure at its helm to be defined by the salacious press coverage. She did once describe the ethos of the magazine as being about “the natural and beautiful flirtatious relationships between young women and middle-aged men”, but, she says now, that was a marketing ploy to get the Telegraph to write about it.

“‘Sex magazine for older men’ was the header, but that wasn’t what we were setting out to do,” she explains. “I just thought, ‘I know all these writers who people won’t publish’, because [even] the normal language of sex couldn’t be said in a normal magazine. And so I wanted to take those writers and say, ‘If you want to write about a threesome or your lesbian love affair, we’re not going to censor you’.” Importantly, she notes, most of the staff were women, and so truly outlandish male heterosexuality was, to an extent, kept at bay.

Besides, Pelling adds, she actually “always saw [the Erotic Review] as a vehicle for romance; a magazine that a man might give to a woman, or a subscription that two people share”. She says this feeling — of romantic desire — could be felt in the energy of the content, too, largely because a lot of the staff were flirting with each other through their writing: “It would be like, ‘Oh you’ve written that to send a message to someone else [at the magazine]’.”

Pelling says she deliberately steered away from ladette culture and the idea that “women will do anything now”. Unlike teenage boys, who would rather die of shame than have their parents find their sticky copies of Nuts, subscribers to the Erotic Reviewl ikely didn’t feel the need to hide it. As Pelling says, they might have shared it with their partners. It was subversive; at times, abstract; it wasn’t explicitly sexy. “Erotica is about complex relationships that go beyond the frame or book,” says Pelling. “It’s about being teased and frustrated and not being given what we think we want.” Maybe this is why it has survived so long — it always left you wanting more.

In 2001, Pelling and her business partner Gavin Griffiths bought the magazine for just £1, taking on its £30,000 liabilities. But things weren’t going great — circulation, having peaked in 1999, was dwindling; Pelling and the editorial team were going months without pay. Even their side ventures, which included launching a website called Poshtotty.com, couldn’t save them. (As you might have guessed, Poshtotty.com was a soft porn website. Griffiths wrote in his memoir, The Accidental Pornographer, that it featured photos of “posh ladies going to Ascot, eating scones, arranging some flowers, and then taking off their clothes”.)

With subscriptions not bringing in enough money to cover their outgoings — which Maclean suggests might be because “the old men started dying off” — Pelling and Griffiths had to sell up in mid-2003, handing the Erotic Review to its third owner, Felix Dennis.

Although widely known for his company Dennis Publishing and its magazines like Maxim and Stuff, Dennis is arguably most famous for his involvement in Oz, which he worked for in the 1970s, and its obscenity trial. The magazine was tried for ‘conspiracy to corrupt public morals’ after publishing a highly sexualised Rupert Bear parody. (At the time, it was the longest obscenity trial in English history, and John Lennon wrote a song about it.)

He was, then, a fitting buyer for the Erotic Review. Having been the ones to approach him for the sale, Pelling and her editorial staff stayed on after the purchase. But, on the advice of his financial advisor, Dennis sold the title to the publishers of Penthouse UK in 2004, just a year after buying it. Pelling and her entire team quit, mostly because they didn’t want to leave Soho. “We did not mind the moist porn, but we did object to working in Surrey,” Pelling wrote. “Besides, one of the henchmen wore a stripey bow tie, and nobody does that unless they’re a member of the Garrick Club or a children’s party entertainer on day release.”

In the years after, the Erotic Review floundered. It spent two years on the top shelf, as a newly-A5, less elitist, hypersexual magazine aimed at the emerging neoliberal crowd, with Edward Timon as editor-in-chief and Catasha Kin as editor. In 2006, it was bought by Trojan, the publisher of Attitude; editor Jan Birks wanted to make the magazine even more mainstream and “not just for the toffee-nosed or the literary”,she told Press Gazette. As this iteration, it secured space at WH Smith for the first time, before being sold back to Maclean in 2007, who merged it with his relatively newly-launched SEx magazine (essentially an ER rip-off that aimed to be, according to Maclean, a middle ground “somewhere between Prospect and Zoo”). For three years, it was a magazine that resembled the original Erotic Review. In 2009, it was bought by longstanding contributor Copstick, before going online only in 2010, being bought by literary agent Lisa Moylett in 2014.

In 2015 — the era of peak crowdfunding — Moylett, ER’s owner at the time, tried to revive the magazine for a 25th anniversary special. “It was an unmitigated disaster,” she tells me over the phone. “People weren’t engaged with it. The original buyers of the Erotic Review had moved on, and it lacked a young readership. It had been a gentleman’s club prior to that and had been run by the dominatrix that was Rowan Pelling, and, you know, as soon as that sensibility went from the magazine, it lost its purpose. We didn’t have the money to be seen in a very crowded market — because everyone was writing about sex by this time, and writing about it in the same way.” The magazine was eventually bought back again by Maclean in 2017.

The truth is: none of these editions worked because there was no market for the Erotic Review as a lads mag. By the time it was returned to its more arty form, times had changed enough that its boarding school sense of humour had gone out of fashion. And, I suppose, its readers had mostly died off.

There was another problem: the internet.

*

It’s very easy to blame the decline of print media on the internet, and the decline of erotica on pornography — but, well, it’s largely true. The arrival of free adult tube sites in the mid-00s, and especially Pornhub in 2007, essentially put the nail in the coffin of lads mags like Loaded and Nuts. Had the Erotic Review not been in the midst of an identity crisis, traversing the line between top-shelf porno and art magazine, it might have weathered the storm more successfully. ER itself is so far removed from internet porn, which is defined by instant gratification and brazen unambiguity, that there could have remained a market for it.

But, as Maclean wrote in 2005: “The Review was probably too elitist to enjoy much more than a succès d’estime. The concept was sexy, a magazine all about sex that promised an intelligent read, but a lot of people complained that it was too precious and self-conscious ever to be a serious turn-on.”

Even if online porn hadn’t exploded, the Erotic Review as it was couldn’t have survived the changing social and political climate. It would be remiss to not acknowledge its fairly blatant classism. Take this quote from the April 1999 issue, by the magazine’s ‘editor-on-the-loose’ Chris Peachment: “I feel about the North much as I feel about the working classes; a very nice place to come from but you wouldn’t want to live there.” There was also very little diversity when it came to race, sexuality, and gender identity. It was totally London-centric. And, although the magazine was, for a while, run by a mostly female editorial staff, the language used to describe women often left a lot to be desired. It’s impossible to imagine post-MeToo, female employees posing in their underwear for the magazine, wearing bikinis in the office during the summer, or putting up with deskside innuendos from their male colleagues, like, ‘May I rummage through your drawers?’.

Still, it was subversive at the time, even in this limited way. It wrote explicitly about sex but without tabloid-esque objectification, and with a heavy dose of irony. It took risks; it didn’t care about censorship or controversy, and it was, at times, actually arousing. It wrote not just about sex but about desire, romance, and eroticism; it took sex seriously when other publications wouldn’t. And, for its faults, a lot of this has been lost. “It seems to me that a lot of the joyfulness and amusement about sex seems to have gone out of it,” says Maclean. “It seems to look a lot more serious now.”

He’s right — but there are, of course, reasons for this. The sexual landscape right now feels unbearably bleak: violence against women and girls remains prolific, there’s a growing backlash to feminism and trans rights, technology has sterilised the dating world, censorship and financial discrimination against sex workers and sex-positive creators is rife online and off, reproductive rights are being rolled back, and the US has re-elected a president who has been accused of sexual misconduct by at least 26 women.

“We’re in this place where there’s this real tension between all the progress that’s been made in terms of topics of consent and questioning preconceived notions, but the counterweight feels really present as well,” says Saskia Vogel, the relaunched Erotic Review’s deputy editor. “I feel so intensely the awareness of progress and resistance or desire to stick to something more traditional. We’re at a time of great progress but also, like, no, let’s keep it the same.”

It’s essential to write about this sexual landscape, but I think it’s also essential to write about the other side: about the thrill of sexual tension, the expansiveness of desire, and the extremities and mundanities of eroticism. And to take this side of it seriously, too. This is the mission of Lucy Roeber, who got the rights to the Erotic Review from Maclean in 2022, becoming its eighth owner and current editor. “Susan Sontag, in her 1967 essay about ‘The Pornographic Imagination’, made a plea that we take explicit literature seriously and not just put it in a box of pornography,” says Roeber. “I really feel that still hasn’t been taken up all these years later.”

Over the last few months, while writing this story, I’ve been lucky enough to have the Erotic Review archive in my flat. I’ve pored over the magazines, unearthing new discoveries each time. A lot of the time, though, I’ve just stared at the covers (many were drawn by Maclean’s wife, Sarah). They’re a relic of a time that will — and should — never come back, but they’re also relics themselves; objects of totally hedonistic beauty. I’ll be sad to part with them, but it’s nice to know that someone is carrying on the legacy.

“The Erotic Review has had so many ups and downs; the history could not be more chequered,” says Maclean. “We felt at times that we were on this bus that was going nowhere, yet we had to keep going somewhere. But the whole ride has been a fun one.” And what’s the main thing he has come away with? “I suppose a fairly encyclopaedic knowledge about sex,” he concludes, “which I didn’t really want, actually. And it’s interesting, because it hasn’t been terribly useful to me.”