Gay Magazines in the 2000s

 As the 2000s went on the decade saw an ever widening split as magazines became more niche market orientated, a trend that had started in the 1990s. As the decade wore on almost all gay magazines had tie ins to porno's and increasingly used stills from films in them, even if the magazines weren't necessarily hardcore. In this way the magazine trend of a sharp split between beefcake and hardcore disappeared. By the end of the decade beefcake magazine Playgirl finally began to drop the pretense of being a women's magazine and acknowledged its gay readership, first by dropping the byline "Entertainment for Women", and by 2010 having a gay editor. As the great recession hit in 2008 gay publishing took a big hit. This combined with the amount of free gay pornography available on the internet sounded the death knell for printed gay magazines as many began to turn into internet only sites with downloadable PDF issues, or just folded altogether.