04 Apr 2025

Some Like It HOT 100

by A.J. Daulerio

A few months ago, a friend sent me several boxes of god-knows-what he’d been storing for me in a relative’s basement for almost seven years after I left my Brooklyn apartment. The boxes were expensive to send, and my friend didn’t have enough money to send anything across the country to Los Angeles. It had been so long that I wasn’t even sure what was in there—or if I wanted it at all. The first couple of boxes were full of loose photographs, baseball cards, scratched records, old magazines, old tax returns, diplomas, yearbooks, college essays, and random assembly instructions for old IKEA furniture—things I’d forgotten about that would probably now end up in our garage because where else do you put it? It’s weird that I still can’t bring myself to throw it away, though for fear that I might be overcome by nostalgia in the not-so-distant future, sad that I no longer have my 4th-grade creative writing journal to look at.

But one box in particular was a welcome surprise—it was at least a decade’s worth of clips I’d accumulated while freelancing in the early aughts. Most of them were from various men’s magazines during what I like to call the “boobs and bacon” era. There was a Penthouse profile of a sleazy Vegas concierge who I followed for a weekend; another was a short feature in Page Six Magazine (RIP, I guess), with anonymous strippers at Scores spilling secrets about some of their high-profile clientele (Stephen Dorff was “very effeminate”; Ethan Hawke “brought a book to read.”) There were a couple issues of Playboy. Several copies of the New York Press.

Then there was something I’d completely forgotten about that I contributed to—Maxim’s Hot 100 from 2005. In the early aughts, Maxim was one of the most popular men’s publications on the planet thanks to its smart-assy articles about grooming, gear, sports, and movies and its profiles of up-and-coming young female actresses and musicians who typically posed in provocative outfits on the cover. This formula left the other prestigious, smarter, more traditional men’s magazines (like GQ and Esquire) in the dust.