After Dark was an entertainment magazine that covered theatre, cinema, stage plays, ballet, performance art, and various artists, including singers, actors and actresses, and dancers.

[1][2] In the late 1970s Patrick Pacheco assumed the editorship from William Como and strove for a time to make the magazine a more serious critical monthly with a greater emphasis on quality writing, abandoning color printing inside and reducing photos to a few inches square.

This was a reaction to William Como's "eye-candy" thrust, but sales were low and in 1981 Louis Miele replaced Pacheco at the helm and returned the magazine to the full-color format with plenty of skin on show.

)[3] After Dark, founded by its first editor, William Como and Rudolph Orthwine (both of Dance Magazine), covered a wide range of entertainment- or lifestyle-related topics.

The May 1979 issue contained a profile of actor Philip Anglim, who originated the role on Broadway of John Merrick in The Elephant Man, a play by Bernard Pomerance.

Their readers were "Travel Minded": taking a median 3.5 vacations per year with 56.6% owning valid passports; and "Bon Vivant": 81.6% regularly drinking vodka, 81.3% scotch, 70.3% gin, 63.5% champagne.

[11][12] The magazine contained substantial advertising for gay restaurants, accommodations, nightclubs, bathhouses, guides, books, pornographic movies, and other products.

The ad appealed for funds for Reems' defense in two separate lawsuits for his participation in the pornographic films Deep Throat and The Devil in Miss Jones.

Catering to musically inclined blue-haired old ladies and golfers in Hush Puppies, Ballroom Dance Magazine was a recreational journal for the geriatric set.

It was out of the ashes of a periodical devoted to such topics as waltzes, rumbas, and turkey trots that After Dark, an audacious mass-market experiment in gay eroticism, arose like a phoenix in all of its subversive splendor.

"[23] Donald Embinder, a former advertising salesman for After Dark, went on to found Blueboy, an upscale adult magazine which has been called the gay answer to such straight titles as Playboy and Penthouse.

One photograph in that issue that seems to use gratuitous nudity is one of actor Paul Charles, performing the role of "Mark" on Broadway in the musical A Chorus Line.

The illustration is one of several for an article about current events on Broadway, and consists of a narrative text as well as photographs of performers with brief summaries of their productions in the captions of the photos.