By Ryan Foley, Christian Post Reporter
Many people have condemned Playboy this week for its decision to feature a young gay man dressed in the magazine’s iconic sexy bunny outfit on its most recent digital cover.
Playboy, one of the most recognized pornographic magazines in the world, featured Bretman Rock on the cover of its latest issue. Described as an “iconic influencer and social media personality,” the Filipino American Rock is not the first male to wear the bunny costume or appear on the cover, but he is the first gay man to do so.
The Playboy bunny outfit includes satin bunny ears, a black bowtie, a low-cut leotard-style suit and a bunny tail. Tights and various types of footwear frequently accompany the costume. In Rock’s case, he wore tights in the cover photo while donning tight pants and high-heeled boots for the extended photoshoot.
In several of the additional pictures taken as part of his photoshoot, Rock posed shirtless, without the suit. Rock shared pictures from the photoshoot on his Instagram page, where he has nearly 18 million followers.
The magazine shared Rock’s reaction to appearing on the cover on its Twitter account: “For Playboy to have a male on the cover is a huge deal for the LGBT community, for my brown people community and it’s all so surreal. A total ‘is this even f******g happening right now?’ type of vibe. And I’m so pretty.”
Several Christians criticized Rock’s inclusion on the cover of Playboy, highlighting it as the latest example of a coarse popular culture that celebrates sexual degeneracy in all forms. In his syndicated op-ed published in The Christian Post, Michael Brown cited Rock’s appearance on the cover of Playboy as a crystallization of the magazine’s “moral degeneration” over the course of its nearly 70-year history “from lewdness to perversion.”
Jennifer Roback Morse of the Ruth Institute, a global interfaith coalition committed to upholding and promoting the “ancient Christian teachings about marriage, family, and human sexuality” and ministering to those negatively affected by the sexual revolution, shared her concerns about Rock’s appearance on the cover of Playboy in an interview with CP, saying, “Playboy has gone from degrading women to erasing women. Playboy Mexico had a man who says he’s a woman on the cover last year.”
“Now they have a self-described gay man on the cover. Evidently, men are better at being a woman than a woman is,” she quipped.
“This cover blurs the boundary between male and female,” she added. “I suspect they think they are defying the ‘gender binary’ as the radicals like to call the differences between male and female.”
Morse told CP that the Playboy cover proves that “the Sexual Revolution really is a unified ideology.”
She added: “People initially embrace the ideology because it furthers some specific sexual interest or proclivity of their own. But once they’ve embraced the ideology, many people will hang on to every part of it, even the parts that are superficially unrelated.”
Morse asserted that proponents of the sexual revolution see sex as “a sterile recreational activity with no moral or social consequences.”
