Stephen Rae

I'm a New York City-based journalist, having been an American Elle and British GQ contributing editor; a New York correspondent for The Independent; a founding Men's Health writer; and a frequent contributor to Playboy, Details, and Modern Maturity and its successor, AARP The Magazine, America's largest-circulation publication. In the late 80’s, I wrote for the seminal Spy magazine—one of my pieces was cited in the first paragraph of a front-page Wall Street Journal article, “Now It Can be Told: How Bad It Feels to be Done by Spy”—and the equally influential, if even-shorter-lived, 7 Days, whose editor I followed, in the 90’s, to the New York Times Magazine. There, I’ve written on such subjects as alien abduction, AIDS patients sued for not dying by speculators in their life-insurance policies, and the drug GHB. My humorous essays have run on the Times op-ed page—twice in seven months, a non-staff record then matched only by Henry Kissinger—and in Newsweek and Newsday; and I’ve also reported for Travel & Leisure, New York, and American Vogue and GQ. The pictures on this website launched a second career, in photography. They have been exhibited in New York’s Soho Photo and Umbrella Arts galleries and  PhotoPlace Gallery in Middlebury, Vermont; published in the books “Family” and “Kids (Not Cute)”; and praised by editors and critics at National Geographic, The Wall Street Journal, and BuzzFeed.