Peppers’ Peck Stirs Bushel of Controversy : Pop music: Guitar magazine is pulled off some shelves because of a cover photo showing Flea and Dave Navarro kissing.

One would expect such magazines as Hustler and High Times to be potential sources of controversy, with their respective sexual and pro-drug stances. But who would anticipate a blowup involving a musicians’ specialty publication?

But that’s what is happening as nearly 100 music stores, newsstands and chain stores around the country are balking at selling the October issue of Guitar magazine because its cover photo shows Red Hot Chili Peppers members Flea and Dave Navarro kissing.

The retailers rejecting the issue include many independent musical instrument stores, but the national distributor that provides Guitar to a number of chain stores says that Wal-Mart and Gelson’s may follow suit. (Representatives for the stores did not return phone calls before the deadline for this edition.)

“When I saw [the photo] it turned my stomach,” says Dave Triller, owner of a store called the Only Guitar Shop in Clifton Park, a bedroom community near Albany, N.Y. “I’m offended by two men kissing each other. Call it old-fashioned, but I’m offended.”

After having the magazine on display for a day last week, during which time he says he received complaints from customers and employees, Triller called Guitar magazine’s headquarters in Port Chester, N.Y., and said that not only would he be returning the copies he had in stock, but that he would not carry future issues.

“If I don’t stand up for this, it will be worse next time,” he says.

Guitar editor in chief H.P. Newquist says that he was surprised when he heard about Triller’s call, but assumed that it was merely an isolated case. Soon, though, he heard from numerous other outlets.

“We thought that this would be neat to do and raise some eyebrows,” Newquist says of the cover photo, which shows Flea and Navarro, both shirtless and tattooed, with their lips pressed together.

Newquist says the shot was chosen because it reflects the Chili Peppers’ convention-challenging image and stands out from the publication’s standard shot of a musician holding a guitar.

“But not a single person in the company, from the publisher to the copy editors, had any idea that people would refuse to sell the magazine on the basis of it being homoerotic or defiling Christian values,” says Newquist, whose magazine has a national circulation of 180,000.

Robert Nowland, program coordinator for the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, says he’s surprised at the resistance, especially since the band members have made it clear they’re not gay.

“They’re not doing anything,” Nowland says of the photo. “It’s not like it’s pornography or anything. This is just men kissing. In other countries it’s not taboo, but here we take it as something sexual, and anything that has remotely to do with the connotation of sex seems to cause an uproar.”

The photo comes as no surprise to anyone who has followed the veteran Los Angeles band, which has posed naked, or nearly so, many times (sometime just with strategically placed socks), including a 1992 Rolling Stone cover. And the band members have kissed in public before, with Navarro and singer Anthony Kiedis doing so in the video for the new single “Warped.”

Flea, in a statement released by Warner Bros. Records, says that the Guitar cover is merely “a couple of good heterosexual friends joking around with their affection for one another.”

Adds Navarro, “I don’t have a problem with playful affection between friends. I only have a problem with those who do.”

So far, a Warner Bros. spokesman says, the objections have not extended to viewers of MTV, which began showing the “Warped” video last week. But, that may not reflect the sentiments of mainstream America.

According to a Gallup poll published in the Sept. 8 Entertainment Weekly, 60% of people surveyed said they would be offended by a TV show featuring two people of the same sex kissing romantically. A 1993 “Roseanne” episode featured a kiss between the star and Mariel Hemingway, who played a lesbian character.

Meanwhile, the number of merchants refusing to carry the Guitar magazine issue is expanding daily, Newquist says.

“It’s not an appropriate thing for a store that bases its business on family,” says Karen Tennent, publications manager of Kent Stanton’s Music in Marrietta, Ga. “We have children coming in the store and we have had complaints from parents. We even had guys in our guitar department appalled that the magazine would put trash on the front cover. One person said it might not be so shocking in New York, but in Georgia, let’s face it, we’re in the South.”

Tennent says that while she objects to men kissing due to her religious beliefs, she would be just as troubled by a photo of a man and a woman in such a “provocative” pose.

For the Only Guitar Shop owner Triller, though, the only issue is what he sees as the promotion of homosexuality.

“My son asked if it would be OK if it was a man and a woman,” he says. “I said, ‘Sure, that’s normal.’ ”