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Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist and Rebel by Oscar-winning film-maker Brigitte Berman, shows another side to the multi-millionaire founder and publisher of Playboy magazine.

The film reveals how, despite criticism from feminists, Hefner and the Playboy Foundation funded cases fighting for birth control and abortion rights in the US courts.

In the 1960s the Playboy Corporation franchised out its hugely successful Playboy club. When Hefner discovered that some of the clubs in the southern states of America were practising racial segregation, he immediately bought back the franchises at his own expense and immediately re-integrated them.

Most tellingly, the publisher of the ultimate heterosexual “girlie” mag, was also a staunch supporter of gay rights years before the Stonewall riots set the agenda, the film reveals.

In 1955 Playboy published a science-fiction short story by Charles Beaumont entitled “The Crooked Man”, which had been rejected by Esquire magazine as being too controversial.

The story portrayed a society where gay men were in the majority and where straight people were forced to hide and lie about their sexuality and meet up in seedy underground dives.

After the story was published Hefner received numerous angry letters from some of his readers.

“It prompted mixed reaction at the time because it was not clearly understood,” says Hefner.

“We printed a response in the magazine in which we said that, in addition to thinking it was a strong work of fiction, we thought the message was an important one: that if it's wrong to persecute heterosexuals in a homosexual society, then the reverse was wrong too.”