“The artist is someone who makes something called art.”
Marcel Duchamp[1]
Not too long ago, I delivered a Zoom talk in which I detailed how I came to find myself frequently writing about transgressive cartoonists. My friend Malcolm, a visual artist of impeccable credentials but sometimes stodgy mien, commented that he found himself enlightened as to my “fascination with the obscene, the perverse, and the tasteless,” adjectives I would not have come to on my own.
At this time, I was also preparing for a podcast on which I would be discussing the Air Pirates, a band of underground cartoonists who, in 1970, took it upon themselves to further the revolution by creating comic books in which Disney characters conducted themselves in an unDisney-like manner, and which, in the ensuing litigation, Disney’s lawyers termed “perverted,” “obscene,” “cancerous,” and “grotesque.” I was struck not only by the similarities of language between Malcolm and Disney’s counsel but how it seemed to say as much about the beholder as the beheld.
In my Zoom talk, I had mentioned a book which I had known about for 50-years but had never had an inclination to acquire. I decided to pick one up.
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There was a time when pornography pushed as many buttons as uni-sex bathrooms do today.[2]
In the late 1960s, the Puritanical instruct damming America’s attitudes toward the sexual was battered by a wave of changing mores – aided and abetted by some liberating Supreme Court decisions. The “adult” book business was grossing $50 million a year ($465 million today). Erotic periodicals brought in another $30 million and X-rated films $450 million. Porn was considered by some to so threaten the country’s moral fibre and contribute so vastly to its crime rate that, in October 1967, Congress passed a bill, sponsored by rabid anti-vice legislators, creating a commission to document the effect of such filth on the public and recommend ways to stem its “flow.” President Johnson appointed 16 men and two women – academics, attorneys, clergy, jurists, librarians, psychologists, publishers, sociologists – to carry out this mandate.
The commission had a staff of two-dozen and budget of $2 million. It solicited input from over 100 organizations. It invited 55 representatives from law enforcement, the legal profession, government, the arts, and the public at large to testify. And on September 30, 1970, it issued The Presidential Report of the Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, which concluded that no evidence showed that exposing adults to explicit sexual material played a “substantial role in the causation of social or individual harm” and that all restrictions limiting their access to the “perverted,” “obscene,” whatever should be repealed.
By then Richard Nixon was president. Nixon who, it seems fair to say, would not have been on anyone’s Top Ten List of Presidents Likely to Have Sex With a Porn Star, washed his hands of the report – probably with Lysol. He called it “morally bankrupt” and promised to “eliminate smut from our national life.” His Attorney General, John Mitchell, took the position porn should be banned even if no more harmful than a Necco Wafer. The US Senate condemned the report 60-5 – with 34 abstentions; and Charles Keating, founder of the 300-chapter Citizens for Decent Legislature, whom Nixon had appointed to fill the one vacancy to open during his tenure, sued to block its release, claiming it the product of “radical liberals.”[3] Twelve commissioners had voted in favor of the report; five dissented and one abstained. It ran 646 pages, with 245 given over to the dissents.
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Six weeks later, Greenleaf Classics of San Diego released a “Complete Text” of the report in a printing of 100,000 – and promoted it through the mailing of 55,000 brochures.[4]
Unlike the original, Greenleaf’s edition came “ILLUSTRATED.”
Over 500 of these illustrations were in black-and-white, ranging in size from a column inch to an entire page. They included movie stills and ads; book, comic and magazine covers; gag cartoons; Tijuana Bible selections; 17th century oil paintings; 19th century book illustrations; Japanese pillow books; a Picasso sketch; a Planned Parenthood pamphlet; sequential frames from stag films; and lots and lots and lots of photos of people pleasuring each other and themselves, minors as well as adults. There were, in spectacular addition, 24 full-color pages, depicting, often in larger-than-life close-ups, conjoinings of both homo-and hetero-sexual variety. Anal, oral and multi-party behavior was portrayed. Practitioners of bondage and S&M were represented. So were those who enjoyed intimacy with domestic and farm animals.
Some background is in order.
I.
Into the mid-19th century, pornography was easily accessible throughout the US. Massachusetts had been the only colony to have an anti-obscenity law, and Vermont, in 1821, became the first state. Porn was a major source of pleasure for soldiers during the Civil War, a state of affairs to much distress members of the Young Men’s Christian Association, which was battling to save their souls. It particularly upset a New York City grocery clerk named Anthony Comstock who led a lobbying effort to persuade Congress to up the maximum fine for those convicted of sending obscene material through the mail from $500 to $5000 and the maximum prison sentence from one year to ten. He also had himself appointed a Special Agent empowered to enforce this law. During his career, he prosecuted everything from Ovid, to marriage manuals, to anatomy textbooks and had Walt Whitman fired from his job with the federal government for authoring Leaves of Grass. Comstock would claim responsibility for the destruction of 15 tons of books and 4 million pictures, the arrest of 4000 people and the suicide of 15.
When it came to determining the obscene, American courts applied the standard England had arrived at in Queen v. Hicklin (1868): that which “tended to deprave and corrupt the minds of those who are open to such immoral influences.” Under this measure, prosecutors hauled into court nudist magazines, Aubrey Beardsley drawings, and a library’s worth of books including Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Sanctuary, and Studs Lonigan.
Then, in 1957, the Supreme Court decided Roth v. United States. Roth held that while the obscene did not deserve First Amendment protection,[5] the Hicklin standard was constitutionally flawed because it ignored the purpose of the material in question, was concerned with thoughts, not conduct, considered only the minds of the most suggestible among us, and focused on portions of a work, rather than its entirety. The standard became: would an average person, judging by current community standards, find that a work as a whole tended “to excite lustful thoughts” and was “utterly without redeeming social importance.” Roth’s conviction and five-year sentence were upheld, but the country would now be safe for everything from Sexus to Portnoy’s Complaint.
It would also, it turned out, be open to publishers willing to dig a little deeper into English Department rosters for kink-friendly experts to defend their efforts worth. Houses which did could now contract for a text of college term paper level prose – C+ would do – on, say, The Way Lesbians Make Love, The History of Flagellation, or Older Men and Younger Women – to provide a patina of social import for their hired-gun PhDs to lavish praise on and have it “photo-illustrated” so ease its traverse from shelves to trench coat pockets.
II.
Greenleaf had been founded in 1950 by a 29-year-old, married, Catholic ex-serviceman from Chicago named William Hamling. A writer and editor of pulp fiction, he had first come to the attention of federal authorities in 1955, when he became the publisher of Rogue, a Playboy for the dirty finger-nailed, which the Post Office tried unsuccessfully to ban from the mail. Hamling then moved into the ”adult” paperback trade, paying writers $600 to churn out 50,000-word novels, like Sex Gang and Pawn of Lust, whose covers promised racier material than their texts delivered.[6] Within a few years, he had become the leading soft-core publisher in America. (He also, through Regency Books, another of his companies, published straight-but-edgy works by Robert Block, Harlan Ellison and Jim Thompson.)
By 1964, tired of the pay-offs to police and pols doing business in Chicago required, Hamling moved operations to San Diego, accompanied by Earl Kemp, his Editor-in-Chief, a colorful 35-year-old from an Arkansas lumber camp, who had won a Hugo Award for Best Sci-Fi fanzine in 1961. As court decisions appeared to obliterate all efforts at book censorship, soft core gave way to “fuck books,”[7] and Greenleaf’s list came to include titles like Titty Titty Gang Bang, Whips Incorporated, and the gay million-seller Fruit of the Loon. At its peak, it employed 20 editors, 10 interns, and 20 proofreaders. It paid as much $2000 a manuscript and was releasing 50 books a month. The guidelines were clear: a sex scene in every chapter and “eroticism” between. “Never,” Kemp instructed, “let the erection subside.” This business model brought Greenleaf ownership of its own warehouse, mail order business, literary agency, and bookstore – plus a company that sold pre-packaged bags of ice cubes. Hamling owned homes in Palm Springs and La Jolla and Kemp a spread in Ajijic, in Jalisco, Mexico, which the writer Jay A. Gertzman (Bootleggers and Smuthounds, Samuel Roth, Infamous Modernist) characterized as “a South-of-the-border porn Yaddo.”
Greenleaf’s success had enraged the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover, who had taken up Comstock’s sword against the obscene. His agents stepped up the frequency of their unannounced visits and increased their wire taps and mail intercepts. Hamling’s legal bills amounted to well over $500,000 – and his pay-offs increased significantly too.[8] When the commission’s report appeared, Hamling took it as a vindication of his fight for freedom of expression. The way was clear for future D. H. Lawrences and Lenny Bruces. Illustrated was his waved flag and sounded trumpet.
It also got him and Kemp indicted. Their trial lasted two months, and the jury deliberated six days. It did not find Greenleaf’s edition of the report obscene, but ruled the brochure, which had photos but no text, except a condemnation of Nixon, was. The Supreme Court sustained the verdict, five-to-four, with four Nixon appointees in the majority. The trial judge, another Nixon guy, sentenced Hamling to four years in prison and Kemp three. Both were sent to Terminal Island, a minimum security facility in Los Angeles harbor, between Long Beach and San Pedro. Both served three months and a day.
It was, if Kemp is to be believed, not exactly hard time. The prison was co-ed, with prostitutes plentiful among the female residents and pot and coke rampant. He called it “one of the biggest drug and sex parties I had ever been invited to.”
III.
In the NYRB, which sits on my table at the moment of this writing, a review of a biography of Madonna declares that the purpose of art is to make one think. In the same issue, another praises a collection of essays by Hilary Mantel because “…they ask the reader to think differently.” Illustrated is the same.
One is invited to think. One is invited to think differently. (It helps if one can also imagine.) The point of pornography, Kenneth Tynan has written, is orgasm (usually individually obtained) and of particular value to the poor, the unattractive, “the bachelors, arriving alone and short of cash in foreign cities where they don’t speak the language…” There is no reason, he goes on, to distinguish books which may lead to masturbation, from those about food which may lead to eating or those about politics which may lead to voting. Triggering taste buds may cause a hungry individual to shoplift at a bodega; igniting feelings of civic duty lead an overly concerned citizen to assault a city councilperson, but even stimulation to such a degree does not criminalize the work in question.
Commonly, for speech to lose First Amendment protection it must directly threaten to harm someone else. So incitements that present a clear and present physical danger or which defame reputations may be curtailed. But pornography… “‘Pornography is not a thing… it is an individual’s reaction… so nearly infinite as to make a clear, legally viable and constitutional definition impossible,’” as Gretchen Brooke Gould nicely captured it.[9] The fact that it may revolt Anthony Comstock or John Mitchell or Maxwell does not automatically cast it beyond the realm of legitimate discourse.
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And social utility and constitutional construction aside, Illustrated is damn funny.
If there was a Wise Ass Hall of Fame…
Was it not just one giant extended middle finger aimed at the president, Congress, and Supreme Court? Was it not a grand enough detournement to make Situationists cheer, turning the words of the powerful back upon themselves, stripping away veils, exposing truth – as well as penises? Here is what we are talking about, it said. Quit beating – so to speak – around the bush.
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So, “perverted…” “Obscene…” “Tasteless…”
Marcel Duchamp led us into this. Let him walk us off. “(T)aste,” he said, “good or bad – (is) the greatest enemy of art.”
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Bibliographical Note
Books drawn from, sometimes minimally but sufficiently to demonstrate I do not keep my hands at all times in sewage, include Burke. The Pornography Wars: The Past, Present, and Future of America’s Obscene Obsession (Bloomsbury Publishing. 2023); Cabanne. Dialogues With Marcel Duchamp (Da Capo Press. 1987); Daley and Parfrey, eds. Sin-a-Rama: Sleazy Sex Paperbacks of the Sixties. (Feral House. 2016); Hawkins & Zimring. Pornography in a Free Society. (Cambridge University Press. 1991); Levin. Outlaws, Rebels, Freethinkers & Pirates. (Fantagraphics. 2005); Marcus. Lipstick Traces; A Secret History of the Twentieth Century. (Harvard University Press. 1990); Talese. Thy Neighbor’s Wife. (Dell. 1981); and Tynan. The Sound of Two Hands Clapping. (Da Capo Press. 1982).
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[1]. Duchamp didn’t exactly say this. What he said was “Now everyone makes something and those who make things on a canvas with a frame, they’re called artists.” I just tightened it up. And, for reasons that will become apparent, I’d like to quote Duchamp a bit further: “We have created (art) for our sole and unique use; it’s a little like masturbation.”
[2]. If you want numbers, according to a recent study, 39-percent of Americans want people using the bathroom designated for the gender assigned them at birth, whereas, in 1970, 40-percent opposed adults’ free access to the sexually explicit, at least as far as standard usage of penises and vaginas went. Once you got into sado-masochism and bondage, the opposition increased.
[3]. It barely pains me to report that Keating spent four-and-a-half years in prison for financial fraud, Mitchell 19-months for obstructing justice, and Nixon… Well, it’s enough of a sample pool to make one think exposure to a little hard core might be good for everyone.
[4]. Originally priced at $12.50, copies today can sell for a couple hundred bucks. The requested opening bid for the one I bought at eBay was $67.50 and had no takers. I paid $50, and it arrived, accompanied by a “Certificate of Authenticity,” attesting to its being #1970-000003 “from the vaults of the publisher. So, figuring 001 had to be Hambrick’s and 002 Kemp’s, I was proud beyond words.
[5]. The reasoning as to “Why” it wasn’t protected ran basically “Because it wasn’t.” Specifically, the court said that when the First Amendment was enacted, states already prohibited blasphemy and profanity, which, I guess, sounded enough like obscenity, being, you know, “tasteless” and “perverse,” to justify banning it a near two centuries after the amendment came to be.
[6]. Not only were no explicit acts described, no word not approved by Webster could be utilized. At one point, the Greenleaf writer Robert Silverberg has recalled, editorial guidelines tried to prevent the use of “it,” as in “I want it!” or “Do it!”
[7]. In 20 of the next 31 obscenity cases to come before the court, it either reversed the conviction or liberalized the definition or future application. In 1969, in Stanley v. Georgia, it even said adults had the right to read and view whatever they wanted in the privacy of their own home.
[8]. Kemp. “Dickless in San Clemente.” efanzines.com. Random Jottings 08.5 alleges that, whereas Pierre Salinger only requested $20,000 to keep the Kennedy feds from indicting Greenleaf, Abe Fortas demanded $50,000 to keep LBJ off their backs.
[9]. “Obscenity and Pornography” www.scholarworks.unc.edu.