The Dirtiest Dozen

By Hank Gross

In 1968, Screw hit the newsstands in New York City. At 25 cents a copy, the first printing of 7000 sold out and soon its circulation topped 100,000. Soon Al Goldstein's venture was joined by KISS, COK, CUN, KISS, FAG, LIK, OOH, SEX, ASS, TIT and WOW, and authorities moved, unsuccessfully, to prosecute them for obscenity. A fun romp through the glory days of the sex newspapers. By Dirk Malloy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Hank Gross
• Release date: Feb 16, 2010
• ISBN: 9781465905628

Hank Gross

I have been a writer and editor for over 40 years, beginning in New York City in the 60's, where I freelanced for various magazines and worked as an editor at the National Examiner tabloid newspaper. I also did research and writing for the Reader's Digest (Hell's Angels, Motorcycle Safety) and flew to Louisville to interview (in poetry) Cassius Clay before he won the title and became Ali. His mother was the sweetest woman and made the best potato salad I've ever had. I have had novels and non-fiction published by major publishers such as Ballantine, World, Arbor House, Peter Pauper Press, and William Morrow, as well as many short stories and articles in major national publications, such as "The Boy Who Ate New York" in the National Lampoon, 1991. (This can be read online at my website, http://www.hankgross.com. I have also taught English and writing to students from Asia, Africa, and Latin America. I studied street photography with Randall Warniers at MIT, as well as figure photography. I won first prize in the December 1995 Popular Photography contest and was later profiled in the magazine (August 1997). Recently, I have taken up painting (acrylics), which can be viewed on my website. My email is: [e-mail]

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THE DIRTIEST DOZEN

Sex Newspapers of the 60's

Dirk Malloy

Published by Dirk Malloy at Smashwords 2010

© 1967, 2005, 2010 Dirk Malloy All Rights Reserved

The author has made every effort to insure the accuracy of the contents of this book., which are intended for educational, informational, and entertainment purposes only. If you have reason to believe that anything herein is inaccurate or out of date, please notify the author and corrections will be made in the next edition as soon as possible. Thank you.

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COMING OUT

Throughout the history of erotica, there have been just two types of pornography – hard core and fake. Hard core could only be acquired under the counter and was generally worth the price; fake, which until recently was all that aficionados could purchase on the open market, invariably consisted of grotesque flights of innuendo and suggestion, hopefully calculated to keep the customer’s imagination stimulated while at the same time keeping the publisher from being busted by the ubiquitous forces of censorship.

As would be expected, absurdity abounded. As recently as half a dozen years ago, a writer of pornographic novels in America could never directly indicate that his characters even came equipped with genitals. Pussy could be implied but never mentioned. Pubic hair was nothing more than shrubbery surrounding a hole that wasn’t there. And about as close as one was allowed to come to calling a prick a prick was to refer to it as a bulge in a pair of jockey shorts.

Additional absurdity became apparent the moment the characters tried to do something, for penetration and ejaculation were strictly forbidden. The male could grind his thighs against those of the heroine as much as he pleased, but he could not, under any circumstances, drop in on her cunt – not that it mattered, since she didn’t have one anyway. And of course, heaven help the publisher if, despite the obstacles of having neither a pud nor a place in which to put it, the hero had the temerity to actually shoot his load. It was all one huge no-no, and had been so for as long as anyone in the smut field could remember.

Thus did matters stand but a handful of years ago. The nation which was on the verge of sending men to the moon was still uptight about allowing them to visit a newsstand to buy a straight-from-the-crotch dirty book. Things were so bad that an IBM computer, preparing a list of license plate combinations for state motor vehicle departments, rejected as objectionable, ASS, COK, CUN, DIK, FAG, FUK, LAP, LIK, OOH, SEX, SHT, TIT and WOW (though not, it should be noted, IBM).

And then came the revolution.

It came on a blustery November day in 1968 when the staff of SCREW, America’s first no-holds-barred sex tabloid, personally distributed 7,000 copies of their 12-page Sex Review to scattered newsdealers throughout the five boroughs of New York City. It came on with balls of brass, and it made it plain right from that now-rare first issue, that it intended cutting, once and for all, through the miasma of hypocrisy in which the sex field had perpetually wallowed.

You are on the virgin trip of the first magazine-newspaper that gives sex a break, ran the editorial titled Screw You! and subtitled What We Stand For.

Fantasy runs rampant over reality in the world of sex – witness Playboy and the sexploitation tabloids that breathe down your neck with headlines like Doctor Rapes Virgin During Abortion—Finds Her to be Long Lost Daughter, or Father Roasts Son at Shishkebab Orgy.

We don’t need it. We don’t have to invent stories on a factory turn-out sex machine, and throw in [a couple of innocent kid pictures] in order to fob ourselves off as a conscientious newspaper with redeeming social value. Sex sells, and to justify the price of 25 cents, we should be able to deliver. If you can’t find anything you want in SCREW, at least we can tell you where to look for it. You won’t get screwed if you follow SCREW.

We will uncover the entire world of sex. We’ll be the Consumer Report of sex, testing new products such as dildoes, rubbers, and artificial vaginas.

We’ll review some of the movies you never expected to see reviewed. We’ll try and dignify your search for the hottest books and films by helping you get your money’s worth.

We will lay it on the line, and on the bed, floor—the beachheads of the world—and then lay it again. Every issue will be another coming, and rather than the end at the conclusion of our articles, there will be a climax instead. Psychology and sociology of sex may be slipped into you on occasion (there are other things besides sex—like cannibalism, syphilis, and Chinese Checkers), but it will always be served with the idea, standing out stiff and manifest, that sex is fun . . .

Seven thousand people agreed that it was – or damned well ought to be – and within a few days she entire print run had been sold out. For readers accustomed to lurid cover promises that were invariably welched on in the innards of the ordinary blood and sex newspapers, SCREW was a refreshing surprise. In addition to the editorial, page two of that first issue – which is now a collector’s item – carried a raunchy comic strip by art director Steve Heller and an advice column by The Old Bucker. The balance of the paper was crammed with a potpourri of erotic miscellany: a piece called Diary of a Sex Addict; two reviews of the film Barbarella with a subtitle inquiring: Does Barbarella Suck?; a center-spread photo showing four men and a girl posed naked around the statue of Alice in Wonderland in New York’s Central Park; a stack of horny classified ads; the first SCREW Goes To Market column, which reported on the pros and cons of an artificial vagina; a photo and text coverage of the uncoverage of a group of girls who had stripped to the altogether on the Alan Burke television show; and finally, on page 12, a gay-oriented advice column entitled Homosexual Citizen.

No question about it, the reader got his quarter’s worth and then some. And when SCREW #2 hit the stands – that is, those stands that were willing to carry it – it was immediately obvious that publisher Jim Buckley and executive editor Al Goldstein had launched a going business with unlimited opportunity for expansion.

Well, not quite. For while public interest in the spicy new tabloid mushroomed, so did the interest of the city’s official watchdogs. Though no direct action was taken by the law to enjoin SCREW from doing its thing, everybody involved with the paper could sense that censorship was just around the corner, and that it was only a matter of time before the ax would come crashing down on their heads. So expectant were Buckley and Goldstein of an imminent bust, in fact, that they took to carrying their toothbrushes around with them wherever they went. The second issue’s editorial commented sharply on the growing tenseness of the situation.

No legal action [against us] was taken on the surface, though SCREW was confronted with subtle pressures that poised the publishers and staff of the paper for imminent arrest. The warping of the marketplace almost killed us during the bloody delivery. Eight distributors refused us and we are still forced to deliver this sheet to newsstands ourselves, collect for it, and beg for display space after publishing it . . .

No newsstands outside of Manhattan would handle SCREW, and most in New York City displayed their cowardly middle-class values by refusing SCREW and using their literary knowledge to label this paper you caress