Gay Today: Viewpoint

SCREW: 30 Years Old!

By Jack Nichols

I'd known Al Goldstein for two months before SCREW's first issue hit Big Apple newsstands. Three decades have since passed. Yesterday an anniversary party invite from the infamous Clown Prince of Porn landed in my mailbox.

A cartoon adorns the invitation showing Goldstein brandishing an automatic weapon and confronting a Hitler-image of sexophobic Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. It thus celebrates SCREW's legendary combativeness when protecting our sexual freedoms. The denizens of Peep Land—topless dancers and porn shop cashiers-- are depicted rallying behind the outrageously foul-mouthed porn publisher.

Mayor Giuliani's "clean up" war on Manhattan's sex shops—happily—has just been dealt a severe blow by a state judge, according to Saturday's New York Times. "Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani," said the Times, "may achieve only a muted victory in his crackdown on sex shops." The Big Apple's sex stores can remain open, ruled the judge, as long as no more than 40 percent of their floor space and inventory is used for adult entertainment videos and paraphernalia.

Prior to SCREW and Al Goldstein, such stores and their hardcore merchandise were unknowns. SCREW was the world's first publisher of newspaper nude frontals, both male and female. It was also the world's first newspaper to publish nude photos of males making love. I was one of those two males. Lige Clarke was the other. When the Roman Catholic magazine Commonweal interviewed Al Goldstein and his first managing editor, it asked, "Why do people need a newspaper like this with photographs of naked bodies in it?"

Goldstein's 1969 reply was matter-of-fact: "Maybe they want to masturbate over it."

Al Goldstein's Big Mouth

Commonweal's editor, Phil Nobile, nearly went cross-eyed in disbelief. "I'm a liberated person," he chided Goldstein, "and you are a liberated person. WE don't need photographs to masturbate over."

Goldstein was nonchalant: "Maybe YOU don't need photographs to masturbate over, but I LOVE TO MASTURBATE OVER PHOTOGRAPHS!"

"What kind of person do you consider yourself," asked the Catholic editor.

"A vulgarian," Goldstein replied quickly.

Then Nobile turned to SCREW's first managing editor---me. "You…" he demanded, "What kind of person are you?"

"Just an old-fashioned Sodomite," I smiled.

As the visibly shaken journalist exited, Goldstein pumped his hand vigorously: "Now listen," he chirped, "if you ever want any photographs to masturbate over, just give me a call."

Not long after that, New York City's "finest" arrested 6 blind news-dealers for hawking SCREW on Manhattan street corners. Goldstein and his then-co-publisher Jim Buckley, were hauled away to jail. Such "obscenity" arrests became so routine that Goldstein and Buckley kept comically-striped jailbird suits in their office closet, on the ready to be properly dressed should police officers approach SCREW's doors

GayToday's staff writer and pioneer cloning rights champion, Randolfe Wicker, whose counterculture button shop on St. Mark's Place became the first store to sell copies of SCREW, wrote an trailblazing article at the request of Goldstein explaining how best to violate New York state's now-defunct sodomy laws. Titling it "Up the ass is a Gas!" Wicker began by saying: "Now listen, sports fans, if you're ever going to be proficient at fucking, you've got to be fucked." It was a dubious but nevertheless interesting premise for SCREW's mostly straight but adventuresome readers to contemplate. And, in more than a few cases, to practice.

The heterosexually-inclined Goldstein, as publisher, was certainly one of the nation's first equal employment opportunity practitioners. I would not be the last of those gay-identified editors whose names adorned the masthead in his porn-filled granddaddy of them all, an otherwise rampantly heterosexual tabloid. And, in the very first issue of SCREW, and for five years thereafter, Lige Clarke and I wrote "Homosexual Citizen" an uncensored weekly column, the very first in any successful straight publication.

That column provided something that Charles Kaiser's Lambda Literary Award Winner, The Gay Metropolis: The Landmark History of Gay Life in America Since World War II (now in paperback) celebrates. Under Eric Stephen Jacob's photograph of Lige Clarke and me Kaiser tells how we were "the first gay authors to write about Stonewall." He points out that "Their article appeared in SCREW magazine."

The Gay Metropolis quotes Lige Clarke and Jack Nichols in the final paragraph of its chapter about the 1960s. It says: "The columnists concluded their report (on Stonewall) with a rousing call to arms:

The revolution in Sheridan Square must step beyond its present boundaries. The homosexual revolution is only a part of a larger revolution sweeping through all segments of society. We hope that "Gay Power" will not become a call for separation, but for sexual integration, and that the young activists will read, study, and make themselves acquainted with all the facts that will help them carry the sexual revolt triumphantly into the councils of the U.S. government, into the anti-homosexual churches, into the offices of anti-homosexual psychiatrists, into the city government, and into the state legislatures which make our manner of love-making a crime. It is time to push to homosexual revolution to its logical conclusion. We must crush tyranny wherever it exists and join forces with those who would assist in the utter destruction of the puritanical, repressive, anti-sexual Establishment.

Those were heady days, in the late 60s and early 70s. Goldstein would begin his serial-marrying of four different women, a behavior pattern he now regrets. "Marriage is death," announced a repetitive cover-line on a full year of SCREWs, featuring a heart with a dagger through it. When Congress passed its anti-same-sex marriage bill, Goldstein complained that those homosexuals have all the luck.

"It appears," he wrote, "that the only thing left to me is to go place a personals sex ad for a gay man." He boasted how, back in the experimental 70s, he'd occasionally "glory-holed with the best of them," but warned that any gay man who replied to his sex ad must understand from the start that his house, his car, his boat, and his other trinket toys will not be any part of the bargain.

Gore Vidal attended SCREW's second anniversary party and gave the newspaper a ringing endorsement in a four-part interview, saying he much preferred it to The New York Times.

Imitators like Hustler—usually lacking SCREW's/ Goldstein's visceral sense of humor—popped onto the scene. Goldstein—at his crankiest whenever scales revealed he was suffering a weight gain—initiated a Manhattan TV cable show called Midnight Blue, a format for sex weirdness running amok. A film about Goldstein— SCREWED—opened this year and played in major U.S. cities.

What many do not know about Al Goldstein and SCREW is that both financed the publication of America's first gay weekly newspaper, GAY (1969-1973). Lige Clarke and I edited it, and American University journalism professor, Dr. Rodger Streitmatter, in his celebrated history of the rise of the gay and lesbian press in America (UNSPEAKABLE, published by Faber & Faber) says it was "America's gay newspaper of record."

When SCREW turned 20, I made it to the anniversary party. My name, after all, is still listed as a contributing editor on its masthead. This listing is a Goldstein tribute to me, really, as I make no SCREW inputs other than monthly gay column I restarted fourteen years after Lige Clarke (1942-1975) and I had left for greener pastures in the book publishing business. My re-start began in 1987 when I sought a place to vomit uncensored onto Ronald Reagan's AIDS-phobic lap. Now, eleven years later, I continue to grind this column out under the heading: "Homosexual Anarchist."

In 1992, when Clinton ran for president, I suggested SCREW's readers support him. "Hillary and Bill," I exulted, "are probably the closest thing we'll ever get to swingers in the White House." The photo that accompanied that column was a composite. The heads of the candidates had been chopped and placed on other bodies. Clinton was blowing Bush while Perot, seated next to Clinton, his arm over Clinton's leg, masturbated. SCREW's typical SCREW photo caption read: "We have a policy at SCREW—no bestiality. But we feel compelled to show you a picture of a donkey blowing an elephant while a weasel jacks off."

And SCREW, whose rotund publisher says he pisses on all alters indiscriminately, is no nicer to me in his headlines and blurbs than he is to any other living institution. When I critiqued my only true nemesis, a pea-brained historian, whose autobiography had revealed he'd tried to heal a herpes problem by walking about during a whole weekend grading papers with his penis in a glass of hot water, the SCREW contents page announced of me that: "Hell Hath No Fury Like a Crazy Old Faggot Scorned."

SCREW is thirty. Happy Birthday SCREW! And high ho, Al. I probably won't make it to the Big Apple this year, but I want you to know that our good ol' days of yore are ne'er forgotten, and that except for GayToday, SCREW is, as its masthead so modestly boasts, "The World's Greatest Newspaper."

Celebrating SCREW's First Birthday, 1969 (left to right) Lige Clarke & Jack Nichols with straight publishers Jim Buckley and Al Goldstein.

It is also the world's most vulgar spread. But, I have no part of that, do I? It was Wicker's "Up the Ass is a Gas" that nearly put Goldstein's ample rear away for a longer stretch than it hoped for, especially if it had had to accommodate some big bully cellmate's horniest moods. But what saved the day in court? Why Lige Clarke and Jack Nichols' "Homo Cit" column, that's what. And why? Because, as Goldstein's lawyers argued, "Homosexual Citizen" had something called "socially redeeming significance."

Yup, Lige and Jack—the queers--helped save SCREW's big ol' bad ass. And Goldstein's too. And in turn, Al Goldstein gave us an opportunistic spot to accumulate sweet mini-fame and fortune.