AL GOLDSTEIN: CLOWN PRINCE OF PORN

An exciting new movie, The People Vs. Larry Flint, draws attention to the first amendment battle fought decades ago by HUSTLER'S publisher. But a second new film, less known, is currently playing at Manhattan's Cinema Village. Titled Screwed, and directed by Alexander Crawford, it tells the story of Al Goldstein, a pioneer no less brave than Flint, but whose free press battles pre-dated Flint's by more than a half-decade.

Little known to today's gay audiences (he was well known before the rise of the gay press in the early 70's) heterosexually-inclined Goldstein became, in 1968, the brashest straight toast of titillated New York. Yet the first issue of his outrageous publication SCREW, contained something entirely new and revolutionary, an uncensored gay column, Homosexual Citizen. As his first managing editor, Goldstein chose a gay man. His second managing editor was a straight woman. SCREW's editorial offices were always filled with gay people happily working side by side with straights. SCREW, in fact, was the history's first rampantly straight publication to treat homosexuality as a natural phenomenon.

Though Al Goldstein and Larry Flint later became fast friends (Goldstein, a talking head on Flint's Biography on the A&E channel, calls Flint "a hero") there was much, in spite of the extraordinary vulgarity in which both publications--SCREW and HUSTLER--reveled, that set them apart. Goldstein represented Manhattan's joie de vivre, while Flint reflected Ohio. SCREW upstaged and pre-dated HUSTLER's mind-boggling impudence by nearly six years. When Flint initially set HUSTLER afloat, it was to Al Goldstein that he repaired for advice. Goldstein cleverly mixed explicit sex photos, startling humor, and ballsy social critiques.

SCREW had been the first to run pictures placed on newsstands showing two men making love. Goldstein affixed his name proudly with these words: "A man loves a man is the first pictorial representation of actual homosexual love ever permitted the light of day in the United States. We publish it as an example of the love between two people." It was April, 1969, before the Stonewall rebellion in Greenwich Village after which SCREW also published the first gay journalist's rousing "call to arms" following that historic uprising.

After SCREW's first year in business, Al Goldstein determined in 1969 that he had enough cash to bankroll another newspaper, GAY, which became America's first gay weekly and, according to Dr. Rodger Streitmatter, author and a professor of journalism at the American University, "America's gay newspaper of record." GAY, said Dick Leitsch, long-time Executive Director of The New York Mattachine Society, "was the best gay liberation ever." Its contributors--men and women--included many of the liberation movement's foremost strategists and activists.

Al Goldstein kept hands off GAY's editorial policies, though he went into partnership with its gay co-editors and assured GAY was distributed nationwide wherever SCREW had already found sales possible. Except in Manhattan, these locales were mostly in then-new adult book stores that eagerly sold both papers. Over four years later, when the gay editors resigned, their departure was celebrated as the front-page lead headline on The Advocate, which then saw itself as alone in an arena where GAY had been its only major competitor.

Al Goldstein suffered arrests, just as did Larry Flint. When the first issues of SCREW hit the sidewalks of Manhattan, nine blind newsdealers were arrested too. The bold publisher refused to back down. He took big-breasted women in SCREW T-Shirts to hawk his zany newspaper at lunch time on Wall Street. "Get your SCREW," the women shouted. TV news showed Goldstein nearly swamped by the crowds, holding his paper aloft while, in the background, smoke and fire arose too, the work of censors burning a large pile of SCREW's. Within three months SCREW had jumped from an unknown underground paper to sales of 150,000 per week.

When SCREW's issue #9 went on the stands Al Goldstein and his gay managing editor were interviewed by Phil Nobile, editor of Commonweal, one of the foremost Roman Catholic "intellectual" journals. Goldstein's unapologetic humor visibly upset the orthodox investigator. "Why do people need a newspaper like this?" asked Nobile, "with these photos of naked bodies?"

"Maybe they want to masturbate over it," replied a bored Goldstein. Nobile went ashen.

"I'm a liberated person," he told Goldstein, "and you're a liberated person. We DON'T need photographs to masturbate over."

"Maybe YOU don't need photographs to masturbate over, but I LOVE TO MASTURBATE OVER PHOTOGRAPHS!" Goldstein informed him.

Phil Nobile went whiter still. "What kind of person do you consider yourself?" he asked the funny man.

"A vulgarian," came the quick reply. Next, Nobile turned to SCREW's gay managing editor. "And you, what kind of person are you?"

"Just an old-fashioned Sodomite, I suppose," replied the editor.

"Now listen," Goldstein told Nobile, shaking his hand as he left SCREW's offices. "If you ever need photographs to masturbate over, just give me a call."