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| Porn To Be Mild | |||||||
| The sexual harassment trial of Screw Magazine publisher Al Goldstein shows just how much has changed since pornographers led the fight for the First Amendment | |||||||
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| Feb. 25 — Any doubt about the passing of the era when pornographers waged principled, meaningful battles against the forces of government censorship, vanished in a grimy courtroom in Brooklyn last week at the trial of a fat little man named Alvin Goldstein, the publisher of Screw magazine. |
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| AS BEAUTIFUL AS THE First Amendment can be when wielded by crusaders for justice or for the rights of the oppressed, it can also be an extremely nasty business watching it get trotted out to protect an old smutmonger whose glory days, such as they were, are more than 30 years in the past. “My magazine has pictures of people f—-ing!” Goldstein thundered from the witness box, employing an odd method of self-defense that made several members of the jury squirm noticeably. (The case is expected to go to the jury early this week.) | |||||||||
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“People call it ‘engaging in sexual intercourse,’ but I say ‘f—-ing!’” Goldstein continued, sounding like a sailor with Tourette’s. And he was just getting started. “I’m proud of it! I’m proud to use words like c—t, p—sy, c—k! Screw magazine is a publication of sexual honesty!” If Goldstein—the passionate defender of the right to be profoundly mediocre—were on trial for obscenity, millions would be lining up to drink his skunky Kool Aid. But Goldstein is not on trial for publishing porn or violating some government definition of good taste. He’s on trial for bending the definition of free speech so far that he believes it also covers his right to make abusive, harassing phone calls to a former secretary who had quit on the spot after being cursed out by Goldstein because he had to wait on line for a rental car she’d booked for him in Los Angeles. “You smelly c—t!” Goldstein said in one of several calls to the former secretary, Jennifer Lozinski. “I’ll take you down! You loathsome turd. You’re a piece of s—t!” Goldstein even devoted his cable-access show “Midnight Blue” to haranguing Lozinski. (Could people really be watching Goldstein’s self-proclaimed “Naked 60 Minutes” to see a fat guy berate ex-employees? In a country where pornography is the biggest consumer entertainment product, Al Goldstein has found a way to make it unprofitable.) The People v. Alvin Goldstein is just a misdemeanor case, but it still teaches us that our country is a long way from the days when the First Amendment’s staunchest defenders were manning the barricades to defend their right to show pubic hair or publish cartoons of the president of the United States having sex with Soviet premiers. Today, obscenity trials are as rare as they were common 40 years ago. Hugh Hefner is a mainstream figure (and practically a spokesman for Viagra). You can see “mature content” on cable channels that would’ve put people in jail in 1970. And even Goldstein’s writing shows up in mainstream publications from time to time. Far from being under attack, pornography has become as American as flag waving, as mainstream as pro wrestling and as readily accessible as the sports magazine swimsuit issues that are its spiritual brethren. It’s telling, after all, that the only controversy Goldstein’s porn magazine can drum up comes from its racist, jingoistic and sadistic editorials, not from the pictorials that any 13-year-old can download from millions of Internet sites. Of course, misdemeanor trials are as rare in New York as a mayor with humility. But this case generated a special buzz after Goldstein published a doctored photo of the head of the Brooklyn District Attorney, Charles J. Hynes, atop the body of a naked woman. And that is what Goldstein and his three lawyers—three lawyers for a misdemeanor?—seized upon. The goal last week was to create such a media circus—with Goldstein as the fat man, bearded lady and the guy who cleans up after the elephants all rolled into one—that few would notice the actual substance of the case. And with Goldstein promising a Fellini-like procession of “character witnesses” such as comedian Gilbert Gottfried, “Munsters” star “Grandpa” Al Lewis, and the porn auteur Ron Jeremy, the media came out in droves. No one left without a notebook or videotape full of enough material to fill an after-hours Cinemax special, not that any of it could be printed in a family newspaper, of course. “You look like you’re a good lay,” he told a female radio reporter on the trial’s first day. “Oh, yeah, how do you know?” she asked, playing along. “Your station manager told me.” | ||||||||
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He next focused his attention on the courtroom sketch artist. “You have nice t—s,” Goldstein said. A second artist seemed to take offense. “That’s my daughter!” she said. “Really?” Goldstein replied. “Well, you have nice t—s, too.” Later, Goldstein pulled aside a New York Times reporter to praise him for a positive article and to offer as a reward a sex act that was once popular in the Biblical city of Sodom. Finally, he got down to the facts in the case. “The DA is a piece of s—t and a scumbag.” And speaking about Judge Daniel Chun, Goldstein reveled in his First Amendment rights to invoke ethnic stereotypes. “I like what he does with lo mein, but he always puts too much starch on my shirts. But I’m going to bring him down, too,” he said of the judge. Is this the same First Amendment that soldiers died in the Ardennes and on Iwo Jima to protect? In the flesh, Al Goldstein is not hard to like. In conversation, he grabs your forearm like a loving grandfather—a grandfather who hands you copies of Screw magazine at the slightest suggestion that you haven’t seen the magazine lately. “I should be an old Jew retired in Century Village,” he said. “But here I am, with a passion for eating pastrami and eating p—-y.” He grabbed my forearm again, pulling me closer in the implied suggestion that I shared his twin culinary passions. (The man is no dummy; I do love a good deli sandwich.) But when I suggested that threatening a judge is no way to win friends and influence juries, he unleashed a tirade, “Have you read the First Amendment, schmuck? This is protected speech. It’s not violence. It’s words.” Later, when the cameras had gone, he pulled me aside and apologized for “going off” on me. “But,” he added conspiratorially, “it makes for great copy, doesn’t it?” It does, but no matter how entertaining Al Goldstein can be, he remains as insatiable for attention as a neurotic comedian who does not know when to turn it off. The press plays along—no one, after all, wants to pull the plug on the quote machine that is providing our life-support—but Goldstein’s is the tired act of a tired man, desperate for cultural significance, desperate for sex and, of course, desperate for a Golden Age that probably never was. After a break in the “trial,” a lawyer not involved in the case grabbed the only available seat next to me. He picked up my copy of Screw and started flipping through it. “Man, I haven’t seen this in years!” he said, gradually becoming disappointed. “When I used to read this, it was like your own personal revolt against mainstream America. Now, it’s just sad.” Inside, Goldstein again played the battle-ready free speech activist rather than sit there as the sketch artists painted the real picture of him as a harassing former boss. Sure, “Grandpa” testified to Goldstein’s peaceable nature, but prosecutor David Cetron fired back by pulling out a recent Goldstein editorial in which he encouraged terrorists to crash jet planes into Hynes’s office. He had only to pull out a copy of the editorial before Goldstein became a One Man March on Washington. “That’s protected speech! That’s words, not actions!” Goldstein screamed. “At long last, have you no shame? Are you going to cut out my tongue next?” His pre-scripted outburst continued even as Judge Chun hustled the jury out of earshot (Newark was a good bet) and ordered the court officers to slap on the cuffs. As Goldstein, 66, was being removed from the courtroom, silent at last, he turned back to the defense table. “Don’t forget my medication,” he said. Gersh Kuntzman is also a columnist for The New York Post. His Web site is at http://www.gersh.tv © 2002 Newsweek, Inc. | ||||||||
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