(Photo: Fred W. McDarrah/Getty Images)
He was arrested numerous times for obscenity and reviled as the devil incarnate by religious figures and feminists. But when pornographer Al Goldstein died at 77 yesterday in Brooklyn, there was a flurry of tributes to his chutzpah and humor, some from people who knew him in 1968 when Screw, his explicit sex tabloid, debuted. (He also presided nude over a cable tv talk show, “Midnight Blue.”)
Along the way, Goldstein amassed wealth but lost it, sinking into near penury after Screw went bankrupt in 2003. By then, he was long estranged from his son and later separated from his fifth wife. But during his prime, Goldstein fought fiercely for First Amendment rights and flashed a biting wit. He was always entertaining. Just as Times Square has become tame and sanitized these days, New York doesn’t seem so much like “Fun City” without this outsized clown prince of porn. He helped writers and artists and radicals, some of whom remember him here.
Gay Talese, author and former Timesman who wrote about Goldstein in Thy Neighbor’s Wife
Literary freedom comes from the underground. It also comes from smut peddlers like Goldstein who had the effrontery to fight censorship and to extend the frontiers of free expression to elites like the John Updikes and the Joyce Carol Oateses who would not have them in their living rooms.
Joe Kane, who penned Screw‘s “Smut from the Past” column from 1970 through 1988; long time Daily News columnist, current author and publisher of VideoScope Magazine
I thought of Al as the Ralph Kramden of porn — gluttonous, blustery and self-destructive, but also charismatic and entertaining, at least if you weren’t standing emotionally downwind from him. At his best, Al was a Lenny Bruce without restraints (he was even friends with Lenny’s mother Sally Marr) and some of Screw‘s editorials were hilarious in their unfettered butchery. While Screw lost a lot of relevance in later years, it was a fairly fearless pub in its time, featuring interviews with John Lennon and Germaine Greer and other icons of the time and a feisty streetwise underground attitude that transcended mere porn. Al was an integral part of the Fun City profile of the late ’60s and ’70s. As a cultural figure, he was wider than life.
Rex Weiner, former writer for the East Village Other and a founder of The New York Ace
Al wasn’t afraid to put his foot where his mouth was. Al took a bullet — many bullets — for the First Amendment. He was a supporter of and columnist for my underground-ish paper The New York ACE, and we all admired and emulated his chutzpah. But that still didn’t stop me from punching the fat jerk when he fired my girlfriend from her position as editor of Bitch Magazine.
Bob Adelman, civil rights photographer and publisher
He was outrageous. But the odd part of that is that he also wanted acceptance. He was a provocateur who had a great need for approval.
We were social friends and I had dinner with him in New York and visited him in Florida. He had a spread and every room was filled with cigars and sex videos. He was obsessed with clocks and sued Florida Power and Light over outages because he would have to read just the electrical clocks. He had a big FU (middle finger) sculpture facing the intercontinental waterway where boats would go by. He was also into guns.
At Screw, he’d do movie reviews, and when Linda Lovelace came by she gave him a blowjob and he wrote it up. He also had a wonderful sense of humor. In the U.S. Army, he was a photographer and taught [photographer] Bruce Davidson. Goldstein put him on the Shit List in Screw because Davidson didn’t invite him to his opening at MoMA. Bruce wrote back saying, “It’s true that Al taught me everything I know about photography but he didn’t say I taught him everything he knows about sex.”
I think what he was advocating is what everybody is doing now. And he saw a way of making money at it. He gave people permission to do things they had conflicts about. He was high spirited and a lot of fun and was quite wealthy at one time. He had a complicated relationship with the Mob because they controlled [pornographic] newspapers and they got [Screw] out there. Porn was dominated by the underworld at that time.
Steve Kraus, former contributing writer for The East Village Other and for Screw and “Midnight Blue” cable TV show.
He was talented, funny, but violent in his language and very self-indulgent and profane. But I’m sad about this end for him. He had lost everything.
Steve Heller, graphic artist, curator and first art director (at 17) of Screw
I’d say that Al was a good friend. There were major contradictions in his life. He was always insecure, but always assured of his beliefs. He was a radical and a liberal when I knew him. Screw was his statement, a way to be socially revolutionary and politically satiric. Yes, he was a lunatic. Yes, he exploited women and men. But he was not a demigod. He wasn’t evil. He was trapped in that horrid body and made the best of it. He had a vision, went beyond the typical smut monger. He was Hefner with Jewish guilt. Lenny Bruce without the addictions. Mark Twain with filthy language.
Was he a mentor? No. He was an enabler. He enabled me to learn, grow and understand what it meant to take creative chances. He did that in a realm that society called filth. But he made people laugh as well as drool. He sought to take dirt out of the gutter and make it a fact of life. He didn’t try to sanitize it. He felt no limits would be self-containing.
He could be a jerk. But so could we all. He could lie, but he never lied about the fundamental values he had. Ask me to define them, and I can’t. But I know from when I was his friend, that he believed in loyalty, although he had self-fulfilling prophesies about people hating him. He sometimes, maybe often, made people do that. But it was never the only thing.
I’m glad I knew him. Glad I worked on Screw. Am proud that it was a stepping stone to other things. But remember it fondly. Not for the sex, which I rarely got, but for the experiences it gave me when I was in my teens and early twenties.
Aron Kay, yippie pie man and former East Village resident
He was a pioneer of free speech. He didn’t really harm anyone. People had the discretion of deciding whether they wanted to read [Screw] or not. I read it many times but I didn’t buy it. I liberated it. Feminists didn’t like Goldstein but some of them were sexually repressed. I threw a giant spitball at him during a 1973 anarchist conference because I thought he was sexist. But Germaine Greer [feminist author of The Female Eunuch] wrote for Screw, on women’s sexuality. He helped radicals hide from the FBI and he was friends with Abbie Hoffman, good friends.