SCREW, founded by Al Goldstein in 1968, remains the most controversial, irreverent pastiche of sex and satire ever committed to newsprint. Its controversial and idealist founder, Al Goldstein, is the subject of Jack Stevenson's new book...
"He had from the very beginning created Screw to be the antithesis of Playboy, casting himself as an obnoxious and ungainly Jew Quasimodo in opposition to Hefner's dandified and pretentious WASP. Hef liked to sip cocktails at the Playboy mansion and bask in the party lights while Al was at home in dingy clubs and theatres where he was busy "overturning every rock and crevice to reveal dark secrets heretofore untold." Hef's glossy parade of perfect air-brushed women symbolised to Goldstein the original fraud; sex as nothing but endless masturbation and one-way fantasy; sex as an activity only the wealthy could afford or were worthy of. The pipe-smoking pajama-clad dilettante had created the concept of the modern woman as something untouchable. A shrine. Screw now set about blasting away at the foundations of this shrine with the leveling power of satire. With his Rabelaisian girth, insatiable appetites and a wont to reveal personal details with a jolting frankness reminiscent of Charles Bukowski, Goldstein would drag sex back into the gutter and celebrate it as a physical act. Playboy was elitist, Screw was fiercely democratic. Goldstein boasted that upon thumbing Screw's back pages any schmuck could get laid within an hour. Playboy was artificial, Screw was all too real. Instead of employing young, perfect-bodied models, the pages of Screw were filled with b&w porn stills, which Al had purchased from a big battered cardboard box as it suited them. These images of "real people" were constantly re-used. "Those women have been in the paper hundreds of times," Al would wax nostalgic many years later, relishing all the money he'd save. "They're so old now, they're in nursing homes."
"Playboy was elitist, Screw was fiercely democratic… Playboy was artificial, Screw was all too real"
Screw, founded by Al Goldstein in 1968, remains the most controversial, irreverent pastiche of sex and satire ever committed to newsprint. Its controversial and idealist founder, Al Goldstein, "an overweight cab driver and welfare recipient" who became "the most outspoken figurehead of America's sexual revolution" is the focus of Jack Stevenson's latest book. Having previously explored the world of filmmaker Lars von Trier, described as a “a brilliant filth scholar” by John Waters and contributor to Another Man, Stevenson turns his attention to Goldstein's tumultuous life, "dedicated to all those who wonder why anyone should give a fuck about the rantings of an apparent madman".
As a publisher, writer, photographer, gadget collector, film buff, life-long atheist, cigar aficionado and family man, his life is riddled with sexual and scandalous turns. Stevenson lays out Goldstein's background: a Jewish upbringing in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, with "a 'psychotic' brother…a 'dumb father' and a 'delusional mother"; the discovery of porn in his father's drawer which led to him amassing the largest collection in high school; his stint in the Army and work as a reporter. Then comes the fascinating part of the Goldstein story: Screw. From its birth and Goldstein's commitment to investigative journalism to its success, demise and the fascinating repercussions (spin-offs, arrests, living on the street, a book, a run for Presidency and films). Stevenson explains, "what disturbed many is that he didn't take sex seriously. This perhaps kept Screw from being a more mainstream porn publication; it didn't treat sex erotically or even pornographically in the traditional sense". Whether you agree or disagree with Goldstein's vision, this story is one not to ignore.
In Screw's glory days, there were countless comparisons between Screw and fellow American sex publication Playboy, and between its founders Goldstein and Hugh Hefner. Goldstein was even interviewed for Playboy in 1974, loaded with "X-rated Goldsteinian witicisms". Here, in an extract from the book, Stevenson gives his take on the two sex-focused publications...
Beneath Contempt and Happy To Be There: The Fighting Life of Porn King Al Goldstein by Jack Stevenson is published by Headpress.
Text by Laura Bradley
