Porn won: Hustler’s Larry Flynt on his nemesis Charles Keating
When Charles Keating’s family announced this week that the infamous savings and loan swindler had died at 90, it seemed only natural to wonder what America’s No. 1 pornographer had to say. After all, before ripping off defenseless retirees, Keating had made a name for himself as an anti-smut crusader, pursuing Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt with a relentless zeal.
“I normally don’t have anything to say about anybody who has passed on,” Flynt, 71, told me from his Los Angeles home Friday. “He wasn’t a personal enemy. I just remember all the trials and prosecutions I went through in the ‘70s because of him.”
A nice sentiment. With a little prodding, though, Flynt shared some of his feelings about the man he believed was “without a doubt a hypocrite.”
Flynt said an attorney once told him that he saw a screening of “Deep Throat” at Keating’s home, shown under the guise of demonstrating “what kind of trash is available.” Flynt’s assessment: “He enjoyed shocking people. I think he really got off on it.”
Keating, you may recall from his obituaries, was a devout Roman Catholic, and a corporate attorney in Cincinnati when he founded a group called Citizens for Decent Literature, later Citizens for Decency Through Law.
One objective: Ridding Cincinnati of the adult bookstores and X-rated theaters that were corrupting the libidos of good and decent Cincinnatians. Did the campaign work? Sort of. Cincinnati became known for its lack of smut, but only because the smut purveyors decamped across the Ohio River into Kentucky, a short car ride away.
“They couldn’t keep the streets clean but they want to keep our minds pure,” said Flynt. “The one thing I would like to remind people is that the strongest desire we have other than that of survival, is sex. It’s very hard to suppress that appetite.”
In 1977, a year before he was shot and paralyzed by a white supremacist angered by an interracial Hustler photo layout, the Citizens for Decency had a triumph. Flynt was charged with engaging in organized crime and pandering obscenity by selling his porn magazine Hustler in Cincinnati.
The magazine, with a circulation of 2 million and photos that were more sexually explicit than those in soft-core publications like Playboy and Penthouse, wasn’t written, edited or printed in Cincinnati; but it was sold there, so prosecutors filed charges.
A jury convicted Flynt, who faced up to 25 years in prison. He spent less than a week behind bars before winning bail. The case was overturned, and a state court ordered a new trial.
But rather than refile the case, prosecutors in 1985 agreed to drop the charges in exchange for Flynt paying $6,000 in court costs and agreeing not to sue local officials for false arrest and malicious prosecution.
By that time, Keating had left Ohio and purchased Lincoln Savings & Loan, a stodgy Irvine thrift that he would turn into his personal piggy bank, leaving depositors broke and costing taxpayers billions of dollars.
(Keating, incidentally, was not involved in Flynt’s most famous case, though. In 1983, Hustler ran a spoof of a Campari ad campaign that featured celebrities talking, in double entendre, about “my first time.” Hustler depicted the Rev. Jerry Falwell discussing his “first time,” which took place in an outhouse with his mother. Falwell sued Hustler and Flynt for intentional infliction of emotional distress, and Flynt’s 1988 Supreme Court victory turned him into a free speech icon, celebrated in the Milos Forman film “The People vs. Larry Flynt.”)
“Even while he was stealing all that money from those old people up there, he was still trying to prosecute my case,” said Flynt.
And Keating had also brought his anti-smut crusade with him to California; he went after Pacific Bell for allowing access to dial-a-porn messages, and tried to shut down a Mitchell Bros. X-rated cinema house in Orange County, claiming the theater attracted “organized crime and persons who practice sexual deviations such as homosexuals, lesbians, voyeurs, prostitutes, pedophiliacs, sadists, masochists, rapists, etc.”
These days, adult bookstores and X-rated theaters are mostly relics of the past. Magazine circulation is way down. The Internet, of course, has changed how pornography is consumed and who is able to consume it.
I wouldn’t say that’s an unqualified advance. The tension between puritanism and prurience is not necessarily a terrible thing; at the very least, if kids believe porn is illicit, it may keep them from overdosing on sexual imagery. I personally think the mainstreaming of porn has had an unhealthy effect, at the very least, on the self-image of young women.
But it’s not up to the government censors to determine what consenting adults may do or watch.
“As long as there is a fig leaf covering something up,” said Flynt, “someone is going to want to see that fig leaf removed.”
In the end, porn always wins. Even in Cincinatti, Flynt told me, where there are three Hustler brick-and-mortar stores. They sell sex toys, lingerie, videos and, of course, magazines.
Twitter: @robinabcarian
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