New York
Sorry for your loss
DrHankMcCoy
posted
1 / 11
Al Goldstein, Pioneering Pornographer, Dies at 77 Al Goldstein, the scabrous publisher whose Screw magazine pushed hard-core pornography into the cultural mainstream, died early Thursday in Brooklyn. He was 77. The cause was believed to be renal failure, said his lawyer, Charles C. DeStefano. Mr. Goldstein did not invent the dirty magazine, but he was the first to present it to a wide audience without the slightest pretense of classiness or subtlety. Sex as depicted in Screw was seldom pretty, romantic or even particularly sexy. It was, primarily, a business, with consumers and suppliers like any other. The manifesto in Screw’s debut issue in 1968 was succinct. “We promise never to ink out a pubic hair or chalk out an organ,” it read. “We will apologize for nothing. We will uncover the entire world of sex. We will be the Consumer Reports of sex.”
Al Goldstein at the offices of Screw magazine in 1981. Eddie Hausner / The New York Times Mr. Goldstein, who lived to shock and offend and was arrested more than a dozen times on obscenity charges, stuck around long enough for social mores and technology to overtake him. By the time his company went bankrupt in 2003, he was a no longer a force in the $10-billion-a-year industry he pioneered. But for better or worse, his influence was undeniable. “He clearly coarsened American sensibilities,” Alan M. Dershowitz, the civil liberties advocate and Mr. Goldstein’s sometime lawyer, said in 2004. “Hefner did it with taste,” Mr. Dershowitz added, referring to Hugh Hefner, the founder and publisher of Playboy, which predated Screw by 15 years. “Goldstein’s contribution is to be utterly tasteless.” Apart from Screw, Mr. Goldstein’s most notorious creation was Al Goldstein himself, a cartoonishly vituperative amalgam of borscht belt comic, free-range social critic and sex-obsessed loser who seemed to embody a defining moment in New York City’s cultural history: the sleaze and decay of Times Square in the 1960s and ‘70s. A bundle of insatiable neuroses and appetites (he once weighed around 350 pounds), Mr. Goldstein used and abused the bully pulpit of his magazine and, later, his late-night public-access cable show, “Midnight Blue,” to curse his countless enemies, among them the Nixon administration, an Italian restaurant that omitted garlic from its spaghetti sauce, himself and, most troubling to his defenders, his own family. “I’m infantile, compulsive, always acting out my fantasies,” he told Playboy in 1974. “There’s nothing I’ll inhibit myself from doing.”
-- Modified on 12/19/2013 8:23:53 AM
Al Goldstein at the offices of Screw magazine in 1981. Eddie Hausner / The New York Times Mr. Goldstein, who lived to shock and offend and was arrested more than a dozen times on obscenity charges, stuck around long enough for social mores and technology to overtake him. By the time his company went bankrupt in 2003, he was a no longer a force in the $10-billion-a-year industry he pioneered. But for better or worse, his influence was undeniable. “He clearly coarsened American sensibilities,” Alan M. Dershowitz, the civil liberties advocate and Mr. Goldstein’s sometime lawyer, said in 2004. “Hefner did it with taste,” Mr. Dershowitz added, referring to Hugh Hefner, the founder and publisher of Playboy, which predated Screw by 15 years. “Goldstein’s contribution is to be utterly tasteless.” Apart from Screw, Mr. Goldstein’s most notorious creation was Al Goldstein himself, a cartoonishly vituperative amalgam of borscht belt comic, free-range social critic and sex-obsessed loser who seemed to embody a defining moment in New York City’s cultural history: the sleaze and decay of Times Square in the 1960s and ‘70s. A bundle of insatiable neuroses and appetites (he once weighed around 350 pounds), Mr. Goldstein used and abused the bully pulpit of his magazine and, later, his late-night public-access cable show, “Midnight Blue,” to curse his countless enemies, among them the Nixon administration, an Italian restaurant that omitted garlic from its spaghetti sauce, himself and, most troubling to his defenders, his own family. “I’m infantile, compulsive, always acting out my fantasies,” he told Playboy in 1974. “There’s nothing I’ll inhibit myself from doing.”
-- Modified on 12/19/2013 8:23:53 AM
I also remember modeling for some advertising in Screw magazine back when, thinking "I sure hope this isn't my 15 minutes of fame..." 
RIP Al G.
RIP Al G.Related Link: MiMi
DrHankMcCoy
posted
7 / 11
I loved the Robin Byrd show. She single-handedly demystified (and - some might argue - de-eroticised) the entire adult industry for insomniacs everywhere.
I also remember modeling for some advertising in Screw magazine back when, thinking "I sure hope this isn't my 15 minutes of fame..."
RIP Al G.
I also remember modeling for some advertising in Screw magazine back when, thinking "I sure hope this isn't my 15 minutes of fame..."
RIP Al G.
