HUSTLER Creator And First Amendment Icon Larry Flynt Dies At 78
Larry Flynt, a ninth-grade dropout who built a $400 million empire of raunchy publications, strip clubs and “adult” shops around his sexually explicit magazine Hustler, and spent decades battling obscenity and libel charges as a self-promoting champion of freedom of the press, died on Wednesday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 78.
The cause was heart failure, said his brother, Jimmy Flynt.
To a nation in the throes of a sexual revolution in the 1970s, Mr. Flynt — defiant, outrageous, relentless — was at the nexus of a cultural and legal war in America: an unpopular hero to civil libertarians, the Devil incarnate to an unlikely alliance of feminists and morality preachers, a conundrum to judges and juries, and a purveyor of guilty secrets to legions of men slinking off from porn shops or the mailbox with brown paper parcels.
Hustler’s June 1978 cover caught the enigmas of a magazine that was at once salacious, satirical, perverse, decadent, gleefully immoral and hypocritical. It portrayed a woman upside down and half gone into a meat grinder, with a plate of hamburger below. A “seal of approval” noted: “Prime. Last All Meat Issue. Grade ‘A’ Pink.” A caption quoted Mr. Flynt, “We will no longer hang women up like pieces of meat.”
Outrageous. Salesman. Envelope-pusher. Brilliant. Agitator. Filth merchant. Goes too far. Misogynist.
No, I'm not talking about Dave Portnoy. I'm talking about a guy whose company was a spiritual ancestor to Barstool Sports and fought all the way up to the Supreme Court for his right to consitutionally protected satire and won, Larry Flynt.
After opening a bunch of HUSTLER strip joints in the '60s, Flynt created a promotional newsletter that would eventually become HUSTLER magazine in 1974. A year later he hit the motherlode, as it were, when he bought then posted pap pics of a naked Jackie O (and her '70s bush) and his new skin mag went viral, '70s-style (read: it sold a shitload of copies and made the news). Soon enough, HUSTLER became part of the holy triumvirate of masturbatory magazine aids for horny young men along with PLAYBOY and PENTHOUSE. Home videos would follow as would a HUSTLER casino. This son of a Kentucky sharecropper had created a media empire built on the carnal impulses of the American male and business was booming.
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But being in the smut business in the '70s meant dealing with hypocritical holy-rollers imposing their ass-backwards views on others and the resulting court cases. While facing trumped-up obscenity charges in Georgia in 1978, Flynt was shot by a sniper and suffered from paralysis that would confine him to a wheelchair for the rest of his life. (The sniper was caught two years later and was upset at HUSTLER's interracial photos so he shot Flynt; turns out he was a real fucking fruitcake.) But the wheelchair hardly slowed Flynt down and instead became a part of his poon-flashing identity.
Flynt's story became widely known in 1996 thanks to Milos Forman's excellent biopic THE PEOPLE VS. LARRY FLYNT. The great Woody Harrelson was nominated for Best Actor for his performance as Flynt and Forman got a nod for Best Director. And Courtney Love sure as hell deserved one too for her role as Flynt's wife Althea but no way in hell was that era's Academy gonna vote for the rough-around-the-edges rock star. For a Hollywood version of a real-life tale, THE PEOPLE did a great job of simply sticking to the facts and not adding in any extraneous bullshit. The movie also further solidified Flynt as a legendary figure of the late 20th century whether you liked him or not.
Farewell to an absolute icon of the smut game and guy who fought his ass off in many courtrooms so that we can continue to make our jokes and poke our fun today, right here on this website.
Though he'd been relatively quiet lately, Flynt long ago left his permanent mark on American culture. And he left it in pink.
And now, an aside about the aforementioned trio of crank mags...
PLAYBOY was the classy one of the bunch. PENTHOUSE was a little more risqué (the mag did a story and pictorial with Wade Boggs's road goomah, Margo Adams, and she revealed that, per the Chicken Man's request, she would attend games sans panties). And then there was HUSTLER.
In its glossy, touched-up photos, HUSTLER regularly showed more of a woman than the mainstream American public ever had the option of buying before. We're talking full-on spread-eagle box shots. Labias majora and minora. Some Grant Clitsome action. A mediocre detective would only need like one second max before he's like, "yup, that's a pussy".
HUSTLER was raunchy and ribald and made no apologies. Back when people used to buy mags, there was always one college roommate who was a HUSTLER guy (shoutout Bib). That meant each month we'd be able to check out the comedic stylings of "Chester the Molester" and my favorite reader submission section of all time, "Beaver Hunt". BH posted a non-professional picture of the winner's, um, beaver along with her hobbies and interests ("I love to get fucked on a motorcyle while G n R blares in the background"). Flynt also had some spin-off jack mags including BARELY LEGAL (shoutout Miles from SIDEWAYS) and ASIAN FEVER for those with more particular tastes when they're bopping their baloney.