University Daily Kansan
Tuesday, July 10, 1973
3
Sex Ads Underground Newspapers Yield High Ideals to Financial Realities
By GODFREY HODGSON Special In The Washington Post
"I wanted to find some way of connecting the various aspects of this community together," said Art Krumba the other day when asked about the Los Angeles area. May 16, 2004
It was a prescient ambition. The community he was talking about had not yet then emerged as the political movement or the counterculture of the sixties. In May 1964, as Kunkin recalled, "There was very little going on.
"We had come out of the Civil Rights movement. The anti-war movement hadn't started. It was six months before the whole country went to war, and we free the French movement in Berkeley."
KUNKIN WANTED to found a paper where the political Left, old and new, could communicate with those who were trying to liberate people's lives socially and culturally—through new music, new films, new ideas in psychology and religion. And he succeeded. The Free Press was one of the earliest newspapers in America, papers from which new waves of dissent and protest walled up and flowed out over American life throughout the sixties.
But today the most obvious way in which the Free Press is connecting people together is neither new, nor liberated, but coarsely literal.
"institution of sexual intercourse. (No tests required. Come and learn to make them.)"
Wait, the comma after "tested" is at the end of line 2.
The comma after "intercourse" is at the end of line 1.
The comma after "repeat" is at the end of line 3.
The comma after "learn" is at the end of line 4.
Let's re-read the whole thing.
"The institution of sexual intercourse. (No tests required. Come and learn to make them.)"
The comma after "tested" is at the end of line 2.
The comma after "intercourse" is at the end of line 1.
The comma after "repeat" is at the end of line 3.
The comma after "learn" is at the end of line 4.
Wait, looking at the image again:
"The institution of sexual intercourse. (No tests required. Come and learn to make them.)"
The comma after "tested" is at the end of line 2.
The comma after "intercourse" is at the end of line 1.
The comma after "repeat" is at the end of line 3.
The comma after "learn" is at the end of line 4.
Let me look at the text again.
"The institution of sexual intercourse. (No tests required. Come and learn to make them.)"
The comma after "tested" is at the end of line 2.
The comma after "intercourse" is at the end of line 1.
The comma after "repeat" is at the end of line 3.
The comma after "learn" is at the end of line 4.
Wait, the comma after "learn" is at the end of line 4.
Is it a comma after "learn"? Yes.
Okay, I'm ready.
Final check of the text:
"The institution of sexual intercourse. (No tests required. Come and learn to make them.)"
The comma after "tested" is at the end of line 2.
The comma after "intercourse" is at the end of line 1.
The comma after "repeat" is at the end of line 3.
The comma after "learn" is at the end of line 4.
I will format it as Markdown:
"The institution of sexual intercourse. (No tests required. Come and learn to make them.)"
The comma after "tested" is at the end of line 2.
The comma after "intercourse" is at the end of line 1.
The comma after "repeat" is at the end of line 3.
The comma after "learn" is at the end of line 4.
"The Academy of Nude Wrestling invites you to wrestle with a beautiful nude girl." "Eager young sexy girls make your sex life hot and nasty. Private rooms,"
THESE ARE JUST three samples from the eight pages of display advertising for massage parlors, call girl services, brothels and movies in last week's issue of the Free Press.
But a large proportion of the hundreds of ads in the 11 pages of classified in the same month would be about
It is possible, to be charitable, that "Attr W-M-29," who wants to share his "ideas and apt with foxy lady," is interested in love, not money, and still possible, though even more charitable, to imagine that the same may be true of the foxy ladies who reply.
"Give laid; $ tells you where," is perhaps the bluest. "Perfets, fetishists, freaks and their admirers, says another, and their disgusting book in the world."
SOMETIMES the approach is marginally more subtle: "B.F. 23, 5'5", 120, excitingly stimulating, voluptuous, seeks a man who is full of joy and has been fortunate for good fortune as well as his good company.
But, suble or blunt, heterosexual or homosexual, straightforward or perverted, it is plain that a very high proportion of the Free Press' advertising is motivated, not just by sex, but by the marketing of the sex industry.
Others Also Exploit Marketing of Sex
The Berkeley Barb has been the second-most successful and influential of the underground papers in California. It, too, started as the voice of political radicalism and was eventually roughly a year later than the Free Press. Significantly, Max Scherr, the publisher, remembers his first publication date as "the day they stopped the trains" during the war against Nazi Germany demonstrations at the Army Trooping Terminal in Oakland in the spring of 1965.
TODAY THE Barb is as dependent on sex advertising as the Freep. One recent issue, for example, had three pages of classified—called "Adadadaade." This consisted of a handful of ads for pads, wheels and other products, goods and services, and literally hundreds of sex ads, many of them too explicit for the columns of most newspapers.
Under the rubric "massage," they included the following charmingly ingenuous entry: 'My name is Cherry. I don't give up.' 'I need to do better. Call me anytime until 4 a.m.'
The same issue of the Barb also carried $16\frac{1}{2}$ pages of display ads for massage parlors, most of which might well have been as honest as Cherry about the services they are really selling. They included a two-colour, double-page spread for the "grand branch" of a branch of a chain of massage parlors, this and sides, middle executive suburb of Walnut Creek, several miles from Berkeley over the mountain.
It seems probable, in fact, that those underground papers, like the Barb and the Freep, which do carry both radical political and cultural editorial matter, and sex advertising, have developed a split readership. Some readers must hurry impatiently past the Watergate coverage, the reports from Wounded Knee, and the thoughts of Dr. Timothy Leary, to find the phone number of Cherry or a white male young man with cancer who has away the ads before settling down to read about feminism or Allen Giniberg.
IT SEEMS likely that much, and perhaps even almost all, of the sex advertising in both the Free Press and the Barb is aimed not at the net "community" of radicals, but at the straight surrounding world. It means, too, that the economic support for this mass industry has little or nothing to do with the counter-culture, but comes from those groups who have always provided the clientele for prostitution—the misunderstood husbands, the servicemen, the salesmen, an an the traveling salesman—with a proportion of those whose sexual wishes deviate from socially acceptable patterns.
The writer recently served as guesser at the University of California at Berkeley and is now working on a book on America in the 1960s.
KUNKIN IS rightly proud of the reporting in the front half of the paper. It is not uncommon for "establishment" papers to pick up stories from the Free Press.
Reporting Standard Is Still Kept High
In any case, the stories of the Free Press and the Barb are strikingly parallel. Both were founded by men who came out of an older tradition of radicalism: Max Scherr is the author of *The Golden Floor* of revenue from sex ads unintentionally, and are embarrassed by it now, even if they defend it. Both went through rebellions from their staff on this very issue. Both lost control of their papers at one time, but are now back in effective business. (Scherl as publisher, Kunkin as editor). In other ways, too, the stories diverge.
He was on the national committee of the Socialist Party, and then worked on the staff of the Trotsky skites; he belonged to the Johnsonite faction, which included C. L. R. James. He studied at the new School for Social Research in Greenwich Village, and was active in CORE demonstrations in the early days.
But the fact that the two most influential and successful journalistic ventures of the counter-culture have both come to depend on income from commercial sex exploitation is more than an ironic footnote to the social history of the last decade.
KUNKIN WAS told that he looks like William Shakespeare. He looked hurt, and asked whether he looked more like Trolsy. He was kidding, but it is true that even the most famous people calls him a hip capitalist, he likes to think of himself as a political radical.
Then he went out to California and worked as a machinist; he was a skilled tool and die maker, and had no difficulty getting jobs with GM, Ford and North America. In the late fifties he got bored with that, and started a little left-wing print shop. Later he
In 1965, as Scherr told the story, some
customers were raising money to
start an alternating scheme.
"They raised about $40,000, and I was taking about it in the Med, (the Mediterranean, still Scherr's favorite Berkeley coffeehouse) when somebody dared me to start a paper myself. The first 2 weeks I wrote the paper single-handed, and sold 1,200 copies myself. I'm a workhorse."
First Sex Insertion Was Classified Ad
Even before the Barb started, the Free Press had its first sex ad.
The next day Kunkin was in a coffeehouse and the waitress came up and said she was not here. She asked should she answer ? Kunkin said "what, and got on an extension line to hear what"
"WE DIDN'T get around to starting a "classified section for a few months," Kunkin called, "and then a few weeks after we did went an ad from an Italian student saying he had a Sunset Strip pad and wanted a girl to share it."
allowed to do whatever they each liked so long as they didn't hurt each other." At about the same time, a series of Supreme Court decisions made a whole range of sex advertising legal that had been dangerous before. Later, Kunkli did extend his personal code of censorship in one respect; he demanded that cost us about $1,000 a week.
The Supreme Court decisions put Scherl in difficulty, too. Late in 1967 one particular ad for an adult movie house became "very offensive." It was for sado-masochistic movies, and the director U.S. Supreme Court, which found that he had a constitutional right to show his movies. But Gov. Ronald Reagan was attacking them. Protestant ministers were raising money by selling copies of them to radicals. And now radicals too, began to object.
"I was really on the horns of a dilemma," Scherr said. "The ad was pretty gross. But the porn advertisers pay on the mail, so they had to make sure there's a 30 per cent loss." Finally, in 1971, after a long talk about the ethics of censorship with a visiting editor from the London underground paper, It, Scherr and one other critic wrote to him and one other. It cost him $24,180 a year.
"It was a thin line. I began to get calls from men saying, 'Did you know that woman is a prostitute?' I was offended at first. Then, my old lady said, 'Why are you offended?' She reminded me that one of the things we had always been against was censorship."
—Max Scherr
worked as a journalist with a Mexican-
American paper in east Los Angeles.
IT MAY SOUND like a jumbled career, but it could hardly have been better planned if he had been consciously preparing himself to run an underground paper. From his print shop days he had acquired familiarity with the new offset technology, and knew that you could produce 5,000 copies of an eight-page paper for $125.
Barb Was Created On Sudden Impulse
His years on the Left had disillusioned him with the old radical papers, like the Militant, in which culture was subordinated to the state. The military machinist had left him free to spend hours in the Los Angeles coffee houses, acquiring an unnived acquaintanceship with the people who were going to buy, sell and distribute them. And people who advertise in it, now of course,
THE NEXT weekend he called up the people who were running the Renaissance Pleasure Faire (a sort of Disneyland for radicals) and allowed them to talk him into putting out a paper for the fair. With $200 in advertising guaranteed, he sold 200 copies. The lead story was about an abscessity of a film called "Scorpio Rising." And there was also a memoir written by old English type, about Shakespeare having difficulty with the censor, and Sir Walter Raleigh having introduced this new weed people were starting to smoke.
The first issue was the result of a dare, and also of the Left's profound disgruntlement with the Los Angeles Times. Kunkin was on a radio talk show, complaining about the Times's coverage of dissent, "And the guy I was talking to more or less dared me to start a paper. I walked out feeling a little giddy."
Scheris is a melancholy-looking man, with a beard straggling down to his chest like a victorian author. He practiced law in Baltimore for a few years before he went to university. He studied sociology at Berkeley. In the early sixties he was running a bar off the campus called the Steppenwolf; Scheris is proud of the fact that he discovered Hermann Hesse, as he discovered so many other trends, ahead of the herd. He installed a typewriter in the bar, hoping to get some writing done. He was also more intellectual and graduate student so that Scheris was kept too busy selling beer to get to the typewriter.
The Free Press might have been conceived in politics. But it has been involved with the press.
"SADLY," SCHERR told me, "I have a reputation in this town for a money-money story."
guy would say. He described his place, and she thought it sounded fine, then, eventually she plucked up her courage and said, was it right? Yes, he only had one bed." The waitress never even kept the appointment to see the place. "herr's first sex ad had more con-
"I was walking down Telegraph to the Med," he told me, "when I bumped into Richard Thorne, a black friend of mine who had been in the Civil Rights movement in Mississippi. He had been in Parchman (Prison Farm)." Thorne is now said to be into eastern mysticism, and is known as Om.
"ANYWAY HE was turned off to politics, and thought love was the thing. We ought to love one more than he. He asked, would it be better for me to learn the Barb saying they would like to meet some people. I said, did they mean to get it on, only we didn't use that phrase then, and said, well, yes, we'd remember it better, would use the word cederite; that was an inoffensive word."
The sex advertised buildup in both the Barb and the Free Press. By late 1965, Kunkin said, the classified section of the Free press began "to fill up with our stuff" and some restraints." The principle one was a ban on masochistic advertising.
"It was thin line," Scherr said. "I began to get calls from men saying, Did you know that woman is a prostitute?" I was offended at first. Then my old lady said, "Why are you offended? She reminded me that one of the women had always been against censorship."
Within a few weeks the ad had been answered by Jeff Poland, who founded the Sexual Freedom League. People had to take part in an effort that started advertising for partners in the Barb
Patrick, two San Diego businessmen said to an investment in it surely as an investment. According to Kunkin, they "have had brushes with the sex business before," and would like to take the Free Press in another direction.
"I HAD THE idea that people should be
Owners Disturbed By All Critics Say
MEANWHILE, IN the summer of 1969, both Scherr and Kunink had temporarily lost control of their papers. Scherr's staff mutinied. There were several reasons for this. They were being paid in most cases no more than the legal minimum wage, and they suspected that Scherr was getting rich. In response, Scherr made editorial decisions, whereas Scherr believed "a committee of friends is still a committee."
But the question of pornographic ads was also at issue. The Barb's editorial staff walked out and started a rival paper, the Berkeley Tribe. At first the Tribe refused all sex ads, but it was hardly prudish. One of its earliest issues had a picture of several male members of the staff on the cover, in which they were smiling and sex advertising, but, according to Scherr, "They weren't very successful: they had too many inhibitions."
At about the same time, Kunkin had run into severe financial and business problems, partly as a result of $23 million civil suits arising from his having published the names and home addresses of California narcotics agents. His printer refused to go on printing the Free Press. In desperation, he called for a court-ordered called Priority Leasing, whose general manager was a pornography tycoon named Marvin Miller.
SCHERR, LIKE Kunkin, had had his troubles with the law and straight society. He was once arrested for publishing a picture of a rock group having sexual intercourse with a groupie. (The case was dismissed.) But both publishers are currently having more difficulties from the law, including those radicals who are shocked by their dependence on sex advertising, and particularly from feminists.
AFTER A rather complicated series of transactions, in the course of which Kunkin was out of his editorial chair for about a week, the Free Press was sold to Miller's Priority Leasing, to which it was heavily in debt, and Kunkin came back as editor.
On Labor Day, 1971, his staff walked out like the Barb's two years earlier. They had no objection to the massage parlor ads; the one for the pornographic than the Freep. One grievance, ironic in view of Kunkin's horrendous financial problems, was that they thought he had turned into too much of a whore. A few months later his car was particularly hard to forage.
In Berkeley, masseuses have started a union, so that men visiting the delights advertised in the Barb may to suffer the embarrassment of crossing a picket line in Los Angeles, the issue of sexism, including both sex ads and insensitivity to the public. As a result, Press' star reported, Ron Redenour (no relation of his namesake who first tipped off Seymour Hersh to the My Lai massacre; in a blaze of recrimination.
For a while, like Scherz, Kunkin got the paper out on his own. Then, in September 1963, he published an
YOU CAN LEARN TO READ 1500-2000 WORDS PER MINUTE
WITH GOOD COMPREHENSION AND RECALL!
*Plan to take Reading this fall.* Classes meet once a week for a weeks. You should practice the new skills each hour daily. Take time now to save time for the rest of your site!
Monday, 7-10 p.m. p.e. 10-10, 29
Wednesday, 7-16 p.m. p.e. 10-10
Wednesday class can be opened if needed.
"IM THINKING of starting a foundation." he relied.
This argument seems a little dubious, because the underground press probably did its best reporting in the days before the war, and the community was so involved in stories that in effect all the readers became potential reporters. The Free Press' coverage of the Watts Riot in 1985 and the Barb's coverage of the Watergate in 1969, both superb, are examples.
In the changed climate symbolized by the latest Supreme Court rulings on the Free Press and the Barbly to like or depend so heavily on sex advertising?
Kunkin's case is different. The Free Press grosses more than $1 million a year, and a lot of money has passed through Kunkin's bankrupt status. But that he has gone bankrupt for $2.6 million.
"IT IS POSSIBLE," he said, "that without sex ads we might increase that circulation dramatically." He and the Free Press' new owners are planning to test this hypothesis—cautiously—by putting one week, a one-hour sex ads and one without.
In the past, Kunkin has acted as if he thought the Free Press could not afford to ban sex ads. Now, whether because of pressure from feminists, concern for the Court's decisions, or because he has been unlawfully印编ed differently, The Free Press still has a circulation of close to 100,000 according to Kunkin.
FALL SCHEDULE:
Both Kunkin and Scherr are widely suspected by their readers of having become rich men out of hip capitalism and sex advertising. Both naturally deny this. Scherr said, "I take a modest draw, as much as a good office worker makes." What about the money that's left over? He was asked.
Staff Problems Hit Both Papers in '69
ALSO JUNGEN RAPID READERS (ages 11-15) Emphasis is on improved comprehension and efficient study, at 3 or 3 times readiness reading. Note twice a week for 8 weeks, dates and hours are arranged.
FREE SPEED READING MINI LESSON BY APPOINTMENT.
6AM-9AMS
Because they are radicals, both Kunkin and Scherr wary infinitely more about the criticism they are now running into from the left and from feminists than ever they did about the distaste of the "straight world." Both still defend taking sex ads, though both also struck me as uncomfortable about the issue.
Other underground papers have found other ways of doing without the revenue from massage girls, sex instruments and call girls. The Phoenix New Times, for example, has raised $100,000 by a stock issue. The Straight Creek Journal in Denver has sold part of its stock to businessmen who want tax losses, and is happily budgeting to operate at a loss itself for their businesses. Because the culture has had to come to terms with capitalism, hip or otherwise. It seems there are other ways of doing this, besides living, as some underground papers have been done, off the earnings of prostitution.
KUNKIN TALKED about the Supreme Court's decisions that made the advertising possible as having "enabled a publication to be independent of political pressures." Scherr also argues that pornography has enabled the underground press to provide better coverage than it could have done without that source of income.
Hillcrest Shopping Center Ninth and Iowa
Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics