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Publisher Larry Flynt: With misogyny for freedom
Photo:
EVAN HURD PHOTOGRAPHY / Sygma via Getty Images
Larry Flynt was a bastard.
By his own admission, he was "the worst of them all".
And because he rightly suspected the bastard in everyone, men rather than women, he became rich in wealth and influence.
He himself was probably a bastard even as a child, even if from today's perspective he would be seen as having a difficult youth in dysfunctional circumstances.
The child of alcoholic parents, he grew up in rural Kentucky, practiced sodomy with poultry and suffered sexual assault by a pedophile.
But that "didn't traumatize him or anything".
After his first marriage failed and his hated mother-in-law was shot, he was admitted to a psychiatric hospital, where he was treated with electric shocks.
He worked sometimes in agriculture, sometimes in the navy - but nowhere gladly.
He preferred to open a "hardworking man" bar in Dayton, Ohio.
And so that these men wouldn't keep fighting, he offered them entertainment: "hostesses."
The trick was so successful that it soon offered a small chain of strip clubs, for which he was clearly advertising with flyers.
In 1974 Flynt knitted the "Hustler" around this "Hustler Newsletter".
Full of confrontation
He was able to catch up quickly with Bob Guccione's "Penthouse" and Hugh Hefner's "Playboy" by outbidding the competition - in terms of the drastic representations.
Unlike Guccione and Hefner, he did not even try to please the moral guards from the religious or conservative camp.
On the contrary, Flynt went completely on a confrontational course.
In 1975 he bought a series of photos of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis naked by the pool for $ 18,000.
A scandal, a scoop.
And as ambivalent as Flynt was as a person.
On the one hand, he undressed a US icon with an enlightening gesture of revelation, on the other hand, he did it voyeuristically and against her will.
This did not affect the circulation of the magazine, on the contrary.
An example is an issue from June 1978, which is often referred to because it allegedly reveals the misogyny of Flynt - which at that time already owned a number of porn magazines and sex shops as if it were a US version of Beate Uhse gets the point.
The title featured a woman half stuck in a meat grinder.
People tend to forget the context, a quote from Flynt: "We will no longer treat women like meat".
But what he did again, in the decadent, satirical, perverse and windy style of the house.
As early as March 1978, Flynt was shot into paraplegia by a racist assassin after a visit to court - because he had dared to show "interracial" sex between blacks and whites.
From today's perspective, this side is often forgotten because all battles on this front seem to have long been won.
Flynt still fought it, and he won it.
Milestone for freedom of expression
He did spectacular reports on torture, the invasion of Grenada, the murder of John F. Kennedy.
Still, "Hustler" was never "read", as "Playboy" often said with a winking joke, "because of the lyrics."
The »Hustler« was still bought because of its parapornographic qualities.
The battle against bigotry came to the final in 1988 when Flynt was able to win one of his many lawsuits with reference to the first amendment to the constitution.
A milestone in freedom of expression, as celebrated in the Oliver Stone film "Larry Flynt - The Naked Truth" (with Woody Harrelson as Flynt and Courtney Love as Althea Leasure, his great love).
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The publisher and his work: Larry Flynt announcing his candidacy for California governor in 2003
Photo: Steve Grayson / WireImage
The basis of the business remained the explicit representation of explicit acts, even if Flynt repeatedly ventured into the political field and even toied with running as a presidential candidate: "What is really more obscene, sex or war?"
With sex, however, and the advent of cable television, and later the Internet, there was soon no more money to be made.
Most recently, Larry Flynt's empire, which he ran from a black skyscraper in Los Angeles, was bobbing slowly in a slow descent.
At times it seemed like it was only held in the air by the publisher's nimbus, a maverick in a gold wheelchair.
It protruded into the present as a foreign body.
A man who had made millions with a misogynous »male gaze« - and at the same time is adored by parts of the queer movement for having included gay porn in his portfolio at an early stage and of course.
An exploiter on the one hand, a knight for freedom of expression on the other.
An ambivalent character.
A decent bastard.
Larry Flynt died on Wednesday in Los Angeles.
He was 78 years old.
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