Comstockery lives on

Charles Foley

Los Angeles Americans have always regarded sex as a kind of King Kong that must be shackled and caged, lest, in his rampage through the streets, he causes the US empire to crumble lIke any other. Remember Rome! says Ronald Reagan, and countless worthy burghers echo him as they gaze in suspect horror on the rows of glass-fronted newsboxes, each containing its pile of Screw, Pipe and Sly,,' Pussy, Hustler and Skin. And so another war on pornography and sexual licence in general is joined. But it is a war, now, of containment—shades of ,vietriam—a desperate bid to hold back the Hood. Smut has seeped into the most respectable suburbs, slithered from California and New York across the mid-West; the neighbourhood sex shop sits next to the "a-fountain, and the family grocer has his rack of hard-core porn alongside the icecream freezer. Despite their many defeats, the cops and the courts are attempting an energetic come-back in this election year. Some recent doings: In Memphis, Tennessee, Harry Reems, sLtar—as they say—of Deep Throat, has been ,nauled through the courts, found guilty of enospiracy to transport an obscene motion Picture across state lines', and now faces up t° six years in jail and/or a 810,000 fine. s to Wichita, Kansas, the publishers of „crew magazine have been dragged from 'heir lair in New York to face similar charges rMailing 'obscene, lewd, filthy, indecent, 4scivious and vile' material into Kansas— here Screw has just 12 subscribers. They gaee a sentence of five years, plus 85,000 in ques.

rk In San Jose, California, 'sex-oriented' Jsinesses are being outlawed within 1,000 :tet of any residential property. It will thus virtually impossible to open a new sex '0,P in this vast 'bedroom community' k p"lch is almost as populous as nearby San rancisco. 'We mean to stop these little

pockets of joy collecting', an administrator explained.

And so it goes: these are but three random dips in a rather smelly barrel. In towns small and large around the country, similar legal dramas are being enacted. Prim Santa Monica, my own operational headquarters in California, has for three years been trying to remove stands carrying 'sexually offensive' papers from the streets. At times as many as 80 racks have been bodily carted away by the Public Works Department in one day, on the basis of some new ordinance. But back they always come.

The Harry Fteems case is of special interest in this conflict between the puritans and the permissives. Et epitomises much of what has been going on over the years in America, from the days of the great court struggle over Joyce's Ulysses, through the persecution of poor Lenny Bruce, to the present.

Mr Reems, twenty-eight, is not simply a 'porn star'; he is an accomplished young actor who has worked with the New York Theatre Ensemble, Cafe La Mama and other companies. While making Deep Throat, he was working at night, for scant pay, with the National Shakespeare Company in New York. He is intelligent, softspoken—a clean-cut, all-American boy.

One day in January 1972 he spent a few hours making Deep Throat, for which he was paid 8100. Almost three years later, he was arrested by the FBI in New York, extradited to Memphis and put on trial. Reems could have avoided prosecution by pleading guilty to the fatuous charge of transporting obscene material across state lines. That would have allowed the federal prosecutor to ban, bar or snip at will this not-very-interesting little home movie. Linda Lovelace, his co-star, and director Gerald Damiano escaped by turning government witnesses.

But Reems and a few others thought a principle was involved, and refused to kow-tow. Had they known what else was involved, they might have thought twice. After a nine-week long jury trial in Memphis last March, he was left 830,000 in debt and facing probable bills of 8150,000 for appeals. He is out of work and broke. In October, he will be tried again for another role in a quickie porn-flick, The Devil in Miss Jones. He receives not a penny from either production, having signed away all rights at the time of their making.

In his way. Reems has made a little history: he is the first artist or actor ever to be federally prosecuted for his performance. Lenny Bruce was dragged through the courts at a local level. Henry Miller, as director Mike Nichols pointed out at a fund-raising event for Reems, 'was never personally endangered' however many times his books were banned.

The film and theatre people are highly disturbed. A Harry Reems Defense Fund has been formed. It has the support of former Attorney General of the US Ramsey Clark, Gregory Peck, Warren Beatty, Jack Nicholson, Rod McKuen, Stephen Sondheim and a host of other people whom one would not, in ordinary circumstances. expect to associate themselves with porn. They are united not so much by concern for Mr Reems' plight but by loathing of what they call 'the NixonBurger Supreme Court', which is considered not only anti-porn but anti-press and everything else that smacks of liberalism.

And they wonder: Who Next ? 'After all', said Jack Nicholson, 'my film Carnal Knowledge was found to be obscene in Georgia. Under these ground rules, the FBI could come knocking on my door and carry me off for trial.'

Mr Reems, like many another person, film, and periodical in the past, has become a victim of Comstockery, which George Bernard Shaw once described as 'the world's

standing joke at the expense of the United States, confirmation of the Old World's deep-seated conviction that America is a provincial place, a second-rate country town civilisation after all'. The publishers of Screw, Al Goldstein and James Buckley, were likewise punished under this 103-year

old postal obscenity law known as the Comstock Act.

We owe Comstockery to one Anthony Comstock, who oversaw its passage in 1873 and then--acting as unsalaried inspector of the posts—enforced it in person with a crazy zeal. By 1913, Comstock boasted of having convicted nearly 4,000 persons, of whom fifteen had been driven to suicide. With a pistol and a free railway pass in his pocket he went about the land burning 'improper' books by the ton, seizing hundreds of thousands of 'lewd' pictures. He had an especial hatred for the humble condom, and hundreds of doctors who supplied, in book form or by letter, information on birth control felt his wrath. Comstock, posing as a desperate mother who wanted no more children, would write physicians soliciting such information and, when he received it, pounce.

Even today, one can be prosecuted for writing an obscene word on a postcard or in a first-class letter, and up to ten years ago these cases occurred at a rate of fifty or so a month. Like all bluenoses before him, Mr Comstock did not care to define 'obscenity'; it was enough for Government to accuse someone of sending it through the mail. Then it is up to the accused to convince a jury of his innocence.

And here, of course, is the heart of the matter. Neither you. nor I, nor Mrs Mary Whitehouse can tell us exactly what 'pornography' is. Like beauty, it is in the eye of the beholder. We can only say, in the immortal words of Supreme Court Justice Mr Potter Stewart, 'I know it when I see it'.

Oddly enough, it was our own dear Fanny Hill that started much of the trouble. Up until 1966, the courts had ruled obscene material was not protected by First Amendment guarantees of freedom of speech. Porn was simply illegal. But the 1966 trial of Fanny Hill yielded the pass by introdcuing the famous criterion of 'redeeming social value'. What, pray tell. may be judged utterly without this quality ? It wasn't too tough a test. The floodgates of porn were opened.

Since 1970, when President Nixon informed us that 'pornography can corrupt a society and a civilisation', the Supreme Court has tried to heave them shut. The Court is stacked with a legacy of Nixon appointees, from Chief Justice Warren Burger downwards, and in a 1972 ruling it declared that 'obscenity and its distribution' were -squarely outside the reach of the First Amendment'.

There, in all its confusion, the matter rests today. In its messing around with the First Amendment—saying, it protects you, but not him—the Supreme Court has merely made it plain that no-one knows where to draw the line. If the peddlers of Deep Throat are illegal pornographers, is the person who sells Petronius one too? Who decides?

And was it a Memphis jury of nine women and three men, all Southern Baptists, who convicted Harry Reems—or the shade of Richard M. Nixon?