Citizen Flynt

The hustler's new book accuses the president of paying for an illegal abortion, the press of lying down on the job and Ann Coulter of being a "fag hag."

By David Bowman

Jul 8, 2004 | Only in America can a citizen's psychic essence loom as big as a cartoon balloon in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. Look! Here comes the Bill and Monica balloon, with Hillary racing behind! Next is the Arnold Schwarzenegger balloon, groping for clouds as if they were fat tits! And atop that floating wheelchair -- it's Larry Flynt, who has transcended the sewer of pornography to become our greatest protector of free speech!

It all began when Citizen Flynt was born in Magoffin County, Ky., in 1942, to poor white trash parents. Pop Flynt was a drunk, and young Larry and his mom soon fled without him to Indiana when the lad was just 10. When Larry turned 15, he fibbed his way into the Army. The kid's age was discovered and he was discharged after a year. Larry then joined the Navy. He served on the USS Enterprise when it was an aircraft carrier and even met JFK when the president was inspecting America's armada.

Larry split the Navy in 1964. He teamed up with his kid brother, Jimmy, to become Buckeye State burlesque entrepreneurs, opening eight strip joints in Ohio. In the early 1970s, the boys decided to publish a skin mag. The Flynts were not Hugh Hefner wannabes, wearing lounging pajamas and surrounded by beauties wearing bunny ears. The Flynts were salt of the earth. They weren't ashamed to fart in public. They knew how to palm off food stamps for near beer. They could recite truck driver citizen's band poetry of the pussy. The Flynts would call their magazine Hustler and stuff it with cartoons about poop along with photos of big-haired girls, legs akimbo, their vaginas presented like slices of sushi. The magazine was a hit. The boys became millionaires.

Then in 1975, the August issue of Hustler ran black-and-white photos of Jackie Kennedy Onassis strolling on a private beach as naked as if she thought she was Marilyn Monroe. Before these paparazzi photographs, Americans used to ask, "Where were you when you heard JFK had been shot?" Now some began asking, "Where were you when you first saw Jackie's mound of Venus?"

The pages of Hustler were so regularly outrageous that Flynt was always being hauled or hauling himself into court. His first notable adversary was the notorious Catholic/Republican Charles H. Keating, who pulled strings to get Flynt tried on obscenity charges in Cincinnati in 1976. Flynt was found guilty, but the verdict was overturned. (Four years later Keating was convicted of fraud in the great savings and loan scandal of 1989.)

In 1976 Flynt married his fourth wife, Althea -- an eccentric woman who two decades later would be portrayed by Courtney Love in the Milos Forman movie about the hustler's eventful life, "The People vs. Larry Flynt." (His beloved Althea would go to her reward in 1987, after drowning in a bathtub of a possible heroin overdose.) In 1977, under the ecclesiastical influence of President Jimmy Carter's sister Ruth Carter Stapleton, Flynt became "born again," asking the Lamb of God to stable in his pornographer's heart. Flynt even made plans to transform Hustler into a Christian magazine of sorts. But Flynt was gunned down a year later by a notorious white supremacist, Joseph Paul Franklin, who was outraged over a photo shoot in Hustler of a black man enjoying sex with a white woman. Flynt was left permanently paralyzed from the waist down.

Our citizen was no Job. Flynt renounced Jesus. Next, he abandoned the plaintive state of Ohio to move with his dear Althea to the American Babylon of California, installing themselves inside a Mansion of Sin in Bel Air.

In 1983, Flynt was in federal court once again because he refused to disclose his source of surveillance tapes that showed the feds suckering automotive playboy John DeLorean into the cocaine deal that sent him to jail. Flynt was so outraged at the judge's pro-FBI stance, that he appeared in court, in his wheelchair, wearing only a flag as a diaper, his belly flopping over the stars and stripes. Flynt also threw a Sunkist orange at the judge. The same year, Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione's girlfriend Kathy Keeton sued Flynt for libel over a cartoon that suggested her paramour gave her the clap. The case dragged on until it reached the Supreme Court in 1983. Many legal arguments of great weight have been made before that mighty bench, but not even Clarence Darrow ever dared to yell, "Fuck this court! You're nothing but eight assholes and a token cunt!"

Citizen Flynt did.

Flynt also found time to run for president against Ronald Reagan and to be sued by Jerry Falwell, the high priest of the Moral Majority. Falwell was enraged by a cartoon that claimed he lost his virginity as a boy with Mother Falwell inside an outhouse. This case also went to the Supreme Court, and in 1988, the "eight assholes and a token cunt" overlooked Flynt's previous insult, to declare that public figures cannot recover damages of "emotional distress" based on satires. Flynt won.

With sex, lies and Republican hypocrisy in the air, Flynt returned to the spotlight during the Clinton impeachment wars. After Salon exposed the adulterous past of House impeachment czar Henry Hyde, Citizen Flynt offered a million-dollar reward for evidence documenting the sexual indiscretions of any other Washington lawmakers trying to crucify Bill Clinton over trysts with Monica Lewinsky.

Citizens lined up to squeal. The adulterer politician that Flynt nailed was the self-righteous House speaker, Republican Bob Livingston -- heir apparent to Newt Gingrich. Rather than wear a scarlet letter, Livingston resigned and effectively stopped the momentum for Clinton's public hanging.

That same year, Flynt's eldest daughter, Tonya Flynt-Vega, published a memoir to counter her father's new social standing as a First Amendment gladiator, claiming that as a child she'd been sexually abused by Flynt. (Flynt denied this.) Flynt's feminist nemesis Gloria Steinem blurbed Tonya's book: "The power of a father over a child is enormous, and [Tonya] tells us what happens when a daughter is born to a father whose business and obsession is the control and humiliation of women." In her book, Tonya also claimed that she recently came upon Jesus freshly hanging from a cross up in the Catskills. Gloria Steinem had no comment.

Now, in the summer of 2004, Larry Flynt has a memoir in the bookstores called "Sex, Lies & Politics: The Naked Truth." The book begins with several American soldiers selling him topless pictures of Jessica Lynch (taken at Fort Bliss, Texas) for an undisclosed amount of money. Flynt tells how he paid them their 30 pieces of silver, and then put Jessica's photographs away in his drawer forever.

I talked to wheelchair-bound Citizen Flynt by phone. I was not prepared to hear how unintentionally chilling his voice is. It is a raspy, struggling-to-breathe gargle from hell; a drawl that emits from the furthest edge of humanity.

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