Not since our fifth issue have we run pictures showing couples actually engaged in the act of sexual intercourse. The law of the land, as interpreted through the Supreme Court, seems clear enough: nothing that has socially redeeming value may be denied the rights of publication and mass distribution and all published materials have this socially redeeming value since they are an expression of certain phases of the culture, social obsessions, so to speak, and an index of the taste of thousands. Despite this, the District Attorney of Kings County, through his minions, seized several thousand copies of our fifth issue, the centerfold of which showed a man and woman lying side by side, his erect penis in the act of penetrating her vagina. The contention of the District Attorney was that this picture was pornography per se and unentitled to the protection of the First Amendment, and the efforts of our attorneys to block the action at the level of the first hearing were unsuccessful. The case went on appeal to the next highest court, but in the meantime the District Attorney carried an injunction enjoining all newsdealers in his borough from carrying further issues of our newspaper since the offending publication indicated that we were likely to print pornography in the future. Because of this, several of our outlets in the other boroughs became panicky and substantially cut down their orders for issues, while all hopes of out-of-town distribution were lost. Our attorneys stated that the action of the District Attorney was illegal and the case, when it got into the higher courts, would certainly be decided in our favor, but in the meantime we were faced with the possibility that the actions of the District Attorney could put us out of business. Sales of our sixth issue were off 75 percent from those of the fifth and of the seventh were even worse, and the clearest projections showed that we would hardly last another month unless the pressure on us was removed.
Our attorneys, then, worked out an agreement with the District Attorney whereby he would withdraw his injunction if we in return would promise not to run offending material in the future. We were not to show couples in the actual act of intercourse, we were not to show manipulation of the genitals and we were not to depict any acts which in the opinion of the District Attorney could be labeled an incitement to riot. Naked bodies, male and female, were permitted, as were pictures of males and females, females and females, or males and males together as long as intercourse, sodomy, or pre-coital play were clearly contraindicated. By agreeing to this compromise, we were able to recover our circulation and eventually paid only a very small fine. Our sales have never returned to the level that they reached at the point of offense, but on the other hand the newspaper has been extraordinarily profitable, and we would clearly be misguided if we were to risk our position for a principle whose finding would come too late to save us.
These are part of the compromises of publishing and I have little guilt or self-recrimination about the action which we took. Nevertheless, now and then, looking at proofs of the pages or the newspaper in actual distribution, I feel a sense of loss overtake me; it is not so much the act of connection that I find missing as a certain expression which seems to come to the faces of all couples engaging in sexual intercourse or even miming it. It is an expression of knowledge and cunning, complex apperception under the fact of connection, and for that which is missing, the pain and knowledge which overtakes even the ugliest and most professionalized model, I feel loss and wish that it could have been different while knowing that this can never happen.