In this country at the minute there are somewhere in the region of 80 publications which advocate what in the current idiom is called the alternative society.
Detective Chief Inspector George Fenwick, head of Scotland Yard’s Obscene Publications Squad, 13 August 1971
On the morning of 22 June 1971, Detective Sergeant Wright and PC Chamberlain of the Metropolitan Police Obscene Publications Squad arrived at the central London office of two underground newspapers, IT and Nasty Tales, armed with a search warrant and – as IT later reported – ‘an insatiable appetite for all things unusual’. They removed 275 copies of the first issue of Nasty Tales, plus a few ITs and some bootleg albums.
Only one of the editorial staff, Joy Farren, was in the building. Some of her colleagues were at Glastonbury Fayre, a hippy jamboree in the West Country, but most had gone to the Old Bailey to witness the start of what became the longest obscenity trial in British history. Richard Neville, Jim Anderson and Felix Dennis, the editors of Oz magazine, stood in the dock accused of ‘conspiring to produce a magazine containing diverse lewd, indecent and sexually perverted articles, cartoons, drawings and illustrations with intent thereby to debauch and corrupt the morals of children and young persons within the Realm and to arouse and implant in their minds lustful and perverted desires’. The use of a conspiracy charge meant that there was no limit to the fines or prison sentences that Judge Michael Argyle could impose if the three long-haired defendants were convicted.
Neville founded Oz in the early 1960s while he was an undergraduate at the University of New South Wales, but produced only six issues before being prosecuted for obscenity and sentenced to six months’ imprisonment. (The conviction was quashed on appeal.) In 1966 he came to England and resumed publication from his new base in London. Raucous, Rabelaisian and so carelessly psychedelic that the text was sometimes illegible – set in blue on a red background, perhaps, or orange on turquoise – Oz set out to shock the bourgeoisie and succeeded magnificently. The News of the World, not usually averse to a bit of filth, thought it ‘obscene and dirty’; the genteel Fabians of the New Statesman deplored its ‘crude anti-socialist beatnikery’. Ludic eclecticism was the guiding principle: Lenin and flying saucers, LSD and Che Guevara, were all hurled into the mix and dyed bright purple. The young Trotskyist David Widgery, almost the only Oz contributor who was also a committed political activist, tried to explain its appeal to his comrades in the International Socialists: ‘Rather than inform and organise, the early underground papers were out to shriek defiance at the world of parents, school and work and bask in an alternative world of fun and dreams. The underground press didn’t say what you think, but it did somehow express how you feel.’ The disapproval of fuddy-duddies on both Left and Right made it all the more appealing to young rebels without a cause. By 1970, the magazine was selling forty thousand copies per issue.
‘Some of us are feeling old and boring,’ the editors announced in Oz 26, in February 1970. ‘We invite our readers who are under 18 to come and edit the April issue …’ Answering the call, about twenty teenagers descended on Richard Neville’s exotically furnished basement flat in Notting Hill. Charles Shaar Murray, who hitch-hiked from Reading, had already turned eighteen, but ‘there was no way that I was going to ignore an opportunity to meet and work with the glitterati of the metropolitan underground. It seemed like my last chance to escape becoming a civil servant or a librarian.’ As a resident of suburban net-curtain land he was awestruck by the editorial triumvirate: the ‘charmingly louche’ Neville, the camp and ironic Jim Anderson (‘the first out gay person I had ever met’) and Felix Dennis, ‘the freak with the briefcase’, whose pinstripe suit clashed deliciously with his shaggy hair and wildman beard.
Oz 28, which Shaar Murray and his fellow schoolkids put together over the next few weekends, included features on rock music, complaints about teachers and exams, and a few articles about drugs. ‘Surely this is what the authorities should be fighting against with a lot more determination and force – these so-called legal drugs that are so much more dangerous than the illegal soft ones?’ one asked, referring to caffeine and medicines. ‘It is time hysteria was overcome and the situation viewed in the correct perspective. I am not trying to advocate the legalisation of cannabis …’ Brian Leary QC, the prosecuting counsel at the Oz trial, did his dogged best to present this as an incitement to drug-taking. But the main part of his case against the magazine was its attitude to sex – its arousal of ‘lustful and perverted desires’ in young people.
What caused all the fuss? An article by a schoolgirl revealed the not very startling information that some of her classmates had decided to ‘wait for the right man’ before losing their virginity, while others ‘spent weekends fucking in convenient places’. Another contributor, a sixteen-year-old called Anne, complained that society ‘is not free enough to permit man to revert to his natural instincts in public … One may kiss in certain places but only fuck in a few places at certain times. Surely this idea is as pretentious and puritanical as the old forms of censorship?’ The prosecution also took offence at the classified advertising (the one part of the mag that hadn’t been produced by the teenagers) and some of the illustrations – a drawing of lesbian couples embracing, a cartoon of a Medusa who had phalluses instead of hair sprouting from her head. Most appallingly of all, there was a comic strip in which Rupert Bear plunged his erect penis into a naked granny.
The Lady Chatterley case ushered in the permissive Sixties; the Oz case looked like a last desperate attempt by mid-Victorian fogeys to stop that corybantic orgy. With their unkempt hair and fancy dress the editors looked more out of place in a courtroom than the respectable men from Penguin Books had done in 1960, but the Oz trial had many echoes of its predecessor. Once again, what seemed to be on trial was not so much a specific publication as all sexual activity except the missionary position, performed within wedlock and preferably at weekends. The purpose of one classified ad, Brian Leary told the court, was ‘to glorify the art of fellatio … it must have the effect of encouraging people to do that sort of way-out sexual thing’.* (‘I wonder how many of you, members of the jury, had heard of fellatio before you came into this court,’ Judge Argyle said in his summing-up.) When the jazz singer George Melly testified that ‘I don’t think cunnilingus could do actual harm,’ the judge had to seek clarification: ‘For the benefit of those of us who did not have a classical education, what do you mean by this word “cunnilinctus”?’ Taking this as an invitation to be less formal, Melly cheerfully offered a few demotic translations. ‘“Sucking” or “blowing”, your lordship. Or “going down” or “gobbling” is another alternative. Another expression used in my naval days, your lordship, was “yodelling in the canyon”.’ Argyle looked like a man who had just found a dildo in his wig.
Meanwhile, across the river at Lambeth magistrates’ court, lawyers were arguing about masturbation. On 1 April those busy little bluebottles from the Obscene Publications Squad had raided the office of Richard Handyside, a London publisher, and seized the entire print run of The Little Red Schoolbook, the English edition of a manual by two Danish schoolteachers which offered straightforward advice on drugs, alcohol, exams and sex. (‘When boys get sexually excited, their penis goes stiff. This is called having an erection or “getting a hard on”. If a boy rubs his prick it starts feeling good and he reaches what is called an orgasm.’ It then revealed the shocking secret that girls could have orgasms, too.) A former headmistress of Felixstowe College, Miss Elizabeth Manners, gave the Lambeth court her expert evidence on the consequences of self-abuse: ‘It is not true to say that masturbation for girls is harmless, since a girl who has become accustomed to the shallow satisfactions of masturbation may find it very difficult to adjust to complete intercourse. This should be checked, but I believe it to be a fact.’* The Lambeth magistrate believed it as well: he fined Handyside £50 and ordered the pulping of The Little Red Schoolbook.
John Mortimer QC, counsel for Jim Anderson and Felix Dennis, had absented himself from the Oz trial for a day to represent Handyside in court. He returned to the Old Bailey in despondent mood. If the matter-of-fact prose of The Little Red Schoolbook was obscene, what hope was there for the gaudy ribaldry of the Schoolkids Issue, with its naked lesbians and ‘cunnilinctus’? Brian Leary argued that ‘pornography is that which places sensuality in an attractive light’ – a definition that would put Chaucer and Shakespeare, among many others, in the dock. Mervyn Griffith-Jones QC had used exactly the same argument against Lady Chatterley’s Lover: ‘It commends, indeed it sets out to commend, sensuality as a virtue.’ As Penguin Books did in 1960, the Oz editors called expert witnesses to testify to the publication’s moral, literary and artistic value. Even the ‘wives and servants’ remark from the Chatterley case was echoed when Leary advised the jury to disregard the evidence of the disc jockey John Peel: ‘Is John Peel the sort of person you would be happy to see married to your daughter?’ Judge Argyle ordered a glass to be destroyed after learning that Peel – who sipped water from it while in the witness box – had contracted venereal disease a few years earlier.
Although the Oz editors were accused of being obsessed with sex, the obsession was more evident on the other side. Judge Argyle asked Richard Neville about an illustration on page 8: ‘The boy there has got a meat hook in his right hand, hasn’t he?’
Neville: Yes, that’s what it looks like.
Judge: And in his left hand, a rolled copy of your magazine, Oz?
Neville: That’s right.
Judge: In the same position as en erect penis would be if that was his penis?
Neville: Quite honestly, your Lordship, until you just pointed it out, I hadn’t noticed it.
Judge: Oh really?
Neville: Absolutely. I had never thought of comparing holding the magazine with an erection.
Judge: Hadn’t you?
Neville: No, I hadn’t.
Judge: I see. Very well.
Unable to produce a single schoolchild who had been depraved or corrupted by the magazine, the prosecutor subjected every article and drawing to intense critical scrutiny in his search for someone – anyone – who could be said to have suffered from what might otherwise seem to be a victimless crime. A victim was found: Rupert Bear, whose innocent adventures had appeared in the Daily Express for as long as anyone could remember. Three full weeks were spent studying the cartoon montage in which his head had been superimposed onto a comic strip by the underground American artist Robert Crumb. ‘What do you suppose is the effect intended to be of equipping Rupert Bear with such a large-sized organ?’ Leary asked Edward de Bono, one of the defence witnesses. ‘I don’t know enough about bears to know their exact proportions,’ de Bono replied. The barrister persisted: ‘Mr de Bono, why is Rupert Bear equipped with a large organ?’ To which de Bono could only say, ‘What size do you think would be natural?’ The judge felt obliged to intervene, ordering him to answer questions and not ask them. Argyle also warned, for the umpteenth time, that if he heard any laughter from spectators he would clear the public gallery.
Banishing hilarity from a seminar on Rupert Bear’s sex life was never going to be easy. The social psychologist Michael Schofield, author of The Sexual Behaviour of Young People, pointed out to Leary that the cartoon was intended to be humorous. ‘It may not be a very good joke, but I maintain that even the funniest joke in the world would, after you, Mr Leary, had finished with it, not be very funny … The main point about it is that Rupert Bear is behaving in a way one would not expect a little bear to behave.’ Leary pounced. ‘What sort of age would you think Rupert is in your mind; what sort of aged bear?’ Schofield confessed that he wasn’t an expert on bears. ‘You don’t have to be,’ Leary persisted, ‘because he doesn’t change, Rupert, does he?’ Schofield shook his head disbelievingly. ‘I think the question is,’ the judge interjected, ‘what age do you think Rupert is intended to be – a child, adult or what?’ ‘It’s an unreal question,’ Schofield answered. ‘You might as well ask me “How old is Jupiter?”.’ But Leary wouldn’t be deflected. ‘He’s a young bear, isn’t he? He goes to school; that’s right, isn’t it?’ ‘I don’t know whether he went to school or not,’ the psychologist sighed. ‘I’m sorry, but I’m obviously not as well informed as you are about little bears. I’m a psychologist. I’m supposed to look for underlying motives. But it does seem that you’re much more expert than me in reading sex into things that don’t immediately occur to me.’
The meaning of the Rupert Bear montage continued to elude Leary throughout the trial, even though it was patiently and eloquently explained to him by Grace Berger, the mother of the fifteen-year-old boy who had produced the cartoon. ‘It was a joke,’ she said. ‘And the joke was this: to put in print what every child knows, that this little bear has sexual organs. Children today are surrounded by, and cannot escape from, the sexual nature of our society: newspapers which are sold by having advertisements based on sex, and include gossip also based on innuendos about the sexual relationships between people who are not married. This is the world in which our children grow up.’
It sometimes seemed that Judge Argyle and Brian Leary were the last people in Britain not to have noticed what was going on around them. ‘On the island where the subject has long been taboo in polite society, sex has exploded into the national consciousness and national headlines,’ Time magazine had reported in its famous Swinging London issue, in 1963. ‘“Are We Going Sex Crazy?” asks the Daily Herald … The answers vary but one thing is clear: Britain is being bombarded with a barrage of frankness about sex.’ The abolition of theatre censorship in 1968 was instantly exploited by West End revues such as Hair, Kenneth Tynan’s Oh! Calcutta! and The Dirtiest Show in Town, all of which lured punters in with the promise of full-frontal nudity. And by the end of the decade the old broadsheet Daily Herald had become the tabloid Sun and was the property of Rupert Murdoch, whose intentions for the paper were obvious from the front page of his first issue, on 17 November 1969: ‘BEAUTIFUL WOMEN – SUN EXCLUSIVE … THE LOVE MACHINE – SUN EXCLUSIVE.’ A photo of female nipples appeared the next day. ‘Mr Murdoch has not invented sex,’ The Times commented in its review of the new tabloid, ‘but he does show a remarkable enthusiasm for its benefits to circulation.’ As well he might: sex sold. By 1970 the soft-porn magazines Penthouse, Mayfair and Men Only each had a circulation of hundreds of thousands. Lord Longford, that most unworldly of peers, set up an unofficial commission of inquiry into pornography a year later and was horrified by what he found. ‘We imagine that no one who has recently looked round any newsagent’s shop or kiosk would dispute the fact that the magazine world has become sex-oriented to an extent that even a few years ago would have seemed unthinkable. On a main station bookstall in London recently the display of nudes swamped any other publication – and behind the counter stood, in scanty black corset, the month’s Penthouse Pet, autographing erotic photographs of her naked body.’ Even The Times carried a full-page advertisement featuring a naked woman.
No one would dream of putting national newspapers or advertising agencies on trial for corrupting youngsters. But the editors of Oz were long-haired freaks. They had no money. Worse still, they combined sexual frankness with anarchic politics. They were fair game. In his closing speech, Brian Leary suggested to the jury that reading Oz had left a nasty taste in the mouth. ‘Let me seek to analyse what that taste was. It’s the very epitome, is it not, of the permissive society?’ No less a figure than Roy Jenkins, the former Home Secretary, had described the permissive society as a civilised society; yet he wasn’t in the dock. It was as if the editors of Oz were being punished for all the public manifestations of sex in the preceding decade.
This was more than a simple obscenity trial. Geoffrey Robertson, an Australian law student at Oxford who advised the defendants, recalls ‘a paranoia around these proceedings which I was not alone in failing to understand … The judge believed that he was dealing with dangerous criminals.’ Argyle was guarded twenty-four hours a day by four armed officers from Special Branch, as well as two Alsatian dogs and their handlers. By day they lurked vigilantly in the court corridor; at night they moved into a large suite at the Savoy Hotel which had been rented for the judge’s use at public expense. The justification for this absurdly paranoid pantomime was that he had received death threats. It later emerged, however, that they came not from the harmless hippies in the dock but from the wife of Argyle’s own court clerk, a Mrs Blackaller, who busied herself during the trial sending menacing letters (from ‘a friend of Oz’) to the judge, her husband and even herself. A year later she was prosecuted and sent for psychiatric treatment. But she achieved her purpose: the very fact that three hairy hippies stood in a dock specially designed for ruthless gangsters such as the Krays and the Richardsons conveyed the desired message: such men are dangerous.
The paranoia was amplified by the charge of conspiracy – which became the Establishment’s weapon of choice against the counter-culture on both sides of the Atlantic in this most conspiratorial decade, though seldom with much success. A year before the Oz trial, the Yippie leader Abbie Hoffman and the rest of the ‘Chicago 7’ were acquitted of conspiring to riot during the 1968 Democratic convention; a year afterwards an unlikely gang of conspirators known as the ‘Harrisburg 6’ – two Catholic priests and a posse of nuns – were acquitted of conspiring to kidnap Henry Kissinger and blow up the underground heating system in Washington DC. Robert Mardian, the assistant attorney general responsible for the Internal Security Division, charged ‘conspirators’ galore – the Camden 28, the Seattle 7, the VVAW 8 – but lost almost every case. ‘Mardian,’ a colleague said, ‘didn’t know the difference between a kid with a beard and a kid with a bomb.’
In most of these trials, as with Oz, it was difficult to locate any crime that had taken place and impossible to identify a victim who suffered by it. ‘For want of anything more concrete, the abstract charge of conspiracy has often been lodged, that rare and heinous crime of doing nothing more than talking about doing something illicit,’ the novelist Joseph Heller wrote in 1973. ‘What illegal conspiracies have been formed more likely exist in the courtroom between prosecutor, judge and policeman, who draw their paychecks from the same bank account and depend for promotion on the same political superiors.’ For the author of Catch-22, reading the newspapers in the Seventies felt like watching life plagiarise his art:
Throughout the novel there are inquisitions, trials, sneaky undercover investigations, bullying interrogations, and numerous more cruel, unpunished acts of intimidation and persecution by people in positions of power, no matter how small, against others who are decent, innocent and harmless, or whose offences, if committed at all, are trivial.
Much of our national experience in recent years has been characterised by the same.
The English common-law offence of ‘conspiracy to corrupt public morals or outrage public decency’ had much in common with Heller’s definition of Catch-22 itself: ‘unread, unseen, perhaps even nonexistent … a handy edict for overriding all safeguards to individual liberty and safety, the key element in a tricky paradigm of democratic government that allows the law to do legitimately what the law expressly prohibits itself from doing’. It was created in 1663, after a Lord Sidley urinated from a balcony in Covent Garden on the passers-by below: astonished to discover that he had committed no crime, the judiciary hastily invented one. (As Heller wrote in Catch 22: ‘The case against Clevinger was open and shut. The only thing missing was something to charge him with.’) At the end of the nineteenth century it fell into disuse, perhaps because late-Victorian aristocrats were refined enough not to piss on the proles de haut en bas: between 1900 and the founding of Oz the offence was exhumed only once, in 1961, against a man who published a directory of London prostitutes. By 1971, however, it was stomping through London courtrooms like a urine-spattered zombie. Ten days after the start of the Oz trial, the Appeal Court ruled that the magazine’s friendly rival, IT, had conspired to corrupt public morals by publishing gay contact advertisements. Although homosexual acts were now legal, the judges decided, public encouragement of the acts was not.*
Back at the Old Bailey, after retiring for four hours to brood on what they had learned about Oz over the previous six weeks, the jury acquitted the defendants on the conspiracy charge but found them guilty of obscenity and sending an indecent article through the mail. Judge Argyle remanded the unrepentant editors in custody for ‘medical and psychiatric reports’ before he passed sentence.
‘That, in our view, just about puts the matter in the right perspective,’ the Daily Telegraph commented. ‘These people, and others like them, may not be potty in a technical sense, but their state of mind almost certainly requires expert examination.’ They were sent to the hospital wing of Wandsworth jail, and shorn of their shoulder-length hair. ‘Surprise!’ the crew-cut trio chorused when Geoffrey Robertson visited them after their first night in prison. A day later, every national newspaper led with artists’ impressions of the new-look Oz editors, stripped of their hippy manes. ‘It was this ritualistic punishment, more than anything else, that turned the tide of public opinion,’ Neville wrote.
‘There has always been a war between the generations,’ the British politician Tom Driberg said on the eve of the 1960s. ‘It is the one war in which, as I think Cyril Connolly said, everyone changes sides.’ I first met Driberg in 1974 at a party given by the journalist Martin Walker, an exotic long-haired creature who addressed everyone as ‘Sweetie’ and rolled joints in the Guardian newsroom. Driberg, then aged sixty-nine, looked on benignly as Sweetie Walker’s young friends smoked dope and grooved to the Rolling Stones. He prided himself on being a lone exception to Connolly’s rule, but in fact there were plenty of them by the 1970s – and the compulsory shearing of the Oz jailbirds recruited many more. ‘At this breaking point, something happened,’ Geoffrey Robertson wrote. ‘Something very English, really: an unspoken recognition that things had gone too far, that it was time for moderation to reassert itself. At last the forces of reason, notably silent before the trial, began to make themselves heard.’ Dozens of MPs signed early-day motions condemning the judge for consigning the editors to prison for psychiatric reports as if they were Soviet dissidents. The Times columnist Bernard Levin, who had flatly refused to testify for the defence, unloosed a devastating polemic. Colin Welch, the author of the Telegraph’s editorial, was given a passionate public wigging by Lady Hartwell, the proprietor’s wife, for being so beastly to those harmless young hippies. ‘Dreadful,’ she cried. ‘Quite dreadful!’
The men returned to court a week later. Alas for Judge Argyle – who clearly thought them deranged – they were found by psychiatrists to be intelligent, polite and indisputably compos mentis: ‘There are aspects of society that appal them and they edited Oz to show the need for reform.’ The judge carried on regardless, sentencing Neville to fifteen months in jail and Anderson to twelve months. The twenty-five-year-old Dennis received only nine months – because, Argyle explained, ‘you are younger than the other two and very much less intelligent’.*
Bail pending appeal is given only in exceptional cases. On the following day, a Friday, Robertson and the other Oz lawyers rushed off to the High Court to plead that this was just such a case. Mr Justice Griffiths, the vacation judge – it was now August – promised to consider ‘this very difficult matter’ over the weekend and give a decision on Monday morning. When the court reassembled on Monday, a young blonde woman in a denim jacket and jeans emerged from the judge’s entrance and sat down next to John Mortimer QC. ‘Ah, excuse me, but this is counsel’s row,’ Mortimer whispered. ‘The judge wouldn’t like it if he saw you here.’ She smiled: ‘I don’t think Dad would mind.’ Griffiths had apparently spent the weekend listening to his children: under his daughter’s admiring gaze, he granted bail. The Appeal Court quashed the convictions three months later, on the grounds that Argyle’s summing-up had thoroughly misrepresented the defendants’ case and misinterpreted the legal definition of obscenity. There was another consideration that swayed the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Widgery. During the hearing he sent his clerk to Soho to buy £20-worth of porn magazines. Recoiling from what he saw, Widgery wondered why these titles could publish with impunity while the full armoury of the law had been unleashed against the mild mischief of the underground press.
Reginald Maudling, the Home Secretary, was stung by the accusation that the police persecuted hippy journalists but let genuine pornographers off the hook. Documents released recently show that he ordered a secret inquiry. Detective Chief Inspector George Fenwick, head of the Obscene Publications Squad, told Maudling that titles such as Oz and The Little Red Schoolbook must be stamped out as they advocated ‘what in the current idiom is called the alternative society’. As for the allegation that shops in Soho were flouting the obscenity law, ‘I would rather question the assertion that pornography was on “open sale” in Soho or indeed anywhere else in London on a large scale.’
Maudling’s officials felt that this explanation ‘left a good deal to be desired’. The real reason for Fenwick’s reluctance to target Soho, it transpired, was that the vice barons who owned the porn bookshops had him on their weekly payroll – along with Commander Kenneth Drury, the head of the Flying Squad, and Commander Wally Virgo, the man in overall charge of both Fenwick and Drury. There had indeed been a conspiracy to corrupt public morals: more than four hundred bent coppers in London were prosecuted, sacked or (if they were lucky) shoved into early retirement by Sir Robert Mark, the new Metropolitan police commissioner whom Maudling recruited in 1972 to empty this cesspit. Five years after instigating the Oz prosecution, Fenwick himself stood in the dock at the Old Bailey, charged with taking bribes. ‘Thank goodness the Obscene Publications Squad has gone,’ said Mr Justice Mars-Jones, sentencing him to ten years. ‘I fear the damage you have done may be with us for a long time.’
For conservatives, however, the enduring damage was done by the Oz editors and all those ample-girthed Establishment liberals – men such as John Mortimer, George Melly and Roy Jenkins – who espoused the permissive cause. Corrupt police officers could be cashiered, but how could anyone repel the advance of sexual liberalism in Britain, or anywhere else? In the year 2000, just before taking up a job as speechwriter to President George W. Bush, David Frum wrote a book tracing the lineage of modern America’s social problems to the libertines and libertarians of the Seventies. ‘The rebels who sparked the sexual revolution,’ he wrote, ‘promised the country more joy, more delight, more pleasure.’ And what had the country got? Broken families, delinquent children, AIDS and commercialised sexploitation. ‘As so often happens after a revolution, the promised joy, delight and pleasure appear only on hortatory billboards erected by the revolutionary leaders – in this case, the purveyors of jeans, underwear and perfume.’
There is some truth in this, but nothing like the whole truth. Just as Oz’s free-living pranksters unwittingly acted as midwives to the Sun’s page-three girls, so the emancipation of female desire – as advocated by Germaine Greer and others – also enabled its commodification, to the great profit of entrepreneurs whom Greer would not have recognised as her soulmates. As the feminist author Susan Faludi lamented, ‘Madison Avenue and Hollywood and the fashion industry and mass media all saw a marketing opportunity in “women’s lib” and they ran with it.’ But are titillating ads and raunchy blockbusters the only legacies? Has Frum never encountered anyone who still feels delight and pleasure at having thrown off the shackles of needless shame, frustration and duplicity?
Still, at least he’s right about the timing of the revolution. Sexual intercourse may have begun between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles’ first LP, but it was only in the post-coital Seventies that the consequences were felt. Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch was published in 1970, Alex Comfort’s The Joy of Sex in 1972. On 22 January 1973 the justices of the US Supreme Court gave judgment in Roe v. Wade, striking down nearly every anti-abortion statute in the land – though what they upheld was not a woman’s right to choose but her right to privacy. (‘As with the division over Vietnam, the country will be healthier with that division ended,’ the New York Times commented, little guessing that the abortion wars would still be raging on more than three decades later.) Last Tango in Paris and Deep Throat, whose sexual explicitness would have been unthinkable only a few years earlier, played to packed houses throughout 1973.
During the supposedly swinging Sixties the marriage rate in America actually rose; after 1972 it plummeted. There were 480,000 divorces in the United States in 1965, more than a million in 1975. ‘If it comes down to your marriage or your identity,’ Nena O’Neill and George O’Neill advised in their book Open Marriage (1972), ‘we think your identity is more important.’ In a feature for New York magazine that year, a former housewife named Jennifer Skolnick mused on why she had bolted from the Baltimore suburbs – and from her husband and four children – to seek self-fulfilment in Manhattan. ‘Was I spoiled because I was taking so many other people – like my husband and children, just to pick some at random – over the hill with me in my decisions? Or was I moral in the deepest sense because I would no longer in the name of sacrifice to others – like my husband and children, just to pick some at random – let slip away the one life I was given as wholly mine to do something with?’
Some men adjusted, however grumpily, to the new order. In others, however, resentment at women’s demands for absolute sovereignty over their bodies and their identities curdled into sexual paranoia. ‘Pregnancy symbolises proof of male potency,’ a psychoanalyst commented after the Supreme Court’s abortion ruling in January 1973. ‘If men grant women the right to dispose of the proof, we men feel terribly threatened lest women rob us of our masculinity.’ Bad enough for a traditional suburban breadwinner, but far worse for those husbands who hadn’t even noticed the approaching storm clouds of the sexual revolution because they had been in Indochina at the time. A day after the verdict in Roe v. Wade, Henry Kissinger and the North Vietnamese negotiator Le Duc Tho signed an agreement under which the government in Hanoi agreed to release all American prisoners of war in return for a withdrawal of US troops from the south. The POWs, many of whom had been held captive on the other side of the world since the 1960s, returned to a country – and to families – that they could scarcely recognise. A GI might come home to a wife whom he remembered as a baker of cookies and presser of shirts to find Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch or Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying on the bedside table. The trauma of war, imprisonment and torture was now compounded by a tremor of sexual failure or emasculation. Some women had already divorced their GI husbands in absentia, and even those who stayed faithful often seemed somehow harder and more assertive – toughened, no doubt, by having to bring up a family and keep a household together with no resident patriarch, but also affected by the changes in society and culture which their menfolk understood only dimly, if at all. ‘After so many years of forced independence, few wives remain subservient homebodies,’ the New York Times reported, adding that some spoke openly of ‘knowing themselves sexually much better’. A returning POW told the newspaper that although he’d been taken aback by the new hairstyles and fashions, ‘most shocking to me is the sexual revolution’. Interviewing returnees for his study Voices of the Vietnam POWs, Craig Howes found that many regarded failure in Vietnam, social unrest and their own family upheavals as ‘related symptoms of a moral collapse represented by the figure of an unfaithful, defiant, or simply different woman’. The sexually embittered veteran became a familiar fictional character – almost always portrayed as a ticking bomb that might explode at any moment. ‘Listen, you fuckers, you screw heads, here is a man who would not take it any more,’ says Travis Bickle, the psychopathic former Marine played by Robert de Niro in Taxi Driver. ‘A man who stood up against the scum, the cunts, the dogs, the filth, the shit.’ But one soon senses that this generalised rage is prompted by a specific frustration. When he takes a woman to a hard-core porn film on their first date, he can’t understand why she walks out on him. ‘I realise now how much she’s just like the others, cold and distant,’ he broods, ‘and many people are like that, women for sure – they’re like a union.’
Few men detonated as lethally as Travis Bickle, but many, like him, transmuted their personal incompetence or misfortune into a universal malaise. If your wife leaves you, you can feel sorry for yourself or wonder what you did wrong; if thousands of wives are walking out on their husbands, the temptation is to see yourself as the victim of a wider conspiracy directed by forces you can neither comprehend nor control – the hallmark of the paranoid style. ‘Whereas the resentment of women against men for the most part has solid roots in the discrimination and danger to which women are constantly exposed,’ Christopher Lasch wrote in The Culture of Narcissism (1979), ‘the resentment of men against women, when men still control most of the power and wealth in society yet feel themselves threatened on every hand – intimidated, emasculated – appears deeply irrational, and for that reason not likely to be appeased by changes in feminist tactics designed to reassure men that liberated women threaten no one. When even Mom is a menace, there is not much that feminists can say to soften the sex war or to assure their adversaries that men and women will live happily when it is over.’
How could it ever be over? At least the POWs had a heroes’ welcome and a reception at the White House before limping home to a wife who was reading Our Bodies Ourselves: A Book by and for Women with an ominous glint in her eye. Those dutiful foot-soldiers from the suburbs were attacked on all fronts, with no prospect of a cease-fire.* The wife had joined a consciousness-raising group, the daughter was cheering her on, and as for the son – was that a hint of mascara on his eyelashes? In the old days unhappy wives knuckled down to the task of being sad but silent, and sons who felt unusual stirrings when they watched Rock Hudson kept very quiet indeed about it. Not any more. The paranoid husband, while still controlling most of the power and wealth, felt himself under siege: while women bombarded him with talk of self-fulfilment, he couldn’t even rely on his own gender for solidarity. As the gay poet John Ashbery wrote in ‘Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror’, perhaps the greatest American poem of the 1970s: ‘It may be that another life is stocked there,/In recesses that no one knew of.’
Of course the heterosexual man had always been vaguely aware that same-sexers existed. If he was British, he laughed along with the rest of the mass audience at the limp-wristed innuendo of Larry Grayson in Shut That Door! or John Inman in Are You Being Served? while clinging to the belief that people like this would never cross his threshold. Anyway, their campery was only a performance, wasn’t it? ‘I’m not really a queer or homosexual,’ Grayson assured journalists, ‘I’m just behaving like one. That’s the difference.’ But while Larry Grayson and John Inman barricaded themselves in the closet, yelling through the keyhole that the semblance of queerness was an affectation, others had had enough of equivocation and deceit. The first public manifestation of gay pride was the Stonewall riot in New York of June 1969, provoked by a police raid on a gay bar in Greenwich Village. ‘We are the Stonewall girls,/We wear our hair in curls,’ the customers chanted, forming a chorus line in Christopher Street. ‘We wear no underwear,/We show our pubic hair,/We wear our dungarees/Above our nelly knees.’ A few brave souls in London, including my friend Bob Mellors, followed their example a year later, though without the high-kicking singalong. A plaque that was unveiled in 2000, on a former public lavatory in North London, tells the story: ‘The first gay rights demonstration in Britain took place here, in Highbury Fields, on 27 November 1970, when 150 members of the Gay Liberation Front held a torchlight rally against police harassment.’ Après ça, le déluge. E.M. Forster’s homoerotic novel Maurice was published, posthumously, in 1971. (Forster had testified for the defence at the Lady Chatterley trial; his book appeared in the year of the Oz trial.) Two homosexual delegates were invited to address the Democratic Party’s national convention in the summer of 1972; the state of Pennsylvania accredited the first openly gay schoolteacher in the country a few weeks later. By the end of the decade, twenty-two American states had revoked their laws against sodomy, and dozens of cities had ordinances outlawing discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation.
In December 1973 the American Psychiatric Association announced that it would no longer classify homosexuality as a mental illness, and amended the list of disorders in its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual accordingly. The professor of psychiatry at Columbia, Robert Spitzer, felt obliged to reassure the public that the APA hadn’t been taken over by ‘wild revolutionaries or latent homosexuals’. He explained the decision thus: ‘Psychiatry, which was once regarded as in the vanguard of the movement to liberate people from their troubles, is now viewed by many, and with some justification, as being the agent of social control.’
But social control was just what some people wanted. In Northern Ireland, where the 1967 Act decriminalising homosexuality didn’t apply, the Rev. Ian Paisley led a Save Ulster from Sodomy campaign. His unlikely American counterpart, the singer and beauty queen Anita Bryant, founded the Save Our Children movement to reverse an edict passed by the city of Miami outlawing discrimination against homosexuals. ‘Before I yield to this insidious attack on God and his laws I will lead such a crusade to stop it as this country has never seen before,’ she vowed, adding that if homosexuality were natural or normal ‘God would have made Adam and Bruce’. In a referendum, the citizens of Miami threw out the anti-discrimination ordinance by a margin of two to one. ‘The “normal majority” have said, “Enough! Enough! Enough!”’ Bryant exulted. Her crusade marched on to similar victories in Minnesota, Kansas and Oregon, but was then routed in California, which voted overwhelmingly against a proposition to bar gays from the teaching profession.* Even Ronald Reagan, a former governor of the state, came out against the proposition: ‘It has the potential of infringing on the basic rights of privacy and perhaps even constitutional rights.’
Although he never acknowledged it, and would have been appalled to think that he owed the slightest debt to the Oz generation and its American cousins, Reagan was himself a beneficiary of the sexual revolution. In the 1960s, Governor Nelson Rockefeller’s hopes of winning the Republican nomination for president had been scuppered by his divorce and remarriage. (‘Our country doesn’t like broken homes,’ a senior party official told the New York Times.) In 1980, the twice-wed Ronald Reagan not only won the presidency but did so with the enthusiastic backing of Anita Bryant’s ‘normal majority’. Such was the change in the moral climate that few people noticed what would have startled previous generations: for the first time in American history, the President was a divorcee.*
* A survey conducted in America in 1974 found that 72 per cent of people between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one indulged in this way-out sexual thing.
* Interviewed in 2008, the ninety-one-year-old Miss Manners admitted that she had masturbated as a child, ‘but I never found it particularly satisfactory’. She gave up on it not only from shame but ‘because I didn’t think I was getting anywhere with it’.
* ‘Homosexuality in high places is just a carnal afterthought now, and the real and only fucking is done on paper.’ – Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (1973)
* Felix Dennis, the hippy of supposedly limited intelligence, went on to become one of the richest publishers in Britain. His many ventures include Maxim, the world’s biggest-selling ‘men’s lifestyle magazine’, which has rather more naked flesh than Oz ever exposed. The Sunday Times Rich List in 2009 calculated his fortune at £500 million.
* A female sculptor whom I knew in the 1970s, trapped in a dull marriage to a dull but prosperous country solicitor, kept begging him to give her some money so she could rent a studio. After several refusals she produced her secret weapon, a copy of the feminist magazine Spare Rib. Terrified that she might go lesbian on him, or invite a delegation from the Society for Cutting Up Men to dinner, he paid up at once.
* As well it might. San Francisco became the unofficial capital of gay America in the Seventies: one of its city supervisors, Harvey Milk, was the first openly gay elected official in the state. This was all too much for another supervisor, Dan White, an ex-cop with a visceral disgust for ‘social deviates’: on 27 November 1978 he strode into City Hall clutching his old.38 police-issue revolver and gunned down both Milk and George Moscone, the mayor. At his trial he pleaded ‘diminished mental capacity’, claiming that a junk-food binge the night before the killings had made him temporarily insane – and, to the outrage of San Franciscans, the predominantly Catholic jurors accepted this defence. The double murder earned him a jail sentence of seven years, of which he served five. In October 1985, eighteen months after his release, White committed suicide. ‘This was a sick man,’ his lawyer said.
* By then, so many Americans had chosen to divorce or live out of wedlock that any who defied the trend seemed risibly unconventional. Hence the title of a comedy starring George Segal and Natalie Wood which was released in the year of Reagan’s election victory: The Last Married Couple in America.