SEXIS WRONG

Flynt wanted to know who would be appropriate to write an
article for Hustler that would expose the Pope as gay. I suggested
Gore Vidal, who had already stated in an interview
that Cardinal Spellman was gay. So much for our first editorial
conference.
There was an unwritten agreement among men’s magazines
that human female nipples would not be clearly visible on
a cover. I was also learning to accept certain arbitrary rules
then governing the inside pages. An erect penis must not be
shown. Semen must not be shown. Penetration must not be
shown. Oral-genital contact must not be shown.
The next month, at Hustler’s
Christmas party, Flynt announced
that I was going to be the new
publisher.
A few months later in Georgia, Flynt was shot during a lunch
break in his obscenity trial. I flew to Atlanta and went directly
to the hospital. Althea brought me to Larry’s room. It was
extremely unsettling to see such a powerful personality so
helpless, kept alive by medical technology, with one tube
feeding him and another breathing for him. He appeared bugeyed
with painkiller. Althea lifted the sheet and showed me
his gaping wounds, a truly awesome sight.
“Oh, God, Althea,” I said, “he’s showing pink.”
“I’m arranging for a photographer to come in here,” she said.
“We’re gonna publish Larry’s wounds in Hustler. I want people
to see what they did to him.”
I sat down in a chair by Larry’s bed. I didn’t know what to
say. We simply clasped hands for a while. Finally I broke the
silence. “Larry, tomorrow is Good Friday. So, uh, you don’t
have to go to work.”
I glanced toward Althea to reassure myself that I hadn’t indulged
in irreverence that was too inappropriate, but she said,
“Oh, Paul, look,” gesturing toward Larry—“he wants to show
you something.” Above the oxygen mask, Larry was blinking
his eyes over and over again in rapid succession.
“He’s laughing,” Althea explained.
It was a moment of unspeakable intimacy.
Althea had transformed the Coca-Cola Suite of Emory University
Hospital into her office, where she was studying the
slides of a “Jesus and the Adulteress” photo spread, including
a nearly life-sized poster in the form of a centerfold pullout:
There was a generic barbershop-calendar
Jesus looking reverently toward the sky as he
stands above the prone adulteress—almost
naked, her head bleeding from the stones that
have been cast—and, just as the Bible says,
he is covering her, but not quite, and she is,
inadvertently, still showing pink. Sweet, shocking, vulnerable
pink. This was a startling visual image, unintentionally satirizing
the change from the old Hustler to the new Hustler. The
marketing people were aghast at the possibility that wholesalers,
especially in the Bible Belt, would refuse to distribute
the magazine with such a blatantly blasphemous feature.
Faced with a crucial decision, Althea made her choice on the
basis of pure whimsicality. She noticed a pair of pigeons on
the window ledge. One was waddling toward the other. “All
right,” she said, “if that dove walks over and pecks the other
dove, then we will publish this.” The pigeon continued strutting
along the window ledge, but stopped short and didn’t
peck the other pigeon, so publication of “Jesus and the Adulteress”
was postponed indefinitely. And the poster would instead
remain on my wall as a memento of my six-month stint
at Hustler. Maybe I should try to auction it off on eBay.
As for Larry Flynt’s born-again conversion, he now attributes
it to “a chemical imbalance in his brain.”
176 EVERYTHING YOU KNOW ABOUT SEX IS WRONG