by Rufus Lodge
The line that terrified the censors and guardians of the public morals was one that was guaranteed to raise a mixture of whoops and chuckles when Ginsberg read ‘Howl’ in public: ‘who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists’ – inspired, perhaps, by Ginsberg’s infatuation with the image of Marlon Brando clad in biker leathers on the set of The Wild One. The line’s combination of obscenity and homosexuality triggered every alarm bell the American establishment could erect to protect its culture.
Yet the man who could unashamedly deliver that line in front of college poetry groupies and Californian bohemians baulked at including a second profanity in the first edition of ‘Howl’: for decades thereafter, there was an enigmatic (but hardly unintelligible) reference in the poem to ‘mother’ being ‘finally ******’. In readings, the omitted word began with an ‘f’, completing an image with Oedipal resonances. On the page, Ginsberg was clearly prepared to countenance men being ****** by motorcyclists; but not a mother, under any circumstances.
This did not prevent his book being the subject of a San Francisco obscenity trial in 1957, from which it emerged triumphant, with the F-word proclaimed legal as long as the work that contained it was of ‘redeeming social importance’.
Once liberated from the shackles of national outrage, Ginsberg proceeded to demolish all remaining taboos in his work. In 1965, he became the first man to declaim the word ‘fuck’ on the stage of London’s Royal Albert Hall, during a reading of ‘The Change’. Within a decade of the ‘Howl’ trial, he was proudly reciting poems such as ‘Please Master’, in which he assumed the role of a subservient beneath the mighty rod of his lover. He described the encounter in such graphic detail that the piece could be used as an explanatory text for any visiting aliens anxious to grasp the mechanics of male homosexuality. But what would mother have thought?
Brooklyn Depths
Homosexual rape, extreme violence, male prostitution, vivid depiction of heroin addiction: just some of the passing attractions of Hubert Selby’s remarkable story-sequence, Last Exit to Brooklyn: ruled legal after a 1964 trial in America, but banned in the altogether more prudish British climate in 1966, until the book was freed for publication on appeal two years later.
Amid the carefree splash of bodily fluids and the trampling of vital organs beneath muggers’ boots, it was possible to overlook Selby’s equally casual attitude towards the usage of the F-word. The first four pages of Last Exit To Brooklyn found Selby coining a succession of new variants on a common theme, with ‘fuckin’ (no apostrophe amid the carnage) followed by ‘what-a-fuckin-load’, ‘whatthefuck’, ‘fuckaround’ and ‘fuckerself’. Having established that he could invent vernacular speech as easily as he could condemn his characters to lives of agonising torture, Selby resumed a more orthodox attitude towards his obscenities, letting Brooklyn’s depravity speak for itself.
No ‘F’ in Peace
You can always rely upon a ‘barefoot poet’. The Berkeley campus of the University of California was, in the early Sixties, the focus of the Free Speech Movement, which was a central stimulus in the formation of what became known as the ‘counter-culture’. And it was in Berkeley, inevitably, that the poet John Thomson cast off his shoes on 2 March 1965, and sat on the steps of the student union building with a small white card pinned to his shirt. It carried a simple message, in his own handwriting: ‘Fuck’. When Free Speech Movement leader Mario Savio playfully chided Thomson for being unclear, as ‘fuck’ could represent any of a range of parts of speech, Thomson adjusted his card accordingly. It now read: ‘Fuck (verb)’.
This was, Thomson insisted, a protest against the war in Vietnam: mild-mannered, you might think, given the gamut of revolutionary behaviour exhibited by American outlaws during the halcyon years of the anti-war movement. Within an hour, however, Thomson had been arrested on a charge of breaching the peace, although he had not said a word, or attempted to organise a single soul to join his protest.
Thus began what one wit dubbed the ‘Berkeley Filthy Speech Movement’. In the resulting furore, the president of the university was driven to resign after criticism of his heavy-handedness in allowing the arrest to take place; only to withdraw his resignation almost at once. Meanwhile, his board enforced the closure of an unofficial students’ magazine, Spider, which had reported the incident under the rather clever headline: ‘TO KILL A FUCKINGBIRD’.
Yet beyond Berkeley there was disappointment among national student leaders that the local radicals had failed to muster significant support for Thomson’s subtle crusade; whereas some Free Speech Movement veterans felt that the ‘fuck’ controversy had distracted focus from their more far-reaching political manifesto. It was still possible in 1965 for young Americans to believe that the issue of Vietnam did not really concern them, a state of innocence that would soon be ended by President Johnson’s intensification of American military involvement.
Such media coverage as there was of the affair tended to concentrate on the ‘obscenity’ of Thomson’s card, rather than the motive for his protest. The specialist journal Sexual Freedom reported what had happened, which led the United States Postal Service to declare that this otherwise rather academic paper was ‘an obscene publication’. Now, at last, Thomson’s spark flared into something approaching a fire, as students and academics combined in San Francisco to form the League for Sexual Freedom around the offending journal. There was a mass meeting of support at San Francisco State University; then a naked swim-in against the war and in favour of unfettered use of four-letter words that described sexual intercourse. A Berkeley student was arrested for reading a pertinent extract from D.H. Lawrence’s novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover in public, despite the fact that the book was now on sale legally in the United States.
Warned before a Berkeley reading that he would be arrested if he uttered any obscenities, beat poet Gary Snyder sent out a carefully worded statement to the local press. ‘I have been hearing in the past two weeks that “fuck” in any usage is profane, dirty and obscene. Those who say this are the ones who make it so. Those who are genuinely disturbed by the word “fuck” – and its sister, “cunt” – the two most tabooed words in Standard English – I feel sorry for.’
This gentle crusade slowly spread across America – the first whisper, in fact, of the sexual revolution that would soon be howling around the Western world. By 1966, the League for Sexual Freedom was manufacturing its own memorabilia, to raise funds for the cause. Those who wanted to show solidarity within their homes or crash-pads could buy a poster that declared: ‘Fuck for Peace’. And, as wearing a badge with that slogan would risk attracting the attention of the police, the League’s members could exhibit their allegiance with a much more genteel message: ‘Copulate for Coexistence’. Which somehow sounds much ruder than the alternative.
Fortunately for the concerned citizens of America, the police did not let these antics disturb their crusade to rid the nation of the four-letter word. In May 1967, cops in Ann Arbor, Michigan entered the offices of the underground newspaper The Sun (no relation), in the hope of discovering something illegal. While poking fun at the disgracefully long hair of the male staff, one policeman noticed, semi-concealed at the back of the room, a kite bearing the design of the Stars and Stripes – and, crucially, the slogan: ‘Fuck America – go fly a kite’. He pulled it down, held it up to view it more closely, and declared that it could now be seen from the road, which broke a local ordinance prohibiting the display of obscene drawings within public view. The result: a court summons for editor and poster designer Gary Grimshaw, a fine of $150 and a sentence of fifteen days’ imprisonment, with a year’s probation to follow. The Sun duly reported the outcome under the restrained headline: ‘Lady Justice Sodomized’.
It’s Only Natural
From an article in the underground newspaper Spokane Natural in August 1967:
CENSORSHIP
We will try a test case.
Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuck
fuck.
This is to prove something. There is no redeeming social merit. Neither are your prurient interests to be aroused. In San Francisco once I saw a three minute movie with the word ‘fuck’ displayed every frame and nothing else, sixteen times a second, three minutes. In two minutes the audience was rocking with laughter.
You can take fear of sex only so far.
I don’t expect anyone to say anything about these dirty words, thank you.
The response of the local community in Spokane was not verbal but physical: unidentified gunmen shattered the windows of the paper’s offices.
A Vicar Speaks
‘I think it’s quite desirable to say “fuck”. But not on the air, because there would be a number of complaints. I once got a letter from a vicar who suggested that I should be castrated and deported for allowing a man to say “fuck” on the radio.’
(John Peel, 1971)
Mothers with Attitude
Parental Discretion Is Advised, declared one of the titles on NWA’s debut album, Straight Outta Compton; and they weren’t kidding. The California hip-hop quintet (whose initials disguised their true identity as Niggaz With Attitude) stoked governmental disquiet and rabid calls for censorship with the most memorable song on the album: rendered on the album sleeve as ‘F--- Tha Police’, but instantly recognisable via its rather more controversial chorus. It was hardly a subtle lyric; but then the scenario didn’t call for subtlety, as the song documented police harassment of young black kids on the streets of Los Angeles. Rapper MC Ren boasted that he was ‘a sniper with a hell of a scope/Takin’ out a cop or two, they can’t cope with me’; and he might as well have declared war on the USA, given the ferocity of the reaction from the authorities.
An assistant director of the FBI wrote to NWA’s record label, deploring the popularity of the song, and warning them that ‘advocating violence and assault is wrong’. Police officers refused to provide security for the crew’s shows, some of which were cancelled. NWA were targeted for strip-searches in airports. Worse, there was even a backlash against the band within the black community, where they were excoriated for the misogyny of their lyrics and their promulgation of ‘gangster’ stereotypes. But their self-professed outlaw image proved to be more enduring, and NWA are widely credited as the forefathers of ‘gangsta rap’.
Meanwhile, NWA proved to have too much attitude to contain within one ensemble, and within a year of ‘Fuck Tha Police’ reaching the streets, one of their number, Oshea Jackson (better known as Ice Cube) was gone. While his ex-colleagues continued to chronicle the vicissitudes of urban life (sample titles included ‘Findum, Fuckum & Flee’, and ‘I’d Rather Fuck You’), Ice Cube unleashed a scabrous assault on those he had left behind, ‘No Vaseline’, accusing them of hypocrisy and racial treachery, and their white manager of fraud. In retrospect, it is unfortunate that Cube chose to complain that NWA stalwart Eazy-E’s ‘dick is smelling like MC Ren’s shit’, given that E died of AIDS a few years later. But Cube was too angry to be profound, his rant’s title explained by a key line: ‘you’re getting fucked out your green [cash] by a white boy, with no Vaseline’. Which is how ‘fucked with no Vaseline’ ended up in Jonathon Green’s three-volume Dictionary of Slang, with Ice Cube credited as bringing the phrase into popular usage. In this instance, however, ‘popular usage’ seems to extend no further than the Vaseline reference turning up in another hip-hop piece, Boondox’s ‘Watch Your Step’.
What the Sister Saw
So Holden Caulfield is walking around his sister’s school like an archetypal troubled teen – the kind of kid who, in the twenty-first century, would lay waste to everything around him with a rifle. But in The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger’s 1951 novel, Holden merely finds ‘something that drove me crazy … I thought how Phoebe and all the other little kids would see it, and how they’d wonder what the hell it meant, and then some dirty kid would tell them – all cockeyed naturally – what it meant, and how they’d all think about it and maybe even worry about it for a couple of days.’ Caulfield even fantasises about catching up with the kid who was responsible for it, and smashing his head ‘till he was good and goddam dead and bloody’.
So what is the outrageous object that makes Holden so crazy? Well, if you were reading this book in Britain at any time between its first publication in 1951, and the 1980s – a period in which it must have sold as many as a million copies – you’ll know that what gets Holden’s goat is some graffiti on the school wall that reads simply: ‘– you’. And that dash conceals an act of censorship that seemed to pass unnoticed, while the absence of that censorship aroused outrage even stronger than Holden’s in Salinger’s native land.
For the American edition of The Catcher in the Rye, just three years after Norman Mailer’s ‘fug’ extravaganza in The Naked and The Dead, boldly quoted the school-wall inscription in full: ‘fuck you’. It was hardly gratuitous obscenity: Caulfield is as upset as any censor, and when he finds the same phrase elsewhere in the school, he tries vainly to rub it out before any more kids can see it. For him, it’s a symbol of the loss of innocence that awaits Phoebe – that awaits us all – when she is inexorably forced to take her place within the crushing corporatism of modern America.
The British publishers, Hamish Hamilton in hardback and Penguin for the paperback, didn’t signpost their censorship: they evidently felt that the F-word could not be published in the UK, and reacted appropriately. The phrase was also snipped in many European translations, such as the Dutch, German, and Norwegian editions, while less abrasive language replaced the evil ‘fuck’ elsewhere. Little, Brown and Company in New York were altogether more courageous: in retrospect it’s remarkable that the novel should not only have remained on the shelves during the height of the McCarthyism era, but also entered many school libraries and reading lists.
Throughout the Fifties, however, there were frequent efforts in the US to have The Catcher in the Rye banned, on both a local and national level. When the would-be censors were put on the spot, their general objections to the book’s ‘moral tone’, ‘juvenile delinquency’ and ‘Communist ethos’ boiled down to one major problem: foul language. And as ‘fuck you’ was the only phrase that could possibly have triggered that reaction, it was clearly the presence of the F-word – even in reportage – that was the problem. As critic Jerome Beatty wrote in the Saturday Review, ‘Banning [Catcher] from reading lists and then arguing over it has helped immeasurably to keep it going as one of the best-selling novels of the post-war years’. But several teachers and librarians apparently lost their jobs over their insistence on making Salinger’s book available to its intended audience. Kids loved it; parental objections were summed up in one comment from a father: ‘I don’t want my girl studying this crap.’
Ronald Reagan for President
It was a small pamphlet, only a few pages long, its cover printed in a rather garish red, white, and blue. The centre of the design was a primitive rendering of the Stars and Stripes, with the logo ‘Bean Spasms’ circling it in cartoonish script. The remainder of the cover was filled with typescript, intended to resemble a Sixties computer print-out. It identified the author, J.G. Ballard; and the title: Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan. In 1968, it featured in a court case that ruined a small publisher and bookshop owner; two years later, its inclusion in another book caused several thousand copies to be pulped.
For anyone remotely familiar with Ballard’s trajectory through the Sixties, it was obvious that this short prose work was unlikely to be a pornographic tribute to the charms of the Governor of California, who was preparing for his first presidential run. Ballard had surfaced in public awareness as a science fiction writer, but soon abandoned even the loose confines of SF for the border-free territory of speculative fiction. Its title aside, none of the pseudo-scientific language in Fuck Ronald Reagan could remotely be described as obscene. The ‘story’ masqueraded as a psychologist’s report on the potency of Reagan’s name and image, as measured by the res
ponse of an imaginary audience when confronted with the juxtaposition of the Governor and (to quote one example) the savage violence enacted by an automobile accident.
The only narrative in the tale was provided by two sentences, broken into section headings: ‘During these assassination fantasies Tallis became increasingly obsessed with the pudenda of the Presidential contender mediated to him by a thousand television screens. The motion picture studies of Ronald Reagan created a scenario of the conceptual orgasm, a unique ontology of violence and disorder.’ No fuel for masturbatory thrills there: merely food for thought about the ambiguous nature of the man who would assume the presidency in 1980.
Twelve years earlier, Ballard gave the piece to the owner of the Unicorn Bookshop in Brighton, Bill Butler, who operated a small press from the premises. The combination of a minor drugs bust and the Unicorn’s reputation for stocking underground literature and magazines inspired the Sussex constabulary to mount a plain-clothes visit to the Unicorn in January 1968. A day later, they returned, and seized a vast quantity of books and journals that they felt were illegal under the Obscene Publications Act of 1959.
Among them were copies of the Ballard story, which attracted the particular outrage of the magistrates when the case came to trial that August. ‘Is this not the meandering of a dirty and diseased mind?’ one of them asked an expert witness who was testifying as to Ballard’s literary stature. Ultimately, Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan had to be omitted from the list of ‘obscene’ publications found at the Unicorn, on a legal technicality. Nonetheless Bill Butler was convicted, fined £400, and ordered to pay all the legal costs – a burden that effectively capsized his business, and sent him to an early death.