Before there was a rainbow flag, before Stonewall had even popped off, there was SCREW — and in April of 1969, Issue No. 10 was already doing what no other newsstand rag dared: printing gay love stories, real ones, right next to reviews of fuckbooks and takedowns of Anthony Newley’s limp cinematic dickprint.
This baby was edited by Al Goldstein, but like any good orgy, it was a group effort. Jim Buckley, Mary Phillips, Richard Field, Jack Nichols, Michael Perkins, and the iconic duo Lige and Jack (Elijah Clark and Jack Nichols) all got their lube-stained fingerprints on this one.
Let’s start with the gooey center: Jack Nichols’ story about meeting and falling in love with Lige Clark. Yeah, that Jack Nichols — the first openly gay man to appear on national TV, staring down Mike Wallace in CBS’s 1967 creepshow The Homosexuals while the rest of America still thought “confirmed bachelor” was polite code. In this issue, Jack penned the aching, sincere, and brave-as-fuck “Can a Revolutionary from a Small Town Find Happiness in the Big City?” — a love letter to Lige that doubled as a manifesto. Together, they weren’t just fucking — they were fighting, writing what became the first gay lifestyle column in a newsstand publication, right here in SCREW. Wrap your head around that: a skin mag with more guts and gay rights in 1969 than most so-called progressives on cable news today.
And if you needed a palate cleanser after the romance, Jim Buckley delivered “Smorgaspussy” — a buffet of bold bites straight from the sex underground — while Al Goldstein himself spit venom in “Dirty Movies: Anthony Newley’s Shit Flick,” an absolutely merciless takedown of the British crooner’s foray into film fuckery. (Al didn’t hate sex. He hated bad sex, and worse, bad art pretending to be sexy.)
Then there was Richard Field’s “Sex Addict”, a raw and rambling confessional that felt like reading a horny Bukowski on deadline. And Michael Perkins brought the intellectual foreplay with his Fuckbooks column—this time reviewing J. Edward Harris’s Portrait of a Lover: A Sensuous Memoir. A book review in SCREW? Yeah. Because reading about sex can be just as filthy as watching it—if it’s written right..
And then there’s Lige and Jack, once again teaming up in their regular “Homosexual Citizen” column — this one called “Grouping Around,” reminding readers that gay men weren’t just organizing politically — they were orgasming, together, unapologetically.
This issue didn’t just lubricate the masses — it lit a fuse. A couple months later, Stonewall would blow the doors off the closet. But in April of ’69, SCREW was already out, proud, and pantless.
Next time you hear some mainstream chode call SCREW a smut rag, remind them it published the first honest gay love story newsstand America had ever seen.
And it did it while calling Anthony Newley a talentless ass-clown.
That, my friends, is journalism.
—P.
