They don’t make filth like this anymore—bold, blistering, and balls-deep in everything sacred. Issue #165 of SCREW dropped on May 1, 1972, right in time to ruin Mother’s Day and give the Nixon administration a fresh nosebleed. This was Goldstein in his prime: furious, fearless, and fully erect at the sight of censorship and hypocrisy.

With a cover by Mathe that looked like Picasso on peyote, the issue kicked off with Al’s middle-finger manifesto, “Screw You”—a rant that could peel the lacquer off a pulpit. From there, the pages exploded with what SCREW did best: roast the establishment, praise the perverse, and turn smut into social commentary with just enough grease to make it stick.

D.A. Latimer (aka Dean Latimer of The East Village Other fame) delivers the provocatively titled “Sucking Slits: Controlling the Woman of Your Choice”—a piece so toxically masculine it could’ve grown chest hair on a copy of Ms. Magazine. Sure, it’s problematic by today’s standards, but this was SCREW, not Good Housekeeping. Context is king, and in ’72, pushing boundaries was the only way to burn them down.

Then we get “My Scene: Tongues in Love” by Antoinette Debello, bringing just enough poetic filth to make your groin tingle and your brain wonder what the hell you just read. Meanwhile, Michael Perkins penned a literary cumshot in “Fuckbooks: Creaming Cremer,” a slippery deep-dive into I, Jan Cremer—the scandal-soaked pseudo-autobiography that hit America like a Dutch molotov, packed with biker bravado, Nazi orgies, and enough self-mythologizing to make Norman Mailer blush. Perkins straddles the line between takedown and tribute, where highbrow meets hard-on and no metaphor is left unmolested.

Rounding out the lineup:

• Ruth Batchelor delivers a weirdly poignant poem titled “A Mother’s Symbol Worry”—a rare SCREW nod to psycho-sexual trauma disguised as a Hallmark card from Hell.
• Anthony Gambino’s “Naked City” captures the flesh-and-freakshow of 1970s NYC, the kind of column that made readers reach for a map and a tissue.
• Christopher Watson’s “Watson’s Weirdness” lives up to its name—a mindfuck in prose, delivered with a manic grin.
• And of course, Goldstein’s venomous “Shit List” makes its weekly appearance, dragging every uptight prude and hypocrite through a gauntlet of invective. If your name landed here, you’d made it—into Goldstein’s eternal Book of the Damned.

SCREW #165 is SCREW at its peak—reckless, fearless, and pulsating with New York filth energy. It’s a reminder that while the world was busy pretending not to touch itself, SCREW gave readers full permission—hell, encouragement—to do just that. And fifty-three years later, we’re still here… stroking the archive.

Stay horny, stay loud.

—P.

Phil Italiano

Publisher, Visionary, Provocateur

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