If June is for weddings, SCREW #65 was our shotgun blast at the institution itself — a sun-soaked, sticky-fingered celebration of everything the moral majority wished we’d choke on. This one dropped like a sweaty jockstrap in church.
Edited by His Holiness of Hard Truth, Al Goldstein, this issue captured a nation on the verge of orgasm and collapse. Nixon was bombing Cambodia, and we were bombing your frontal lobe with bare-ass truth and vintage rage.
Dan Mouer kicked things off with a sit-down interview with the director of I Am Curious (Yellow) and I Am Curious (Blue) — a Swedish one-two punch of sex, politics, and pubic hair that made American censors wince and arthouse perverts cheer. The piece, titled “Blue + Yellow = Green $$$,” wasn’t subtle, and neither was the box office. Dot Smith followed up with “Hookah Heaven,” a velvet-lounge takedown of the peace-pipe set, where incense, ass, and pseudo-spiritualism collided in a haze of pretentious pot smoke.
Goldstein himself teamed up with Mary Phillips (his 2nd wife) for “Mod Donna: The First Feminist Play,” a review-cum-roast of radical theater with tits and teeth. Walter Brett took us to the National Mall for an all-American fuck-in in “Orgy on D.C. Mall,” which proved once again that freedom and fornication go hand in hand — especially on federal property.
John Paul Hudson delivered a whip-smart timeline of pissed-off women in “Fuck Me Now or I’ll Chop Your Head Off,” a title that likely cost us a few advertisers and won us the hearts of every woman with a dull knife and a bad ex. Lige and Jack, our resident queer truth-slingers, returned with “Homosexual Citizen: Cocks on the Rocks,” another cocktail of wit, dick, and political defiance from the gay underground.
Hank Orlecchina’s “Rock ’n Raunch” made the case that every guitar solo was a dry hump and every concert a full-body climax. Polly Holden stirred serious shit with “Fuckbooks: Pedophilia for the Masses,” calling out the so-called literary elite hiding behind postmodernism while diddling the margins of decency. It was bold, blunt, and borderline illegal.
Mouer wasn’t done — he also served up “Mini-Skinema,” a voyeur’s guide to the short-form smut reels that flooded adult theaters like cum in the gutter. Peter Egron’s “Naked City” was a photo essay from the New York underbelly, shot like a love letter to decay.
The comics? Absolutely deranged. John Caldwell and John Thomas turned the funny pages into filthy fever dreams, and Olsen’s “The Eclipse” was a dark little number that mocked everything from religion to repression with a knowing wink.
And no issue was complete without Goldstein’s “Shit List,” that beautifully bitter index of politicians, prudes, and publishers who deserved to get bent over a rusty sawhorse and taught the true meaning of free speech.
We weren’t just a magazine.
We were the lit match in the nation’s pubes.
—P.
