Larry Flynt, pornographer and self-styled First Amendment champion, dies at 78

Source: Washington Post




Larry Flynt, one of America’s most notorious pornographers and self-proclaimed champions of First Amendment freedoms, who built his sprawling business interests on the hard-core raunch and grotesque parody of Hustler magazine, died Feb. 10 at his home in Los Angeles. He was 78. His brother Jimmy Flynt confirmed the death but did not cite a specific cause.

Repeatedly sued, prosecuted, jailed for contempt, gagged for obscene outbursts in court and, in 1978, shot and paralyzed by a would-be assassin, Mr. Flynt always thrived on controversy. After the shooting, he used a wheelchair — gold-plated and velvet-lined to his specifications. In a grit-to-glitter saga like few others, the ninth-grade dropout from the hills of east Kentucky used street smarts, gutsy business instincts and, when necessary, his fists to parlay a string of shabby Ohio bars into a $100 million nationwide porn empire of magazines, private clubs, a swank casino in suburban Los Angeles, an online sex toy store and other ventures.

Hustler, whose circulation peaked above 2 million in the late 1970s, thumbed its nose at sleeker skin publications such as Playboy and Penthouse. Mr. Flynt proudly offered Hustler as a blue-collar and taboo-smashing alternative with its raw frontal nudity of men and women, and crude cartoons. “Playboy and Penthouse,” he once told an interviewer, “were parading their pornography as art, with the air-brushing and the soft lens. I realized that if we became more explicit, we could get a huge piece of this market. . . . I sensed that raw sex was what men wanted. And I was right.”

Equally reviled and celebrated for his depictions of close-up female genitalia, gang rape, bondage, bestiality, mutilation and, most famously, a naked woman being put through a meat grinder on the cover of the June 1978 Hustler, Mr. Flynt reveled in the nation’s collective gasp at his pornographic derring-do.

Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/larry-flynt-porn-king-and-self-styled-first-amendment-champion-dies-at-xxx/2021/02/10/5240626c-6bf0-11eb-ba56-d7e2c8defa31_story.html

---

No comment.