Earl Kemp, the graphic-artist-turned-publisher-of-critical-science-fiction-essays-turned-porn-publisher, died on February 6 from head injuries suffered in a fall in his home. He was 90 years old.
Born in 1929, Kemp moved from his native Arkansas to Chicago in the 1940s, and was invited to join the University of Chicago Science Fiction Club in 1950. Thus began a life-long interest in the genre, leading him to become an award-winning fanzine editor; the chair of the 1962 Worldcon, an annual get-together for science fiction fans; and one of the founders of Advent Publishers, a label devoted to releasing books of criticism about the science fiction genre.
But it was in the early 1960s that Kemp embarked on a new adventure: He went to work as an editor for fellow Chicago science-fiction fan William Hamling, owner of erotic book publisher Greenleaf Classics, which over the course of its existence (1959-1974) released more than 1,000 sexy (and often sexually explicit) novels under more than 30 imprints, including such familiar ones as Bedside Books, Leisure Books and of course Greenleaf Classics. Titles included The Lust Merchants, Swap Smorgasbord, Secret Sex Desires, and a number of gay lines with titles such as Pretty Man, Muscle on Broadway and Women of the Swastika. But Kemp and Hamling hadn't forgotten their old pals, and such famous SF writers as Harlan Ellison, Robert Silverberg, Robert Bloch and Kurt Vonnegut had erotic novels published under pseudonyms by Greenleaf.
Almost needless to say, all that published sex got Kemp and Hamling in trouble, first in 1966, when a federal obscenity indictment was returned in Houston, Texas, on seven Greenleaf novels. That trial ended in a hung jury, and the government decided to move the prosecution to San Diego, where Greenleaf Classics was then based, and where charges were eventually dismissed based on Supreme Court rulings that found similar writings not to be legally actionable.
But then, in 1971, what may be the strangest obscenity prosecution in the history of obscenity law took place, also in San Diego. In late September, 1970, the United States Printing Office released a report of the findings of the President's Commission on Obscenity and Pornography. The Commission, formed at the behest of President Lyndon Johnson, had concluded that porn posed no threat to the American way of life—or as the report put it, there was "no evidence to date that exposure to explicit sexual materials plays a significant role in the causation of delinquent or criminal behavior among youths or adults"—a conclusion that didn't sit well with President Richard Nixon, who had taken office in January of 1969 before the Commission's report was released, and promptly condemned the effort.
The Johnson Commission hired experts to examine a wide variety of sexual material—none of which was included in the final published report. Hamling and Kemp saw this as a failure on the government's part, and in mid-December 1970, Greenleaf released its own version of the report, The Illustrated Presidential Report of the Commission on Obscenity and Pornography—just 352 pages long, but with 546 photos and drawings that illustrated various passages contained in the official report.
Just three months later, the officers of three publishing companies—Greenleaf Classics, Inc., Library Services, Inc., and Reed Enterprises—were indicted on 21 counts of violating postal laws by mailing obscene books and advertisements, and one count of conspiracy to violate the federal postal laws.
The indictments were announced in Washington, D.C., but the trial took place in San Diego, and according to a report in The New York Times of December 25, 1971—Christmas day!—the jury was unable to come to a decision as to whether Greenleaf and its officers and staff had published an obscene work, leading Judge Gordon Thompson Jr. to declare a mistrial on those charges.
However, the jury did find that Hamling, Kemp and two Greenleaf company officers were guilty of having mailed obscene brochures advertising the Illustrated Report through the mails—an echo of a similar conviction in 1966 of publisher Ralph Ginsburg for having mailed advertisements for his magazine Eros.
The Greenleaf defendants, all represented by prominent First Amendment attorney Stanley Fleishman, received prison sentences ranging from four years (Hamling, who was also fined $87,000) to three years (Kemp) to five years on probation (the other two defendants). The case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1974, in what First Amendment attorney J. Michael Murray said resulted in a "very important federal obscenity ruling," but the convictions were sustained.
The convictions spelled the end for Greenleaf Classics, and it's unknown what Kemp did for a living after his release from prison. However, in 2002, he did return to editing fanzines, creating one titled e*I*, which was mainly a memoir of Kemp's experiences in the science-fiction field.
A YouTube video of Earl Kemp speaking in 2011 about some aspects of his life can be found here.
