Adult entrepreneur Larry Flynt, founder of LFP, Inc., which publishes several adult magazines, produces several lines of adult videotapes and even owns casinos in Southern California, delivered the keynote address on Thursday afternoon to the hundreds of attendees at the 12th Annual Gentlemen’s Club Owners Expo, held this year at the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino.
Flynt was introduced by Jim St. John of the P.T.’s chain of nightclubs, and spoke for nearly half an hour. What follows is a transcription of Flynt’s talk:
“I’ve been on a book tour promoting my new book, Sex, Lies & Politics, so if you want to know how to vote this November, pick up a copy and read it. But I’m pretty worn out after doing 20 cities, so I hope I’m prepared for this.”
“I’m grateful to have this opportunity to speak with you today. You know, you’re part of an industry that has really prospered in the past quarter of a century, and now the mere existence of this industry is being threatened by a new conservative political movement in this country, and the only way we can fight them is with our lawyers and at the ballot box, so I encourage you not to give up, because when you throw in the towel, they win, regardless of the circumstances.”
“I’ve been dragged through most of the courts in the land and shot and jailed for defending the First Amendment, and many of those lonely nights in jail when I questioned whether it was worth it or not, I used to always think what Martin Luther King said. He said, ‘If something’s not worth going to jail for, it’s not worth very much.’”
“When 30 years ago, Janis Joplin so eloquently sang the lyrics, ‘Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose,’ that sentiment is more applicable to today than it was then, because as a nation, we’ve already lost our innocence, and the only thing left to go is our freedom.”
“I’m often asked if the Founding Fathers had Hustler magazine in mind when they drafted the Constitution. No, I don’t think they did. Neither do I think they had strip clubs in mind. But what I do think they had in mind was the unrestricted right of free choice from which the First Amendment gets its vitality and meaning.”
“All speech starts with a thought, so when you censor speech, you censor thought. No one has a right to do this. I find it troublesome that we’ve had free speech for so long that it’s lost its value. The First Amendment is intended to protect all speech, no matter how offensive. If the comments are not going to offend anyone, you don’t need the protection of the First Amendment. Freedom of speech is not the freedom for the thought you love, but rather for the thought you hate the most. If you go out and take a survey tomorrow, 98 percent of the people will say they believe in free speech, and then when you say, ‘Well, how about hate speech? How about flag burning? How about pornography?’, they say, ‘Oh, I didn’t know that’s what you were talking about.’ Everybody has their own version of what free speech should be, so you go from 98 percent down to below 50 percent. That’s why I’m thankful that the First Amendment is there in essence to protect the minority, not the majority.”
“Although we live in a nation where the majority rules, democracy only works when individual rights are considered. Without individual rights, democracy is totally worthless. You can’t have five wolves and one sheep voting on what to have for supper, because the sheep’s gonna lose every time, and I know; I’ve been that sheep a few times. We pay a price for everything in life, and the price we pay to live in a free society is toleration. We have to tolerate things we don’t necessarily like so we can be free. Freedom is not lost in one fell swoop; it’s lost a book at a time, a movie at a time or a magazine at a time. Not so long ago in the past century there was a man who long before he started exterminating the Jews, the top of his agenda was censorship. But when he began burning the books, he didn’t start with the classics; he started with the pornography and the so-called garbage that nobody wanted to read, and eventually it led to Voltaire and Shakespeare.”
“Another good example of a society that’s really screwed up is the culture that exists in our own country here. In your local newspaper, you can publish a photograph of the most horrific picture imaginable: A mutilated, decapitated body. You might even win a Pulitzer price for it. But if you publish a photograph in the same newspaper of two people making love, you might go to jail. So we’re actually living in a society that condemns sex but condones violence. Until there’s some readjustment in those priorities, I think many of us that want to live our lives and be truly free are going to have a difficult time doing that.”
“We use sex to communicate with more than any other single medium, so you’d think we would make a better effort to understand it. But there’s as many myths about human sexuality today as there were 300 years ago. Other than the desire for survival, sex is the strongest single desire that the human being has. It’s easy for me to understand why sex is so political, because the church has had its hand on our crotch for over 2000 years, and the government is exceedingly moving in that direction, figuring if they can control our pleasure center, they could control us.”
“But the ruling class, you know, has a new problem, in a sense. See, the rich and the privileged have always had their leather-bound editions of pornography ever since the Victorian era, but today, the poor man’s art museum has become the bookstore and the video store. This, coupled with the advent of wireless communication, I really think the genie’s out of the bottle, and the government’s no longer going to be able to control people as they have in the past. See, down through the centuries, people will always control information, however religious or governed, but if you don’t have the information, it’s very difficult to control it. That’s the only shining light that I see in this effort to try and put all of the businesses that are on the fringe of the First Amendment out of business.”
“There’s nothing wrong with moral values if they work for you or your family, but boy, I have a problem when they start imposing them on other people. People’s lifestyles, sexual attitude or preference are his or her own business. What people view or read in the privacy of their own home is their personal business. We cannot limit adult reading habits to what’s fit for children or we’ll have nothing left but Alice In Wonderland and Little Red Riding-hood. Over the years, my most ardent foes have been the religious right, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. I like to call them the flip side of Osama bin Ladin. I took Mr. Falwell to the Supreme Court and beat him in a very important First Amendment case in 1988, and it was a unanimous decision. Needless to say, I got a great thrill out of that.”
“The other people that have attacked me over the years and will attack you as well because of the business that you’re in are the radical feminists. Now, I have no problem with the women’s movement. I support it completely: Equal rights, equal pay, non-discrimination in the workplace, the opportunity to break that glass ceiling. But radicals like Gloria Steinem, Andrea Dworkin and other relics from the ‘60s whose only claim to fame is that they urged a bunch of ugly women to march, I don’t think they speak for the average American woman. They’re always saying that – well, the same thing would be applicable to you, girls working in clubs, that what you’re doing is demeaning women, objectifying them. I get the same rhetoric in my business. But in all my years in the business, I never, ever had one model say that she felt that she was being objectified. I’ve photographed so many, and these girls do it because they want to do it, and not because they’re bad people either; it’s just they have the freedom and the opportunity to do it and they take advantage of it.”
“Probably one of the most evil acts that the government has been involved in is the passage and institution of the PATRIOT Act. All the civil liberties and individual rights that we gained in the last century have been placed in jeopardy by John Ashcroft and George Bush. Now, they will tell you that, oh, this is only for terrorists; if you’re not a terrorist or suspected terrorist, you don’t have to worry. But those words on paper that have become law, they don’t discriminate on nationality, you know. The same PATRIOT Act can apply to an American as apply to an Arab person. Now, today, in just a couple of years, your medical records are no longer private; your financial records are no longer private. Even your library records are no longer private, and if you are lucky enough to have an attorney and you’re incarcerated, your communication with the attorney can be monitored by the government. I mean, I think George Orwell was a little bit early with the book. Benjamin Franklin once said that – this is over 200 years ago, too, when he said, ‘Those who would trade their civil liberties for security deserve neither,’ and I think Bush and Ashcroft could have learned a lot by taking a page out of his book.”
“I understand from my lawyers that have been following some cases with the ACLU that we’ve determined that on a number of occasions, they have used the PATRIOT Act against Americans, and right here in Las Vegas, they used portions of the PATRIOT Act to nail a businessman on a RICO charge. So when they tell you that this is only for an Arab with a towel wrapped around his head, let them know that you know better.”
“You know, we not only have a conservative Supreme Court as well as a conservative administration, so there’s something we should brace ourselves for, and it’s not good news for our industry, and that is, we might have to face up to the fact that many civil rights or individual liberties that we gained with the very liberal Warren court in the ‘60s and ‘70s have been placed in jeopardy with the new conservative Supreme Court that we have, and especially if Bush gets reelected and he’ll have an opportunity to appoint any justices, they’ll come out of the same mold as Clarence Thomas did.”
“Every once in a while, the Supreme Court gets it right. We know that the political system is all screwed up, but we really like to think that when the chips are down, the Supreme Court’s gonna get it right. Well, they didn’t in Florida, and they lost a lot of luster and it’s gonna be tough getting it back. That whole state should have been ordered to be recounted, and there’s still people in America who believe George Bush won Florida, and I can tell you for a fact that he didn’t win Florida, and it doesn’t matter whether you were for Bush or Gore; that’s beside the point. What should concern you is fairness, what’s right for both. There’s few very basic rights that we have, and that’s probably one of the most important ones, and there’s only half the people turned out to vote during the last presidential election. If more people would turn out, we could create a revolving door in Washington and send those political hacks back to their own districts because all they’ve learned is to pamper the special interests.”
“Sometimes people aren’t concerned – I know people always get confused on the issue of pornography and obscenity. They’re not synonymous. Pornography’s been around ever since cavemen were doing etchings of their walls. Obscenity is like the concept of sin: It defies definition. What might be to one is not to another. Justice Douglas said it best: “What is obscene is better left in the minds of man.’ Obscenity is a legal definition. Pornography in itself is more acceptable than it’s ever been in our society. What determines if it’s obscene or not is the interpretation of the courts of the land. When Jerry Falwell eventually sued us, the magazine, back in the mid-‘80s, I could not get support from anyone. I lost at the trial level and I lost at the circuit court of appeals. I could not get anyone to file friend-of-the-court briefs with the U.S. Supreme Court. No one wanted to associate themselves with me, and they did not think the Supreme Court would consider the case. When the high court agreed to hear oral arguments, there was a quick reversal; all the mainstream media came on board to file briefs because they realized if I lost, they too would be adversely affected.”
“To explain a little bit more about the Falwell case so you’ll understand what happened there, the decision by the Supreme court was to make parody protected speech. The best examples of that are Saturday Night Live, David Letterman and Jay Leno; they do outrageous things on those shows compared to when Johnny Carson used to do the Tonight Show. It was rather tame. You know, they’re able to be as outrageous as they are because of the case that I won.”
“When the founders of the Constitution met in Philadelphia on May 24, 1784 to draft the Constitution, it was not the haves and have-nots getting together to hammer out rules to live by. It was the haves and the haves trying to protect their regional asses. The wealthy plantation owners, merchants, lawyers, slave-owners, land speculators – the small businessman was not represented at all. Patrick Henry didn’t show up because he said he smelled a rat. The reason that I point that out about the Constitution is, we have a wonderful country, but don’t kid yourself: From Day 1, it was the elite that ran things. I also want you to forget about George Washington and that goddamned cherry tree, because George Washington was not the father of our country. Thomas Paine was the father of our country. He cautioned the framers about avoiding a concentration of power in government, emphasizing that the Supreme Court justices, appointed for life, could in fact become legislators, and that’s exactly what has happened. The Supreme Court has emerged as a new legislative body, making virtually all of the decisions that affect our daily lives.”
“You probably remember my foray into the Clinton impeachment bill, through a story I like to tell; people get a kick out of it. I’d go home every night and on the television, no matter what channel I turned to, it was always ‘Bash Clinton’ night. I looked at the polls, and the polls said 70 percent of the people still wanted him to remain in office. Well, I said this is partisan, this is inherently unfair, because the Republicans are as guilty of as much and more than what he did. Well, if we were going to throw every CEO of the Fortune 500 companies who got a blowjob in his office out of his seat, we wouldn’t have anybody to run the country.” (Applause)
“Clinton didn’t commit treason; he didn’t rob the treasury. I ran an ad in the Washington Post offering a million dollars for anyone that could establish that they’d had illicit relations with their congressman or senator. The first guy to fall was Speaker of the House Bob Livingston, and on the day that he resigned, he was scheduled to take Newt Gingrich’s seat, so he was number third in line to the President, so it was a big deal, and on the day he resigned, he did an interview with the New York Times, and they asked him about me, and he referred to me as a ‘bottom feeder,’ and the Times called me for a comment, and I said, ‘Yeah, that’s right – but look what I found when I got down there.’” (Applause)
“We managed to get about a dozen other congressmen; some of them are necessarily—not for reasons that we could approach them to resign and get them out of Congress, but we’ve slowly been chipping away and we’ve been pretty successful. One was Rep. Bob Barr, the congressman from Georgia. He was the head of the Pro-Life Republican Congressional Caucus in the House of Representatives. He would go out on the House floor and say abortion is equivalent to murder, and he’d leave and go home and take his wife to the hospital so she could have an abortion, and we have his cancelled check where he paid for it with his own check. So that guy’s a real scumbag; he did not belong in our government, and that is the type of hypocrisy that he and Livingston would do. Joe Esterhasz, in his book The American Rhapsody, gave me credit for saving the presidency. I doubt that that’s true; I think things would have turned out pretty much as they did, but one thing’s for sure: When Livingston fell, the whole tenor of the trial in the Senate changed.”
“America’s big on telling its citizens they live in the land of the free, but how free are we when our sexual attitudes are being constantly monitored? When we’re being told, as if we were children, what we can or cannot see or read? How free are we if our local governments decide what can turn us on and what should not? What is obscene and what is acceptable? The greatest right that any nation can afford its people is the right to be left alone, and in closing, I’d just like to say that if I have any legacy to leave, I’d like that to be that I have fought to expand the parameters of free speech. I can’t think of a more noble goal.”
“I want to thank you for having me here today.”
