Why Won’t You Say What *Really* Happened?
Nine Radical Journalists Who Told the Truth and Paid the Price
The reason I’m a working writer today, is because I was an underground journalist in the 70s. We wrote about Vietnam, about Bible-free sex, about race in Amerikkka. —About life that didn’t look like the Nixon White House.
Was our amateurism an embarrassment? Were we all a bunch of stoners and bomb-throwers?
Well, sure, a little. Who else was going to do it?
At the time, we found the coverage of the New York Times, et. al., as preposterous as people find it today. We couldn’t believe their dilettante airs. Sound familiar?
This week, my friend Masha Gessen said they were preparing a syllabus for their new class on the nature of news and media writing itself. I want to read everything on Masha’s list, as well as chime in with my own suggestions.
Allow me to share 9 titles that have fallen a bit out of memory, the rarities. Some of them are out of print, but between your library, the bookstore, or Internet Archive, you’ll find them!
Page-turners, all.
When I want to show someone what the underground press looked like, when we didn’t have a nickel but we were out to change the world, I show them my thick coffee table book: The Movement Toward a New America: The Beginnings of a Long Revolution.
It’s not just text, it’s reproductions of the papers’ designs, the photographs and comix, the stories where no one knew the author’s real name but everyone was quoting the lines.
L: Parks Bus portrait, facing page writers who came out of the U.G. Center: The group that freed the Dow Chemical papers, showing what napalm really did. R: Various folks who’ve had enough. +Crumb’s famous “white man” cartoon. Puritans control public morality in the press: Bible-Thumpers with their dick in their hands. They’re unbearable! The nature of “sex news” itself is rarely critiqued.
I offer one book, that tells it like it is: Caught Looking: Feminism, Pornography, and Censorship.1
When I was teaching at UCSC, I used one of the chapters by Barbara O’Dair and Abby Tallmer, “Sex Premises” to prompt my undergraduate class to act out the different sides of erotic-political charades.
I would read each “premise” aloud, (see image examples) and they had to criss-cross the room to align with a YES or a NO. “Go with your gut, your first impression. Watch what happens to the splits between your gender experience, age, sexual life.”
They would never read a “sex headline” the same way again.
First two pages of “Sex Premises” from Caught Looking. Story by Barbara O’Dair and Abby Tallmer.
Fair Warning: I’m a Hunter Thompson completist. There’s nothing of his I wouldn’t recommend. I suggest his media anthology, The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time, because it gathers some of his best work on the campaign trail, AND Vegas, and the greatest sports/combat journalism story ever written: “The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved.”
© Jon Bailiff, the night Hunter died
