If my business—if you can call what I do a business rather than a grand delusion that I've been pursuing for more than 50 years—needed a slogan, something like, "Just Do It" or "Finger Lickin' Good," it would be: "Pissing People Off Since 1971." This occurred to me the other day when I was thinking about all the people whom my writing has enraged or who have been infuriated by cartoons that other people have created and that I published in newspapers and magazines I once edited.
It's true that in the 1970s I did publish things to intentionally piss people off. In those days of emerging punk and outrage for the sake of outrage, it was a generational response to coming of age in a society run by criminals and hypocrites and seeing no path forward into a bleak-looking future. The Sex Pistols had good reason to sing, "No future for you."
The best-known episode of this protopunk era was the publication, in 1974, in Observation Post (OP), a radical college newspaper I edited, of a cartoon of a "nun using a cross as a sexual object" (as The New York Times put it), drawn by the late artist and filmmaker Robert Attanasio.
The drawing was Attanasio's statement on his childhood abuse at the hands of the Catholic clergy, which left him with what I now think was a case of PTSD. And the public reaction to the cartoon, which I touched on in Beaver Street, and which I'm exploring in detail in the book I'm currently working on, was so extreme, I'm still trying to make sense of it.
A very pissed off ultra-conservative New York Senator, James Buckley, led the charge against OP, calling for a federal investigation and the expulsion of the editors responsible for the cartoon. But nothing of the sort happened. Student newspapers, the courts declared, have a constitutional right to criticize religion in any manner they see fit, and the Catholic Church is not above criticism—which I'd think is especially true for those who've been subjected to the Church's abuse.
The people who became enraged at my John Lennon bio, Nowhere Man, were Yoko Ono's media flacks as well as Lennon fans who didn't like the inherent truth I communicated in the book. The media flacks were just doing what they were told to do. But fans of the man who sang "Just give me some truth," yet are opposed to learning the truth of who Lennon was in real life, have always puzzled me. It wasn't my intention to piss anybody off with Nowhere Man. It just happened naturally.
Beaver Street, my history of the adult entertainment industry, pissed off a lot of people, too. Some of them were enraged that I treated certain characters with what they thought was too much sympathy. Others were angry for the opposite reason. But nobody was more pissed off than the late Gloria Leonard, a former porn star and figurehead publisher of High Society magazine. Leonard demanded I make clear that she was the real publisher, not a figurehead. I refused. The barrage of junior-high-school-level insults she lobbed at me were reminiscent of the wit and wisdom of Donald Trump. The episode saddened me. I'd met Leonard several times and I liked her. But she was not the publisher of High Society. That would be Carl Ruderman, who hid behind Leonard's skirt.
I've run into only one person whom my latest book, A Brooklyn Memoir, pissed off. It happened at an event where I read from the book and then took questions from the audience. A woman, making no effort to hide her rage, said that she grew up in Flatbush, only a few blocks from where I did, and what I described in the book was nothing like what she experienced. She implied that I was lying. My response: "Each block was like a mini-neighborhood and everybody had their own experiences." And I moved on.
There are more recent examples that I prefer not to get into here. Because there's no need to re-infuriate people whose wounds are still raw. But it does remind me of an old adage: If your stories don't piss anybody off, what you're writing is public relations, not journalism.
And, of course, there are the immortal words of Joan Didion: "Writers are always selling somebody out."
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