An Unseemly Man: My life as a pornographer, pundit, and social outcast is the highly readable autobiography of Larry Flynt. For those who don’t know, Mr Flynt came to prominence after publishing hardcore porn magazines like Hustler in the United States.
If Larry Flynt had only put out pictures of women with their legs spread he probably would not be as well know as he is today. But as he battled a litany of obscenity and other legal charges throughout his career his cases helped established freedom of speech in the United States on firmer footing. He was also shot in the prime of his life by a white supremacist angered over his publication of pictures featuring a white woman and a black man engaged in sexual activity.
The shooting took away Larry Flynt’s ability to walk. But it did not eliminate his zeal or willingness to fight. As he said, he never backed down from a confrontation. The contents of this book and Mr Flynt’s actual life experience bear that out.
What is truly obscene?
Although this book contains the story of Larry Flynt’s life it also picks up where Thy Neighbor’s Wife left off. Published some 15 years after Guy Talese’s masterful work An Unseemly Man nonetheless features several of the same figures.
For example the prominent anti-porn crusader Charles Keating appears in both books. Though by the time An Unseemly Man was published in 1996 Keating had been sentenced to 10 years in prison for his role in the savings and loan crisis. As Larry Flynt so artfully puts it in this book, “Before he fucked the savings and loan industry, Keating tried to prevent the portrayal of fucking in magazines”.
Unlike Thy Neighbor’s Wife this book was written in a very down-to-earth and conversational tone. This doesn’t make it any better or worse. It is simply in keeping with Larry Flynt’s style as a man from a poor rural upbringing with just a high school equivalency document marking the high point of his formal education. This is not to say Mr Flynt was unintelligent. Far from it! He was a master of his craft.
A life hard lived
Although Larry Flynt ended up as a rich man with a vast publishing empire his life was full of hardship. We was born to a destitute alcoholic farmer in the backwoods. His beloved younger sister died in childhood. His parents split up and he bounced around for years.
After lying about his age, Flynt did a stint in the army. Later he served for a longer period in the US Navy, though he lost his motivation when he returned ashore to find his woman knocked up by another man.
Later still Larry married the love of his life only to watch her fall into heroin addiction, contract AIDS, and die in his bathroom. This happened as he suffered years of pain from the attempted assassination that left him paralyzed but not numb from the waist down.
Throughout his life Larry Flynt variously made money as a beggar, soldier, sailor, factory worker, bootlegger, bar owner (of the pub, strip club and hostess bar variety), casino owner, vending machine owner and magazine publisher. The stories behind all of this and more are succinctly yet sufficiently told in An Unseemly Man.
Breaking ground and battling
But Larry Flynt wasn’t only a businessman. He was arguably even more notable for the public stances he took against everything from moral hypocrisy to religious hucksterism. He even took on the massive tobacco industry. As he put it:
In the early days of Hustler I had sought out cigarette ads in an effort to bring in some needed cash. All the cigarette companies had turned me down. They didn’t want to advertise, they said, in such a raunchy magazine. I stewed in quiet for a while, but then became very angry. They were killing hundreds of thousands of people a year selling their carcinogenic product. What evidence was there that pornography did any harm to people?
It wasn’t only a potential loss of money that motivated Flynt as we see when we read on.
Ignoring protests from my advertising director, I had began running a series of full-page ads on the back cover of Hustler showing in graphic detail the effects of smoking…. No one in a national publication had ever taken on the powerful cigarette companies in such a fearless, uncompromising way…. when Hustler’s circulation began to climb into the millions… word had come from the cigarette companies that they were ready to play ball. All they wanted in return was for me to end the antismoking ads. I responded with another back cover ad, this time coupled with an article exposing the deceit and malevolence of the tobacco industry.
The observant may note that pictures of things like “cancer-ravaged human lung and tongue” now adorn actual cigarette packaging in many places around the world. Though Larry Flynt is speaking of the 1970’s when tobacco companies still more-or-less had their way when it came to marketing and much else.
Larry Flynt’s legacy
Flynt was still being hit with “obscenity” charges as late as 2003, years after the publication of An Unseemly Man. But by-and-large he was victorious in his many legal battles. The most significant case was Hustler Magazine vs Falwell which went all the way to the Supreme Court. Despite infamously calling the nine justices “eight assholes and a token cunt” in open court years prior, Larry Flynt won this landmark case by a unanimous vote. The case established the right to satirize, caricature or parody public figures.
Mr Flynt would later praise this and similar rulings while explaining their real importance in his own signature style. “If the First Amendment will protect a scumbag like me then it will protect all of you, because I’m the worst”. And that indeed is the point.
Larry Flynt died in February 2021. But his book published many years earlier still managed to paint a vivid picture of his life. As time goes on we learn even more. In March 2021, the VICE website got ahold of 300 plus pages of law enforcement records kept on Mr Flynt. Their reporting on the report is quite interesting and in many cases it corroborates what Flynt wrote in An Unseemly Man some 25 years prior.
Various claims and criticisms have also been levied against Flynt since his autobiography went to press. Without investing the time and energy necessary to engage it all I believe it suffices to say that An Unseemly Man is worth a read. It tells the story of a man who’s life intersected with developments and changes in the United States and the world as a whole in the last three decades of the 20th century. In some ways it even helps explain where we find ourselves today. I recommend this book to anyone with even a passing interest in human sexuality or human rights. Four stars. 
Interesting. Americana.. Cheers.