Kentucky- Larry Flynt, the cheerily profane smut peddler, Thursday lectured the nation’s editorial cartoonists on why free speech is so valuable, touching indelicately — in no particular order — on Christian fundamentalists, scornful feminists, President Bush, blacks and the news media.
Flynt, publisher of Hustler magazine, spoke at the Kentucky Theatre to the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists, which is meeting in Lexington this week, and dozens of curious locals.
Before the speech, the crowd watched parts of the film The People Vs. Larry Flynt, which highlighted his landmark First Amendment victory in 1988 at the U.S. Supreme Court. The court ruled that-Flynt was entitled to mock the Rev. Jerry Falwell in a parody advertisement that suggested he had sex with his mother in an outhouse.
Falwell had sued Flynt for libel and infliction of emotional distress.
“Had the court gone in Falwell’s favor, you all would have been out of business,” Flynt told the cartoonists. “Because all somebody would have to prove, to sue you, is that you hurt their feelings.”
Flynt, 61, is a native of Magoffin County but now lives in California, where he recently ran for governor.
He uses a wheelchair because a white supremacist shot and crippled him in 1978 for publishing interracial sex photographs.
Yesterday, Flynt’s speech was slightly slurred. He stared blankly over the heads of the crowd, and struggled to lift a water bottle to his lips. A male aide, roughly the size and shape of a refrigerator, wheeled him into the theater and stood guard near him.
But Flynt was mentally alert, taking mostly friendly questions and offering his views on:
• The Hustler store that his brother, Jimmy Flynt, plans to open this summer at Interstate 75 and Winchester Road.
In March, amid local controversy, the Urban County Council prohibited adult bookstores, video stores, cabarets, and adult dancing and entertainment businesses at interstate interchanges. In response, Jimmy Flynt said he would limit the Hustler store to a gift shop and cafe.
“We will comply with all the zoning rules and regulations. The store will get opened,” Larry Flynt said yesterday. “We’re used to that (community outcry) happening wherever we go.”
• The Federal Communications Commission’s crackdown on “indecency” in radio and television.
“You’ve got that little snot-nosed kid of Colin Powell’s running it (the FCC), Michael Powell,” Flynt said.
“They’re making a big to-do about nothing,” he said. “They made this big thing about Janet Jackson’s breast — which I kept looking for, and I never could see it.”
• Whether pornography degrades women — one of the few subjects on which audience members challenged him.
“I’ve had thousands of models pose for me, and I never heard one tell me that she felt exploited,” he said. “If it is something that someone wants to do, there shouldn’t be a feminist down on the street corner telling her she can’t do it.
• Offensive cartoons.
Flynt said Hustler, from its start, has published cartoons bound to anger someone, if not everyone. They have included drawings of black people with big lips and noses, dressed like pimps and eating watermelon, which Flynt said offend only white people.
The one cartoon he regrets, in hindsight, mocked then-first lady Betty Ford after she had both of her breasts removed because of cancer.
“It was a very insensitive thing to do,” he said. “We made some mistakes. Everyone knows that tastelessness was part of our goal.”
Mike Luckovich, editorial cartoonist for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, cringed as Flynt boasted about his cartoons’ depictions of blacks. But Flynt is admirable in his own way, Luckovich said later.
“I’m so used to public figures and celebrities who are very guarded in what they say. They just talk in these bland little sound bites,” Luckovich said. “He doesn’t hide his opinions.”
• President Bush and the USA Patriot Act. “Bush’s warmongering aside, his assault on civil liberties and rights, vis-a-vis the Patriot Act, is probably the most damaging thing that he did for the nation,” Flynt said.