Larry Flynt
Larry Claxton Flynt Jr. was an American publisher and the president of Larry Flynt Publications. LFP mainly produces pornographic magazines, such as Hustler, pornographic videos, and three pornographic television channels named Hustler TV. Flynt fought several high-profile legal battles involving the First Amendment, and unsuccessfully ran for public office. He was paralyzed from the waist down due to injuries sustained in a 1978 attempted assassination by serial killer Joseph Paul Franklin. In 2003, Arena magazine listed him at No. 1 on the "50 Powerful People in Porn" list. The 1996 biographical drama film The People vs. Larry Flynt, directed by Miloš Forman and starring Woody Harrelson, chronicles the life and career of Flynt.
Early life
Flynt was born in Lakeville, Magoffin County, Kentucky, the first of three children of Larry Claxton Flynt Sr., a sharecropper, and Edith, a homemaker. He had two younger siblings: sister Judy and brother Jimmy Ray Flynt. His father served in the United States Army in the European theatre of World War II. Due to his father's absence, Flynt was raised solely by his mother and maternal grandmother for the first three years of his life. Flynt was raised in poverty, and said Magoffin County was the poorest county in the nation during the Great Depression. In 1951, Flynt's sister, Judy, died of leukemia at age four. The death provoked his parents' divorce one year later; Flynt was then raised by his mother in Hamlet, Indiana, and his brother, Jimmy, was raised by his maternal grandmother in Magoffin County. Two years later, Flynt returned to live in Magoffin County with his father because he disliked his mother's new boyfriend.Flynt attended Salyersville High School in the ninth grade. However, he ran away from home and, despite being only 15 years old, joined the United States Army using a counterfeit birth certificate. It was around that time that he developed a passion for the game of poker. After being honorably discharged, Flynt returned to his mother in Indiana and found employment at the Inland Manufacturing Company, an affiliate of General Motors. However, there was a union-led slowdown and he was laid off after only three months. He then returned to his father in Kentucky. For a brief period, he became a bootlegger but stopped when he learned that county deputies were searching for him. After living on his savings for two months, he enlisted in the United States Navy in July 1960. He became a radar operator on. He was the operator on duty when the ship was assigned to recover John Glenn's space capsule. He was honorably discharged in July 1964.
First enterprises
In early 1965, Flynt took $1,800 from his savings and bought his mother's bar in Dayton, Ohio, called the Keewee. He refitted it and was soon making $1,000 a week ; he used the profits to buy two other bars. He worked as many as 20 hours a day and took amphetamines to stay awake.Flynt decided to open a new, higher-class bar, which would also be the first in the area to feature nude hostess dancers; he named it the Hustler Club. From 1968 onward, with the help of his brother Jimmy and later his girlfriend Althea Leasure, he opened Hustler Clubs in Akron, Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati, and Toledo, Ohio. Soon each club grossed between $260,000 and $520,000 a year. He also acquired the Dayton franchise of a small newspaper called Bachelor's Beat, which he published for two years before selling it. At the same time, he closed a money-losing vending-machine business.
''Hustler'' magazine
In January 1972, Flynt created the Hustler Newsletter, a two-page, black-and-white publication about his clubs. This item became so popular with his customers that by May 1972, he expanded the Hustler Newsletter to 16 pages, then to 32 pages in August 1973. As a result of the 1973 oil crisis, the American economy entered recession and the revenues of Hustler Clubs declined. Flynt had to refinance his debts or declare bankruptcy. He decided to turn the Hustler Newsletter into a sexually explicit magazine with national distribution. He paid the start-up costs of the new magazine by deferring payment of sales taxes his clubs owed on their activities.In July 1974, the first issue of Hustler was published. Although the first few issues went largely unnoticed, within a year the magazine became highly lucrative, and Flynt was able to pay his tax debts. Flynt's friend Al Goldstein said that Hustler took its inspiration from his own tabloid Screw, but credited his comrade-in-arms with accomplishing what he had not: creating a national publication. In November 1974, Hustler showed the first "pink-shots", or photos of open vulvas. Flynt had to fight to publish each issue. Many people, including some at his distribution company, found the magazine too explicit and threatened to remove it from the market. Shortly thereafter, Flynt was approached by a paparazzo who had taken pictures of former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis while she was sunbathing nude on vacation in 1971. He purchased them for $18,000 and published them in the August 1975 issue. That issue attracted widespread attention, and one million copies were sold within a few days. Now a millionaire, Flynt bought a $375,000 mansion.
Attempted assassination
On March 6, 1978, during a legal battle related to obscenity in Gwinnett County, Georgia, Flynt and his local attorney, Gene Reeves Jr. were shot on the sidewalk in Lawrenceville by Joseph Paul Franklin. The shooting left Flynt partially paralyzed with permanent spinal cord damage, and in need of a wheelchair. Reeves Jr. was shot in the arm and side; but fully recovered.Joseph Paul Franklin
Franklin, a militant white supremacist and serial killer, also shot Vernon Jordan; he targeted other black and Jewish people in a killing spree from 1977 to 1980. Violently opposed to 'miscegenation,' he confessed to the shootings many years later, claiming he was outraged by an interracial photo shoot in Hustler. About Flynt and a Hustler pictorial, he stated, "I saw that interracial couple... having sex... It just made me sick... I threw the magazine down and thought, I'm gonna kill that guy." Flynt himself suspected the attack was part of a larger conspiracy involving ultra-right elements surrounding U.S. Representative Larry McDonald also behind the Karen Silkwood case with ties to the Intelligence Community and that Franklin may have been subject to MKULTRA-style mind control.Franklin was never brought to trial for the attack on Flynt. Franklin was eventually charged in Missouri with eight unrelated counts of murder and sentenced to death. Flynt expressed his opposition to the death penalty and stated he did not want Franklin to be executed. Despite that, Franklin was executed by lethal injection on November 20, 2013.
Personal life and death
Flynt was married five times; his wives were:- Mary Flynt
- Peggy Mathis
- Kathy Barr
- Althea Leasure
- Elizabeth Berrios
He said he was an evangelical Christian for one year, "converted" in 1977 by evangelist Ruth Carter Stapleton, the sister of Jimmy Carter. He said he became "born again" and that he had a vision from God while flying with Stapleton in his jet. He continued to publish his magazine, however, vowing to "hustle for God". He later declared himself an atheist.
Flynt said he had bipolar disorder.
Flynt died from heart failure in Los Angeles on February 10, 2021, at age 78.
Flynt's enterprises
By 1970, he ran eight strip clubs throughout Ohio in Cincinnati, Toledo, Akron, and Cleveland.In July 1974, Flynt first published Hustler as a step forward from the Hustler Newsletter, which was advertising for his businesses. The magazine struggled for the first year, partly because many distributors and wholesalers refused to handle it as its nude photos became increasingly graphic. It targeted working-class men and grew from a shaky start to a peak circulation of around three million. The publication of nude paparazzi pictures of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis in August 1975 was a major coup. Hustler has often featured more explicit photographs than comparable magazines and has contained depictions of women that some find demeaning, such as a naked woman in a meat grinder or presented as a dog on a leash – though Flynt later said that the meat grinder image was a criticism of the pornography industry itself.
Flynt created his privately held company Larry Flynt Publications in 1976. LFP published several other magazines and also controlled distribution of the various titles. LFP launched Ohio Magazine in 1977, and later its output included other mainstream work. LFP sold the distribution business, as well as several mainstream magazines, beginning in 1996. LFP started to produce pornographic movies in 1998, through the Hustler Video film studio, which purchased VCA Pictures in 2003. In 2014, Flynt said his print portfolio made up only 10% of his company's revenue, and predicted the demise of Hustler due to competition from the Internet.
On June 22, 2000, Flynt opened the Hustler Casino, a card room located in the Los Angeles suburb of Gardena. Other ventures which were wholly owned or licensed by Flynt or are wholly owned or licensed by LFP, Inc. include the Hustler Clubs and the Hustler Hollywood Store. LFP also publishes Barely Legal, a pornographic magazine featuring young women who reportedly have recently turned 18, the minimum age for a person to appear in pornography in the US.