Larry Flynt’s drive to loosen the puritan grip on the US has taken a new turn with his upmarket sex shops. Frances Anderton meets the porn king
It is midday in a sunny, spacious coffee bar on Sunset Strip. Enthroned in a gold- plated wheelchair, munching a bagel, sits the man considered a shameless smut peddler, ardent defender of the United States’s First Amendment and, with his offer of $1-million for dirt on Republican politicians, the scourge of Washington moralists.
The caf is sleek and bright, with floor-to- ceiling glass windows and maple flooring, shelves of books and magazines, and a bar serving latte. It could be another Starbucks- style coffee house were it not for the billboard- size photos of busty babes, the censored poster image from The People Versus Larry Flynt, the plastic-wrapped Hustler magazines, and the goods – sexy leather and lace lingerie, Hustler merchandise (caps, cups, T-shirts), bathing accessories, and, behind a screen embossed with ”Relax, It’s Just Sex”, a cornucopia of hard-core videos and sex toys.
This is Hustler Hollywood, porn publishing magnate Flynt’s latest creation, a posh sex emporium. It is testimony to the mainstreaming of Flynt and of pornography in the US.
Flynt has a strong presence. He is surrounded by handlers – his brother Jimmy, his daughter Theresa, who manages the store, his PR, the young man who pushes his chair – but appears a law unto himself. He is snappily dressed in shades of olive (jewelled rings are the only sign of his legendary flamboyance) that set off his Irish red hair and pale, freckled skin. His hazel eyes survey his store with amusement.
The politically correct part of my conscience warns me to revile the scumbag who once ran a cover featuring a woman being fed into a meat grinder. But it is hard not to like the guy who made a fool of Washington, and has a talent for bon mots (Flyntisms, he calls them) – for example, ”Bob Livingston told The New York Times that I was a bottom-feeder. That’s true, but when I got down there look what I found.”
Livingston was the US speaker-elect who got out just as Flynt was going to publish damaging revelations about his private life. Flynt was subsequently credited with bringing about the beginning of the end of the impeachment saga.
While we are talking, two men who look like archetypal blue-collar Hustler readers ask to pose with him for a photograph, then a smartly dressed thirty-something black woman asks for his autograph, as does a young man, new to Los Angeles. He declares Flynt his lifelong hero, says the million-dollar offer for dirt on the Republicans was ”genius” and so is this store. ”It’s not seedy like the places you run into, get what you want, and run out again,” he says, adding, ”We need these in Ohio.”
It so happens Cincinnati, Ohio, is where Flynt opened a more conventional Hustler adult entertainment store 18 months ago, as a challenge to the restrictive obscenity laws there. He found to his surprise that a quarter of his customers were women. ”After 30 years in this business, it never ceases to amaze me,” he says.
He has also found that 25% of Hustler readers are women, up from 3% when he launched the magazine in 1974. So he decided to create a new type of outlet ”that does not have the atmosphere of a sex store”, but would be comfortable for women.
He chose Sunset Strip, because it is both a prominent entertainment district and close to home, but found West Hollywood’s zoning regulations forbade stores where the ”preponderant business” was sexual stimulation. To get around this he added the coffee, the books, the newspapers, the Hustler merchandise and, voil, the sex shop was recast as Next for sex.
Hustler Hollywood is open from 7am to 3am but really hots up late at night, when it fills with people of all ages. Maybe half are women. With looks ranging from nonchalance to embarrassed trepidation, they wander, in full view of passers-by, among the leather underwear, spray-on latex, strawberry- flavoured body powder and rubber moulds of porn stars’ vaginas. The only type of customer conspicuously absent, notes a cashier, is the ”dirty old man in a raincoat”.
Some men are not convinced. ”I don’t like the idea of sex shops turning into cafs,” says screenwriter Michael Traeger. With others he believes that sleaziness is part of the allure when buying pornography.
Hustler Hollywood arrives when porn is increasingly acceptable and available. While Washington has spent a year having conniptions over adulterous foreplay in the Oval Office, much of the rest of the US has been entertaining itself with hard-core porn on the Internet and triple X-rated videos in hotel rooms and video stores.
Flynt has played a significant role in the mainstreaming of pornography, not least as the subject of the redemptive The People Versus Larry Flynt, which represented him as an all-American hero rather than as a reflection of the nation’s darker side. He sees it as a trend that is ”going to continue to grow and I don’t think the government can turn back the clock”.
Before everyone gets jaded, however, Flynt is busy working his new market. He says the store is meeting expectations (the hottest- selling sex toy is the vibrator). ”If I’d known retail was going to be as popular as it is, I would have started earlier,” he remarks. He plans a roll-out across the US – although ”there’s no reason to go into the Bible Belt” – and fresh enticements at Hustler Hollywood, such as sex-talk sessions with porn stars.
The store’s presence has not deterred the developers of a hotel opposite and high-end residential development behind. A few residents did call complaining that the window displays were pornographic, says Lisa Heap, planning manager for the City of West Hollywood, but, ”the day I went”, she says, ”there was nothing objectionable. They were modelling those ‘Larry Flynt for President’ T-shirts.”
If Flynt ran for president he would likely do better now than when he threw his hat into the ring as a publicity stunt in 1984. The man is on a roll. Already a hero in the pornography industry, he has won favour among a larger public delighted by his antics on Capitol Hill (”smut may be my vocation, but politics is my hobby”), his outspokenness and his commitment to his mission – freeing the US from its religion-induced ”guilt trip about sex” through fighting for an ”end to obscenity laws”.
He wishes that Bill Clinton would make a public statement defending privacy and freedom in consensual sex. He plans more Hustler stores and a new card club in Los Angeles County, due to open later this year.
But despite having a full plate, Flynt – the man broken by a bigot’s bullet – is wistful. At 56, he says, ”for the most part I’ve lived my life. If I have a legacy to leave it will be that I’ve contributed to expanding the parameters of free speech.”
One of Flynt’s admirers has referred to him as ”the last American outlaw”. That pleases him. ”Usually to attain the majority you have to compromise somewhere along the line. I just don’t think anything worthwhile can be accomplished by compromise.” If Hustler stores become as commonplace as Gap, will Flynt, and pornography, lose their outlaw status?