RIP Larry Flynt: Kentucky native, porn publisher, and First Amendment champion

In the gathering gray of an April evening in 2004, I waited alone in the alley behind the Kentucky Theater, uncertain that my guest would show up. Inside, 150 or so attendees of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists annual convention watched a screening of the 1996 drama “The People vs. Larry Flynt.”

The film chronicled the infamous pornographer’s landmark 1988 legal battle with the late Rev. Jerry Falwell, which ended with a unanimous Supreme Court firmly reinforcing our collective right to satirize the powerful. (Even if that satire implies that a renowned religious figure had fornicated with his own mother in an outhouse.) The AAEC had filed a friend of the court brief on Flynt’s behalf.

I didn’t wait long. A standard prom-issue limo slid up next to the loading dock. A couple of well-dressed young men emerged, lifted the gold wheelchair out and positioned it. Out swung Larry Claxton Flynt’s legs, rendered useless by a 1978 assassination attempt and wrapped in an expensive suit. Flynt struggled into position, looked up at me and growled “Goddammit, I hate to f---ing travel!”

Flynt, who died last week at 78, not only won the big First Amendment case, he was a native Kentuckian, making him a natural “get” for the Lexington convention. I had found his office tricky to communicate with, since they made no demands, didn’t need airline tickets (he had his own jet) and handled their own hotel reservations. He had simply barked into the phone, some eight months earlier, “All right, dammit, I’ll be there!”

Waving off my probably-too-effusive appreciation for coming, Flynt, his handlers and I quietly slipped in the alley doors, made our way along the offstage-left wing and BAM! BAM! BAM! It suddenly struck me as both darkly hilarious and some kind of grave breach of protocol that the scene where he takes a bullet was playing out onscreen. I leaned down to offer an apology, but Flynt cut me off. “Don’t worry, I’ve seen this movie.” Indeed.

I knew he’d be a lightning-rod speaker and he didn’t disappoint. Professing himself a great fan of unfettered cartooning, he nevertheless admitted that his magazine had sometimes gone too far, as in a cartoon which lampooned former First Lady Betty Ford’s breast cancer in the 1970s. “In retrospect,” Flynt admitted, the cartoon had been “in poor taste.” We could only wonder about the “taste” of myriad other Hustler cartoons and photo spreads on every perverse, misogynistic, violent and patently offensive topic known to man or beast.

His injuries made speaking a struggle, but Flynt delivered. He animatedly railed against former President George W. Bush, for whom he had a particular dislike. He stayed to answer plenty of questions with grace, wit and humor.

I was a little disappointed that, over dinner, Flynt was considerably less effusive. No matter, he had done his job, sparking soul-searching among our self-important, ponderous, mainstream newspaper cartoonists about First Amendment protections extending to the gratuitous, crude, misogynistic and utterly distasteful smut between the slick covers of porn mags.

In the historical context of this week, as the second impeachment trial of Donald Trump unfolded, with the former president’s lawyers claiming that free-speech protections excuse him from any responsibility for the Capitol uprising, Flynt’s passing is further somber occasion to consider First Amendment liberties. Although it’s a cliché to note that you can’t yell “Fire!” in a crowded theater, it looks as though, at least to one of our two major parties, you can yell “Ready… Aim...” and let a crazed, murderous mob figure out the rest.

Larry Flynt once said, “If the First Amendment protects a scumbag like me, then it will protect all of you. Because I’m the worst.”

Maybe. But watching Donald Trump’s outrageous claims to free-speech protection play out last week, some might disagree.

Joel Pett is the Herald-Leader’s Pulitzer Prize winning editorial cartoonist.

This story was originally published February 15, 2021 at 10:50 AM.