When I lived in New York in the late 1980s, the Village Voice was my bible. Not my political bible. I was the only one in my class at Columbia Journalism School who would have voted for Reagan—if I hadn’t been Canadian. It was my nightlife-and-everything-else bible. How I knew what clubs to go to, who was playing at The Bottom Line, where I found my first apartment. One of my closest friends in those days met his future wife through its personal ads. “People found their lives through the Village Voice,” someone says in Tricia Romano’s exhaustive—but surprisingly not exhausting—The Freaks Came Out to Write, an oral history of America’s first alternative weekly. At almost 600 pages, her compendium of interviews is as fat as the Voice itself was back in its doormat-thick heyday—and filled with just as much crazy.
To the world outside its offices, the Voice presented as a bastion of what in the book is often referred to as “pinko” values, a window onto bohemian life, or as one wag cracks, a place to read about “how Jews talk to their gay plants.” Behind the scenes was another story. One of fractious office politics, racism, sexism, homophobia—all the things it professed to stand against—and a backbiting birthplace of identity politics. Someone likens it to Yeats’s line about Ireland: “Great hatred, little room.”
Most surprising is the reactionary strain among many of its stalwarts. Founding editor Dan Wolf was anti-union. Man-of-the-people columnist Pete Hamill defended the “subway vigilante,” Bernard Goetz. Jazz writer and libertarian curmudgeon Nat Hentoff complained that gay people were “too powerful” during the AIDS crisis. Pulitzer Prize–winning cartoonist Jules Pfeiffer casually used the N-word as one of his punch lines.
“Oh, it was not a happy little group of writers pooling together,” says Susan Brownmiller, of whom Voice muckraker Jack Newfield complained to the editor, “You’re hiring all these Stalinist feminists.” Everything wrong with the Voice—the hypocrisy, pomposity, the vicious and sometimes physically violent altercations—is what makes this book so readable. And to her credit, Romano, a nightlife columnist for the paper in the 1990s, shies away from none of it.
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The Voice was founded in 1955 by three combat veterans of World War II with no journalism experience but a shared interest in freedom of expression and left-wing anti-Communism. The publisher was Edwin Fancher, a former truck driver who had trained as a psychologist. The editor in chief was Dan Wolf, who had studied psychology at the New School with Fancher. The third and most famous member of the troika was Norman Mailer, who put up most of the $10,000 in start-up costs off of the success of The Naked and the Dead. Dissension among the ranks, a hallmark of the Voice, was already a thing. Mailer and Fancher didn’t get along, because Mailer had married—and would later stab—Fancher’s ex, Adele Morales. Wolf seems to have done all the work while Mailer, grooming his “white Negro” hipster image, contributed a column that a Fleet Street import to the paper, John Wilcock, called “pretentious and condescending rubbish.”
The original Voice was 12 pages and cost a nickel. Over time it came to feature a lively combination of shoe-leather muckraking, like Jack Newfield’s “10 Worst Landlords” exposés and Village-housewife-turned–urban activist Mary Perot Nichols fighting Robert Moses’s plan to run an expressway through Washington Square Park—all leavened with cultural coverage. It championed new playwrights such as John Guare and Edward Albee. In 1962–63, a newspaper strike made the Voice the only place to advertise. Circulation jumped to 25,000 and money started rolling in. The parties were fun: A young nobody staffer could show up at his editor’s apartment and rub elbows with Mayor Lindsay, Bob Dylan, James Baldwin, and Frank Serpico. The art critic Peter Schjeldahl reported that meeting deadlines “interfered with taking drugs.”
In the 1960s, the Voice was feeling its countercultural oats, notably as the cradle of rock criticism on the East Coast, led by Richard Goldstein and Robert Christgau. He recalls Commentary’s managing editor, Marion Magid, asking him to write about Bob Dylan, but he wasn’t a huge fan so suggested Ellen Willis, later a lefty Voice staple; her piece was the first serious literary treatment of Dylan, for good or ill. Goldstein, who later became the Voice’s executive editor and megaphone on gay issues, complains he never got credit for being the first rock critic because no one wanted to think “their profession was founded by a faggot.”
That F-word keeps coming up. Mailer damns with faint praise first-wave feminists for “writing like tough faggots.” Voice writer Lucian Truscott IV credited the Stonewall riots to the “forces of faggotry.” Truscott had come straight to Greenwich Village from West Point, a scion of military brass under whose grandfather, a three-star general, Dan Wolf had served in the Pacific. Truscott took some heat for that line because, as he says, the paper at that time was “about half gay” while at the same time, according to Guy Trebay, a gay writer at the Voice through the ’80s and ’90s, being “deeply homophobic.”
It was even more torn when it came to race. Until 1979, there had been one black staffer. As Goldstein says, “Even the cleaners were white.” Although James Earl Jones worked there—as a janitor—to support his acting career in his early days. The ’80s began a flurry of hires to correct the situation: Nelson George, Greg Tate, Stanley Crouch. But again, dissension ran amok. Tate championed hip-hop in cerebral, grammatically free-form pieces like “Yo Hermeneutics!” while the ideologically unclassifiable Crouch trashed Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing for reductive race-baiting. Crouch also violently bullied younger black staffers and was eventually fired for his rages. I stress the word “eventually.” The place really comes off as a madhouse, often misguided and at times immoral, like allowing the Communist shill Alexander Cockburn to write about Israel while cashing Palestinian checks. One staffer recalls Cockburn heartbroken when Mao died.
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Over the years, the Voice would become a revolving door of editors and owners. In 1974, Vanderbilt heir Carter Burden sold it for $3.5 million to New York magazine’s Clay Felker, who sold it in 1977 for $30 million to Rupert Murdoch, who sold it in 1985 for $55 million to pet-supply billionaire Leonard Stern, who held onto it until 2000 and then sold it plus a few other weeklies he’d amassed for a cool $170 million because he saw the Internet coming.
The 1990s, even with the Voice still fat with ads and copy, was the beginning of the end. It was a perfect storm of factors. With Bill Clinton as president, there was no Republican in the White House to oppose. The smart-alecky New York Press caught on as an alternative to the Voice’s alternative weekly—and it was free. Time Out New York became a glossy go-to for listings. The New York Times and New York magazine were getting pre-woke and covering the same gender- and sexual-identity issues that had once been the Voice’s sole purview. Michael Caruso, who built an irreverent, distinctly hetero sports section (later killed by the feminist editor Karen Durbin) says, “The culture that we covered and championed became part of the mainstream, so you didn’t need the Voice anymore.” Or as its gossip columnist Michael Musto summarized: “The mainstream has subsumed the underground.” When Musto wrote about drag queens, they were outré. Now RuPaul’s Drag Race is a hit TV show.
To deal with this onslaught of competition, Leonard Stern took the Voice free. It never recovered. The last chapter of the 1990–2000 section is titled “What’s Craigslist?” That was Stern’s question when he first heard about the website that would wipe out his paper’s chief source of revenue.
The 2000s only got worse. After 9/11, real estate ads dropped by three-quarters. They never came back. The owners of Seattle’s New Times took over, bros who professed their passion for journalism before firing Voice legends Hentoff, who was still filing from a typewriter, and Wayne Barrett, whose 1992 book on Donald Trump was an unheeded warning of the rough beast slouching toward Washington. Turned out that New Times was built on “an empire of porn,” and the bros went to prison for sex trafficking. Another billionaire came in and killed the “adult” ads. He also made it Web-only. The Voice has since changed hands yet again and print editions appear only sporadically, like deliberately minted collectors’ items in a world that has passed it by.
The Voice lost its voice. Even if it still had one, it’s unlikely anyone would care.
Photo: AP Photo/Mark Lennihan
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