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Your Government at Work: Deep Throat and the FBI

As a foreigner, one of the most fascinating things to me about American culture is its combination of the profane and the puritanical. The same society that did more than any other to further the cause of free speech also persecuted it with shocking regularity. The sixties and very early seventies were the epoch of the last great culture battle in American history, beginning with the fall and decline of Lenny Bruce and ending with the advent of Deep Throat.

For most of its history, the United States, a country that rightly prides itself as the freest in the world in regards to speech, harshly repressed speech having anything to do with sex that non-academics would appreciate. Until Deep Throat, it was something more closely resembling an inquisition than anything that can be described as law enforcement. Until the 60s, books by authors now considered to be American treasures, such as Henry Miller and William S. Burroughs were routinely banned by governments at every level.

One need only look at the prosecutions of Lenny Bruce throughout the early 60s in multiple jurisdictions to understand the Great American Speech Inquisition. Bruce was repeatedly indicted and convicted for nothing more than words. And the most serious convictions weren’t in the Bible Belt, they were in New York City. Ultimately, Lenny Bruce was persecuted to death for nothing more than words that are now commonplace on cable television.

It took the 2005 HBO documentary, Inside Deep Throat and a report from yesterday to appreciate just how savage the last desperate gasp of the American government in the Free Speech Wars actually was.

The papers are among 498 pages from the FBI file on Gerard Damiano, who
directed the movie and died in October. Released this month following a Freedom
of Information Act request by the AP, they are just a glimpse into Damiano's
roughly 4,800-page file. More than 1,000 additional pages were withheld under
freedom-of-information exemptions and because they duplicated other material;
the balance of the file has not yet been reviewed and released.


Many parts of the released files are whited out and the FBI's ultimate
targets are unclear, but the seriousness with which the agency treated the
investigation is unquestionable. Authorities have long said the film was made
with Mafia money but the file doesn't mention mob links.


The file includes memos among the FBI's top men – L. Patrick Gray,
William Ruckelshaus and Clarence Kelley, successive heads of the agency after J.
Edgar Hoover – and field offices so widespread, it seemed nearly all of the
country's biggest cities were involved.


On various entries in the file, a checklist of top FBI brass appears in
the top right corner, with initials next to some names. One of those listed is
W. Mark Felt, the FBI second-in-command whose "Deep Throat" alias as a Watergate informant came from the movie's title.


Was the Mob involved in Deep Throat? Sure, they were. That shouldn’t surprise anyone. When the people demonstrably want something that the government seeks to suppress, organized crime will inevitably fill the void and supply that demand. That’s the ultimate danger of prohibition and that’s how the government and the criminal element tend to prop each other up.

It should also be remembered that in the early 1970s, the Mafia was running roughshod over America. It essentially owned the construction industry in New York. Yes, the Mob financed a fuck-flick, but they also built the World Trade Center. You tell me which is more serious.

Actually, I’ll tell you. The FBI had a nearly 5,000 page dossier about a fuck movie and the Colombo and Gambino families still run most of the legitimate infrastructure business in New York City. People forget that law enforcement, particularly at the federal level, is far more political than it is legal and that’s especially true of obscenity prosecutions. The Ford, Carter, Bush 41 and Clinton Justice Department ramped down pornography prosecutions while the Nixon, Reagan and Bush 43 administrations ramped them up. The fact that convictions continually declined mattered not because these were political, rather than legal priorities.

Were there 5,000 pages of FBI material in the Watergate affair? Probably not. The revelations that ultimately led to President Nixon’s resignation came from the Senate Select Committee and the Special Prosecutor and not the Bureau. The leaks from Deputy Director Mark Felt, himself nicknamed Deep Throat, involved actions taken in the days immediately after the break-in.

Maybe the most troubling thing about this story is that it definitively shows that the legal saga of Deep Throat wasn’t being directed by some yahoo a field office somewhere. It was being directed at the very highest levels of the Bureau. You’d be excused for thinking that, based on that fact alone, that Linda Lovelace was once of the fucking Rosenbergs.

The Deep Throat wars and prosecutions were worse than malevolent; they were a monumental waste of time and resources. It was stupid, counter-productive and let real evil get past the ever-watchful eyes of the government. The Mafia continued its growth and two-legged beasts like Charles Keating and Roy Cohn were given added respectability as their own cancerous corruption continued unabated.

The most serious of the Deep Throat prosecutions, in Memphis, was a clear perversion of both the letter and the intent of the law. The film’s male lead, the aptly-named Harry Reems, was indicted not just for obscenity, but for conspiracy, as if the star of the film had anything at all to do with things like distribution or exhibition. And Reems was convicted, only being cleared on appeal because Deep Throat was produced before the Supreme Court’s ruling in Miller v. California, under which he was prosecuted.

And to what effect was all of this done? Not only is pornography more graphic today than it was in 1972, it is far more widely available than at any time since ancient Rome. Moreover, it has been a driving force in the last waves of technological revolution. Dirty movie theatres are virtually non-existent these days, largely because of the advent of VHD, DVD and Internet technology, all of which were largely driven by public demand for pornography.

Because of home consumption, the so-called Miller Test of community standards is largely obsolete as an applicable legal theory, unless you define your household as a community and poll the family as to their standards.

In retrospect, Deep Throat represented the mainstreaming of pornography in American culture. Once that happened, obscenity prosecutions continued, but not to any great effect. Demand fed the technology, which further fed the demand. Pornography now makes billions of dollars more than mainstream Hollywood productions every year.

Most importantly, Deep Throat made women want to suck cock really well. And nothing is more important than that.

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