By the time I started spending significant periods of time in New York City, around 2003, the Village Voice newsweekly had ditched its cover price and was available for free out of big, clanking metal bins stationed on each street corner. Picking up my copy of the Voice was invariably the first thing I did after checking in at my digs. Before free wifi became ubiquitous in the city, this was where you looked for listings of gigs, exhibitions, restaurants, bookstores—or whatever else might float your boat. In Tricia Romano’s The Freaks Came Out to Write, which chronicles the paper’s history, a former editor-in-chief, David Blum, remembers how those metal bins would too often double as urinals into which drunks would relieve themselves. They were, he says, “the most disgusting distribution model I’ve ever seen.” The bins, though, were always dry in my part of town and picking up my copy of the Voice gave me a thrill. The paper plugged me directly into the pulse of the city, connecting me to a whole history of underground culture and thought. I felt like a tourist no longer.
Over a deliriously unruly 520 pages of social history, The Freaks Came Out to Write maps the story of the Voice from its founding in 1955 to its current status as a title which, despite various attempts to shut it down, has refused to entirely fade away. Documenting its near-70-year timespan through oral history is entirely within the spirit and tradition of the magazine. Books copied-and-pasted together from interview transcripts can read like a poor excuse for presenting research, but not here. The energy of the Village Voice always did come from—yes—the voices of the writers and editors who managed to get the magazine out week in, week out.
Beginning as an intern in 1997, and associated with the title through the next eight years as a columnist who wrote about the city’s nightlife and underground club scene, Romano was herself a vital part of that history. That she had no journalistic experience when she was hired by the Village Voice was not considered a hindrance. On the contrary, lack of experience was a requirement of the job. Writers on the Voice were employed because they were already integral to the scenes they wrote about. As another Voice scribe, Diane Fisher, reflects, “you hire someone who is living through the phenomenon worth covering.” From the first days of its history, the Voice, Fisher adds, was no place for “experts”.
That history was kickstarted, Romano tells us, when three men—Norman Mailer, Dan Wolf and Ed Fancher—decided that existing local print media, the New York Times and New Yorker in particular, had become so brazenly establishment as to be a servile mouthpiece for values they regarded as questionable and dangerous. By the time the Voice published its launch issue in 1955, Mailer’s 1948 Second World War novel, The Naked and the Dead, written from personal experience, was already considered a modern classic. Wolf and Fancher were also war veterans, and the lingering trauma of that conflict—and the threat of the Cold War leading to nuclear annihilation—led them to establish a magazine in which free expression was the foremost consideration. There was to be no euphemistic journalese; no cosying-up between journalists and politicians.
The lingering trauma of the Second World War led three men to establish a magazine in which free expression was the foremost consideration
Out of his Naked and the Dead royalties, Mailer invested $10,000 to get the thing up and running, after which Wolf, who assumed the editorship, and Fancher, who was publisher, threw the magazine open to readers, who could subscribe for $2 a year. It wasn’t up to editorial staff to decide “all the news that was fit to print”; that was down to readers, who were invited to send in ideas for what they wanted to read—and all the better if they had the chops to write it up themselves. Once a piece had been agreed, the paper trusted the instincts of the writer, who would earn the right to roam with their subject wherever they wanted—and nobody quibbled if they delivered an extra two or three thousand words over the wordcount. Editors tried their best not to edit, intervening only to save embarrassment over an obvious factual error or a sentence that refused to scan. Circulation rose sharply and the Voice, by the end of the next decade, was outselling all other weekly newspapers in the US by a considerable margin.
A paper that generated itself out of the readership it served, as opposed to force-feeding a diet of carefully calibrated opinion from up on high, was very much within the spirit of 1950s Greenwich Village. Located in Cooper Square, perched between the East and West Villages, the paper’s offices offered the perfect vantage point from which to gauge changes that were blowing in the wind. Before clubs like Café Wha? and the Gaslight gave the burgeoning folk music scene its hub, folkies had gathered around Washington Square Park to sing outdoor communal hootenannies. Jazz clubs, like the Village Vanguard and the Five Spot, the latter a few blocks from the Voice office, hired musicians such as Charles Mingus, Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane who were determined to remake the fabric of their music. Although there’s been much rhapsodising about 1950s Greenwich Village as a place where artists, poets and comedians, alongside musicians, gathered to trade ideas—and get roaring drunk in the process—that doesn’t mean it wasn’t true. And the Village Voice was another grand improvisation, an experiment in how best to reset the journalistic rules.
Those “freaks” of Romano’s title include an impressive cast of writers, journalists and associates who, mythic figures all these decades later, were then either barely known when they started at the Village Voice or had been spurned by mainstream titles. Any notion that the Voice was a utopia in which everyone rubbed along amicably in a comradely spirit of cooperation shatters quickly. Egos clashed and internal arguments raged as the Voice struggled to contain the varied personalities it brought together. However, throughout the book, there’s recognition of the fact that the heat and passion sparked was what fired up the magazine’s journalism.
That Amiri Baraka—the poet and writer, who, traumatised by the assassination of Malcom X in 1965, relocated from Greenwich Village, filled with what he perceived as toxic white hipsterism, to Harlem—could occupy the same space as Nat Hentoff, the Jewish jazz critic, seems almost implausible. In the aftermath of Malcolm X’s shooting, Baraka abruptly turned away from integrationist politics towards separatism and was regularly accused of littering his poems with casual antisemitism and misogyny. Hentoff—the very definition of the white jazz critic Baraka riled against, as well as someone who pushed back relentlessly against antisemitism—would gradually move towards taking a more socially conservative perspective on issues such as abortion, and in 2003 he supported the invasion of Iraq.
With ideological fault-lines such as these, sometimes you wonder how any copies ever made it to the newsstand. An ugly incident involving racial and sexual politics detonated outside the door of Kit Rachlis’s office the very week, in 1984, that he became executive editor. Stanley Crouch, the famously volatile (black) journalist, was arguing with (gay) letters editor Ron Plotkin over edits to a letter that Crouch had written in response to a disgruntled reader. “They are shouting and screaming at each other,” Rachlis tells Romano, “and Stanley either is about to cross the line with something homophobic, and Ron I don’t think is gonna cross the line with saying something racist, but they are edging closer and closer.”
Tensions flared because the stakes seemed so high. The Voice created space for black writers to write about black culture in a way that, outside of black newspapers such as Freedom’s Journal, New York Age and New York Amsterdam News earlier in the century, had not been available previously. Writers such as Hentoff, Baraka and Crouch, from their radically distinct perspectives, covered jazz comprehensively and with distinction, before the emergence of a new musical form in the 1980s re-engerised the Voice’s commitment to black music. Music editor Robert Christgau told his colleague, writer Barry Michael Cooper, about a “new music coming out of the Bronx called rap,” which was “going to be a game changer”. Christgau committed himself to tracing the evolution of hip hop and, as writer Carol Cooper testifies, “the level of hip-hop writing that new Black writers were bringing into the Voice was intense.”
The Voice’s compassionate coverage of the AIDs epidemic did much to raise awareness—and save lives
Despite writer Lucian K Truscott IV’s assertion that “the Voice was about half gay”, and it publishing work by pioneering gay journalists such as Jill Johnston and Arthur Bell, the paper was initially unsure how to deal with the news of a new and dangerous sexually transmitted virus called HIV. “We were right in the middle of it. We couldn’t quite figure out how to cover it,” says David Schneiderman, then editor-in-chief. Hentoff’s initial position, insisting on mandatory testing for gay men, then firing people if they refused—while suggesting that gay people were “too powerful”—no doubt sparked further fierce discussions. But, eventually, the Voice’s compassionate coverage as the AIDs epidemic began to grip the city’s gay community did much to raise awareness—and save lives. The journalist Robert Masa, himself HIV positive, began writing about the crisis from a first-person perspective, speculating on how to tell his father about his illness. All of which provided a counterweight, Rachlis says, to the religious right and also to President Reagan, who were at best ignoring HIV, at worst demonising its sufferers.
The new economics of the 1980s changed the Voice: a magazine so rooted in the culture can’t help but change when the culture goes rogue. For a bizarre period, from 1977 to 1985, the paper was owned by the bogeyman himself, Rupert Murdoch, who pumped in millions of dollars, while making everyone feel uncomfortable. The staff, freaks to the end, refused to take his unwelcome involvement lying down and published stories investigating his business affairs while also criticising the Murdoch-owned tabloid the New York Post. Reporter and author Wayne Barrett became tenacious in his investigations of the business practices of another mogul, Donald Trump, and also his later sidekick Rudy Giuliani. Remarkably, Romano managed to grab some quotes from the 45th president on Barrett, whose conclusions that “Wayne is a very bad writer” and his “last book was a major disaster” are wearily unsurprising.
As Romano joined in 1997, the revolving door of editors under the Murdoch regime had slowed, and the Voice moved with the times, establishing its own website as early as 1995. Problems continued, though: the publication, now free and dependant on advertising revenue, was hauled over the coals for printing adverts for escort services and Asian massage parlours, thereby making money out of the plight of exploited immigrant women—as far removed from the idealism of its beginnings as it was possible to be.
This book formed in Romano’s mind while she was attending a reunion in 2017 for Village Voice staff. Fancher, then 95, gave a speech, and the danger of losing such prime witnesses unless she started work immediately became clear. That year, the print issue was suspended, and she pours scorn over what remains—an online archive with an occasional print issue, which are “Village Voice-y” but lack the revolutionary zeal that fuelled the magazine she worked for. The problem being, she concludes, that the internet has fragmented culture and knocked New York off its pedestal as the “centre of the cultural and political universe”. The spirit of the magazine hangs over the online world—meaning it is everywhere, but also nowhere.
