Image: Al Goldstein graffiti by Mark Critchell

Why is this the most hated man in American? The Al Goldstein Story has it all...

SLEAZE!

TWISTED INDEFENSIBLE HUMOUR!

SCATHING BLISTERING ATTACKS ON INNOCENT PEOPLE!

A TOUR THROUGH THE KINKY DARK CORNERS OF POPULAR CULTURE!

SHOCKING PHOTOS!

GUEST APPEARENCES BY ALL-AMERICAN ECCENTRICS LIKE GRAMPA MUNSTER, MYRON FASS and LARRY FLYNT!

To the counterculture of the 1960s Al Goldstein was a freedom-of-speech warrior, while to right wing fanatics in Middle America he was a NYC Jew porn monster. He was the hate object of choice for feminists in the 1970s and 1980s, and to his employees at Screw magazine he was the most erratic and insufferable boss on the planet. To fellow travellers in the porn industry he was the dirty old uncle who passes out drunk at your kid´s birthday party - pathetic and embarrassing but also given to bursts of courageous intellect and wisdom in sober moments. A pioneer that everybody in some measure owes their livelihood to, but nobody wants to be seated with.

Along the way we witness the birth of the underground press in the 1960s, porn chic in the 1970s and the rise and fall of his home turf, Times Square, as the sleaziest square mile on the planet. We survive the sex wars of the Reagan 1980s and look on as the Goldstein empire crumbles to dust in the new millennium, while the man himself is swallowed up by the very world he made possible.

Divulged for the first time, in Jack Stevenson's unauthorised Al Goldstein biography Beneath Contempt and happy to be there:

HOW GOLDSTEIN CREATED THE SUCCESS OF DEEP THROAT!

HOW SCREW MAGAZINE FUNCTIONED AS THE LITERARY NEXUS BETWEEN HIPPY EXCESS AND PUNK NIHILISM!

HOW THE MOST HATED MAN IN AMERICA BECAME THE LONELIEST AND LAST REBEL!

Explosive New Book Lifts Lid On Traci Lords

LONDON, United Kingdom (February 15, 2011) - Robert Rosen's international bestselling biography of John Lennon's last days, Nowhere Man, changed the way the world saw a hero. Now, his upcoming Beaver Street, an 'investigative memoir' detailing Rosen's two decades working in pornography, threatens to change the way it sees a pariah.

Rosen finds himself back on familiarly controversial terrain with a devastating attack on Traci Lords, the former 'child' porn star whose entire pornographic oeuvre, stretching from ages fifteen to eighteen, became outlawed, threatening to incarcerate an entire industry.

Rosen's attempt to shift the traditional weight of sympathy away from Lords, commonly thought of as a viciously exploited minor, to the industry thought to have exploited her, is guaranteed to ruffle feathers at a time where censorship, child pornography, and sex are as controversial as ever.

The Lords case is by now folkloric, but in Beaver Street Rosen provides a riveting, uncomfortable, and often hilarious account from those in the eye of the storm. Says Rosen: "Every film producer, magazine publisher, printer, video-store owner, adult-bookstore owner, newsstand proprietor, porn photographer and porn fan, overnight found themselves facing any number of charges for the creation, possession, distribution, or transportation of child pornography."

The crux of Rosen's revisionist critique hinges on the question of 'exploitation'. "It was beside the point," Rosen explains, "that this 'child' had admitted using a false birth certificate to fraudulently acquire a passport, using this phony passport to obtain a fake California driver's license with a false date of birth (making her six years older than she actually was) and then using both pieces of identification to prove that she was of legal age as she systematically sought work in the porn industry."

The portrait of Lords as an unusually judicious and ambitious young woman is compelling, and her ascent, from government witness to Hollywood star and bestselling author, brilliantly shadows the legion of porn professionals left facing unemployment and even prosecution. Like Raskolnikov looking for a stray spot of blood, Rosen alone discovers almost 200 pounds of Lords material in his office, while all around him an entire industry is in a frenzy of pulping, pulling and shredding, a result of that 'child's' singular and certainly precocious talent for selfpromotion and hard work.

Wherever people ultimately stand on the Lords debacle, there is no doubt that Beaver Street provides a valuable, vivid glimpse at a little-seen side of the coin. As with the rest of Rosen's book, what really fascinates is the picture of normal professionals trying to make ends meet in extraordinary circumstances. How many other journalists, photographers, and publishers are expected to scrape a living beneath the hostile scrutiny of the FBI, the Nixon administration, Billy Graham, Andrea Dworkin and a host of others? That, and wade day in and day out through an endless swamp of smut? If Rosen relished his two decades in porn, you feel it is because he relished it as a writer, for its delicious absurdity above and beyond anything. An absurdity Beaver Street captures in glorious Technicolor.