SEX'S OUTER LIMITS

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP88-01314R000100510004-5
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 16, 2016
• Document Release Date: October 12, 2004
• Sequence Number: 4
• Publication Date: April 1, 1968
• Content Type: MAGAZINE

Approved For Relepsg 89%4/10/28: CIA-RDP88-01 ~
.April 1, 1968
book, publishing such unknown authors
as Edward Albee, James Purdy, Sam-
uel Beckett, Allen Ginsberg. In 1964, it
was turned into a slick-paper magazine
with striking art work and lots of col
or; its scatology is elegantly, framed.
With a circulation of some 160,000,
Sex's Outer Limits I~;thc magazine recently changed from a
One character gets his kicks pretend- bimonthly to a monthly.
ing to shoot pretty women with a .22 Evergreen's editors claim that they
rifle from his bedroom window. An- are not on the lookout for adventurous
other suffers from such an advanced sex; that just happens to be what peo-
case of post-coitum triste that he ur- ple are writing about. "It is the last _-
inates on a woman. Then there is the frontier," says Managing Editor Fred
fellow whose sleep is troubled by a noc- Jordan. "Sex also serves other func-
turnal emission, and next morning he tions and stands for things beyond it-
frantically hides his shorts from the pry- self. It can be a political statement." If
ing eyes of an ,alder woman. Not to sex, in fact, turns sour in so many Ev-
mention the daredevil who copulates ergreen stories, the. editors believe that
.with a nimble Philippine girl on a wood- is a reflection of the times, specifically
BUXTON BERINSRI? the anguish over the Viet Nam war.
ROSSET
Ahead of the galloping field.
en bench while she chats nonchalantly
with a waitress passing by.
These are only a sampling of the va-
riety of sexual practices and preferences
presented in the pages of Evergreen
magazine; for range and ingenuity they
are unmatched in any other publication
this side of the Story of O. In the past
two to three years, freedom of sexual ex-
pression has increased at a galloping
rate, and Evergreen has led the field..
This is no surprise since its editor and
publisher is Barney Rosset, 45, pres-
ident of Grove Press, a house that spe-
cializes in erotica and avant-garde au-
thors. Its hard-cover Black Circle books
and its Black Cat and Zebra paper-
backs embrace everything from outright
pornography (The Pearl) to mystical
flights of sexual fantasy (Jean Genet's
Miracle of the Rose) to revolutionary
calls to action (Frantz Fanon's The
Wretched of the Earth). It also has a "except that he won't talk to us."
generous supply of fro e~ n`, t' s h,~ s,f ' l '
_67ReR1#n ' rr q- Y' '- 3148000100510004-5
clists and provocativ ittdl s Is. 1 r n a
Last Frontier. Cheap girlie magazines that the magazine return his latest
have always catered to
prurient inter- manuscripts to him, unpublished.
Evergreen. Women are not so much to
be loved as abused, and the varieties
are impressive. One writer, E. F. Cher-
rytree, candidly reveals his special hang-
up: a passion to see women fighting
each other, the bloodier the better. "It's
my biggest sex pleasure and has been
since I was four. I'm 35 now." Ev-
ergreen illustrated this treatise with a
few pages of sketches of two shapely.
girls, one blonde, one. mauve, going at
it tooth and claw. The piece evoked con-
siderable response, says Rosset, all of it
favorable. "We really stumbled on
something," he says, adding that he
could have devoted an entire issue to
that idiosyncrasy.
Appealing to another set of readers
is a comic-strip character named Phoebe
Zeit-Geist, a curvaceous nude who is
continually being assaulted by men,
women, animals and monsters. From
each scrape, she escapes with her
smooth skin, at least, entirely intact.
When one tormentor turned out to be
a German army officer, the issue was
banned in West Germany. Two issues
later, Evergreen gave equal time, as it
were, and made Phoebe's torturer a
rabbi. Having mined that vein, Ever-
green temporarily dropped Phoebe after
one last mass orgy of sadism in which
all her enemies ganged up on her.
Cult of Revolution. Evergreen's pol- '
itics is as far out as its sex. It sub-
scribes to the New Left roster of rev-
olutionary heroes: Che Guevara, Castro,
Malcolm X, Ho Chi Minh, Stokely Car-
michael. It has published LcRoi Jones's
furious diatribes against whites, mainly
Jewish: "The little arty bastards talking
arithmetic they sucked from the Arab's
head." While not taking it too serious-
ly, Rosset excuses black anti-Semitism
on the grounds that Jewish merchants,
after all, have exploited Negroes in the
ghetto. "We agree with practically ev-
TAT
1"' N
s o not political memoirs.
Its first catch was Kim Philby, the Brit-
ish master spy,. for whose reminiscences
it paid more than $50,000; the first in-
stallment appears in the April issue.
With only marginal advertising. Ever-
greets does not quite break even by.
charging $1 an issue. But by develop-
ing young writers in the magazine, Ros-
set stands to recover his investment
when they become ,popular and he pub-
lishes their books.