1.04: In the beginning…. Guy Strait
The saga should probably begin with what we know about a man named Guy Strait.
Guy Strait was born on 03/25/1920 Texas, and died on 03/25/1987 in San Fransisco, California on his 67th birthday.Strait founded the first gay newspaper in San Francisco in 1961. By 1977, he had according to “authorities “cornered the market” on the production of “kiddie porn”. The events of his life between 1961 and his death in 1987 are full of myth and speculation, but here’s some of what i’ve found.
It would certainly be an insult to dismiss Guy Strait as a child pornographer, or excuse him as a pornographer who strayed over the bounds into children. Some have described him as a product of the San Francisco sixties counterculture. In some ways that counterculture was a product of Guy Strait. He published the city’s first gay newspapers in 1961. He defined that time and place: his 1967 essay “What is a Hippie?” is on college reading lists today.
Guy Strait was born the tenth of eleven children. At the age of 18 he traveled across the Yucatan Peninsula photographing the unclothed natives and passing out Bibles. He had served in the army during World War II, and in the early 1950’s studied fine art at the Chicago Art Institute. He had a photography studio in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district in the 1960’s. (Children in Chains, Clifford L. Linedecker, 1981)
The Illinois prosecutor who sent Strait to jail said he “appears to be an intelligent, kind and affable cherub.” Linedecker, who interviewed Strait in prison, describes him as having “a barrel body, thinning white hair that sticks straight out from his head in clumps, a hearing aid, and reading glasses that slide down his nose disclosing watery blue eyes.” He looked “every bit a mischievous old troll.”In 1961 Guy Strait organized a gay rights group, The league for Civil Education (LCE) and began publishing the first gay newspapers and magazines in San Francisco – the League for Civic Education News, the Citizen News, and Cruise News and World Report – from his offices on Minna Alley. These newspapers were available by subscription, but were also distributed free in gay bars and were sold openly at news-stands. These publications fostered a greater sense of gay visibility and laid the groundwork for gay political mobilization later in the decade. Another source confirms that he “sought to politically organize gay bar patrons by distributing the paper for free”. One historian calls him a “bar-based activist”. (Wide Open Town: A History of Queer San Francisco to 1965 . Nan Alamilla Boyd,University of California Press, 2003) Other Stait publications include a 1963 guide called The Lavender Baedeker and in 1967 The Haight-Ashbury Free Press and the “Bar Rag.” He signed some editorials as “the DOM”, some say DOM was short for “Dirty Old Man”. Strait himself claimed the moniker stood for “Dominus” the Latin word meaning “master or Owner”.
Strait himself later unpretentiously described Cruise News as “earthy” and “muckraking” and said it was not very profitable. (Linedecker)Mr. Strait’s interests and publications were not confined to politics, however. Through his political publications, Guy Strait advertised his photographic enterprise as well as his political views. He eventually renamed the paper Cruise News and World Report and devoted most of the back page to a section titled “Models Galore for Sketch Artists, Sculptors, and Others.” Readers could order 8×10 photos of two dozen young men, all between the ages of 15 and 23, some nude and some posing in the “muscle” style in posing straps. (p. 138, Strapped for Cash: A History of American Hustler Culture. Mack Friedman, Alyson Publishing, 2003)
Strait later said he got into the pornography business when he was offered $2,000 each to lay out two magazines. The money was easy, the competition was of poor quality, and he claimed he already had “thousands of negatives”. Robin Lloyd claims Strait was responsible for the “first of the commercial chicken magazines… Hombre, Chico, Boyphoto and Naked Boyhood were among the titles.”
Strait told a Senate subcommittee that he wouldn’t photograph children under fourteen for pornography. “Over fourteen, I don’t consider them children. They’re sexually mature. Let’s say fourteen is not a child, thirteen may or may not be, and fifteen sure as hell is not.” He claimed to have no trouble finding models. “No one jumps in front of a camera for money. These kids do it for ego. Take a youngster who has never been appreciated, You tell him he’s good looking enough to be in front of a camera and people will want to see him and he’ll be interested.” According to one of the reports of the Illinois Legislative Investigating Committee, he claims never to have filmed children in sexual activity with adults. (Sexual Exploitation of Children, a report to the General Assembly. Illinois Legislative Investigating Committee. Chicago, Ill. August 1980, p. 167.)It is worth noting that at Strait’s prime in the pornography business, the age of consent in many states was fourteen. While accusations involving pornographic films were bandied about in the press in the 1973 Lyric Publications/Lyric International pornography scandal, none of the 90 indictments were for pornography, and Strait was sent to prison not for filming three Rockford, Ill. boys, but for taking one of them to bed afterwards.
An on-line source claims Guy Strait moved to Los Angeles in 1970 and lived in a house on Roderick Place, a dead-end street next to the Forest Lawn Cemetery in Glendale. Linedecker says he lived in the Hollywood Hills and maintained a house trailer for editing film in Redwood City, south of San Francisco.In Los Angeles he formed a distribution company, DOM-Lyric, in partnership with Lyric International. (Tristans note: Enter Billy Byars Jr. founder of Lyric, who i’ll discuss next). Lyric’s most ambitious work was the full-length mainstream film “The Genesis Children” featuring Peter Glawson and other young actors. Lyric had so far only produced only “physique” and “nudist” photography and fims, never pornography, but apparently found Strait’s distribution network useful.
( Tristans note: It should be noted here that Guy Strait had very little to do with “The Genesis Children” film. This film was Billy Byar Jr’s project. Byars placed the advertisement that attracted the writer/co-director. He travelled with cast and crew to the locations, threw his weight around, and influenced the editing and finished product to a degree that greatly frustrated many of those contributing to the work. Guy Strait was only involved in the potential distribution of the project at this point.)
In the fall of 1973 Strait and an associate were arrested before the other twelve accused in the scandal that brought down DOM/Lyric and which then U.S. Attorney General Edwin Meese called “the first child pornography ring brought to public view.” (Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography (1986) PART 3: Law Enforcement Recommendations. Chapter 3, paragraph 5). Samples of Strait’s work had turned up when a “sex ring” was broken up in Houston, TX. and an unedited film was later found by police in Straits Redwood City, CA. trailer. Strait says the film showed three boys and a girl, while Sgt. Lloyd Martin of the LAPD (by all accounts an over-zealous lead investigator who some said seemed to be fixated on boys) mentions only the three boys. Apparently while filming in a room at a Holiday Inn hotel, a mirror reflected Strait with a 16mm camera on his shoulder. (Tristans note: I’ve seen this image and others “accidently” revealing the camera operator). Strait says he jumped bail and the charges were later dropped. Linedecker says he “became something of a cause celebré for a time.” Robin Lloyd quotes one of Strait’s magazines as saying he was in Turkey or Greece but that police thought he was in New York. He was actually in Rockford, Illinois. He was arrested in Phoenix, Arizona on April 23, 1976 and charged with a “nearly four-year-old incident in Rockford.” Strait served a three year sentence in Illinois, first at Statesville Prison and then at Vienna Correctional Center. He was released in 1980, just after his sixtieth birthday. Online rumor says he left the country and died in exile in Europe, but a California death certificate certainly overules that rumor.
According to the Chicago Tribune, Strait “was one of the nation’s leading pornographers… he had cornered the market on the production of ‘kiddie porn’.” (Chicago Tribune, 17 may 1977, p. 1-8.) Strait’s actual volume of business is hard to be sure of. The Chicago Tribune ascribes to “police” an estimate that he made $5 to $7 million in his career. The high figure would average to just under $300,000 per year over his twenty year career. Linedecker’s numbers are the unsupported figures of sgt. Lloyd, who claims DOM-Lyric put out ninety magazines with a wholesale price of $2.50, and a retail of $5.00, with initial print runs of 10,000, making a quarter million dollar gross. The print run is based on “distribution lists taken in police raids”. Linedecker says the Illinois prosecutor told congressmen that Strait’s distribution list had at one time 50,000 customers, but that Strait says there were 942 names. Strait’s films were mail-order only, so the size of the distribution list is the upper limit for sales.
These sales numbers are unverifiable and inconsistent, and making sense of them is beyond the scope of this article. It seems clear however that if Guy Strait, the man with a “corner on the market” was averaging less than $300,000 a year total from many kinds of pornography, of which child porn was only a part, that child pornography, at least that produced in the U.S., was certainly not a multi-million dollar a year business in the 1970’s.
One of the few online sources on Strait mentions “the boy who killed himself in the affair involving the arrest of the photographer Guy Strait.” Apparently one of the boys involved in the Rockford scandel committed suicide after testifying against Strait. Strait attributes the suicide to the trauma of testifying, but the various authors who mention him seem to take the attitude that if Strait had “forced the boy to testify by refusing to plead guilty”, the blame was all Strait’s. However, the alleged “affair” was not the scandal that brought down Lyric, and the boy was not one of the “Lyric boys” seen in the many films and photos taken at the Los Angeles Mulholland Drive home known as “Uncle Terry’s House”. This is the house with the pool with the blue cinder block wall behind it. This house is also believed to have been used as Lyric’s “studio”, and much of the pool area and interior of the home can be seen in various films and photos.
Anthony Summers’ J. Edgar Hoover biography, “Official and Confidential”, says that an older associate of Lyric’s owner took two boys from the Lyric L.A. “studio” down to “visit” then U.S. F.B.I. Director Hoover at his home in La Jolla north of San Diego. (Tristans note: The story goes that upon arrival the two boys were in sour moods and the sight of a “trollish” J. Edgar laying by his pool didn’t help matters. As the boys were being introduced, Hoover mentioned that one of the boys would look much better without the “girly long hair”. The boy responded by telling J. Edgar to “go fuck himself.” This was a party that never got started, and both boys were hurried back to the limo and Los Angeles. An alternative rumor is one where the boys were driven to meet Hoover at his favorite bungalow at Clint Murchisons Del Charro hotel in La Jolla, and two limo’s then transported everyone to an outdoor location where an “encounter” was to take place. Both scenarios agree that the meeting was aborted due to the described confrontation. As Hoover died on May 2nd 1972, this meeting, if it happened, would have to predate that ). Since Strait was the oldest of those arrested in the 1973 scandal, and as Linedecker says that Strait “claims to be the first person to accuse Hoover of being a “closet queen”, Strait may have been the unidentified “older associate”. Its thought that Summers and others clearly knew it was Strait.
There is an excellent chapter on Guy Strait in the 1981 “Children in Chains” by Clifford L. Linedecker. Linedecker, who has written a number of “true crime” popular books, mostly lets Strait have his say, as he explains on page 228: “This account is based on his version of his life and activities except where another source is specifically quoted or credited.” Linedecker also corrects some of the wilder errors made by Robin Lloyd when discussing Strait in his highly unreliable 1976 book “For Money or Love”, that triggered the 1977 kiddie porn panic. He includes information on the models of cameras Strait used, the costs and raw-to-finished ratios of the twelve-minute film loops, and means of avoiding piracy, such as lowering the quality of 8mm product and salting the mailing list with rabidly anti-porn clergy. Except where noted this account follows Linedecker, whose book is recommended to anyone with a deeper interest in Mr. Strait.The report of the Illinois committee is also recommended; the committee actually did quite a bit of investigation. It deflates a lot of the wild numbers bandied about in the press, and exposes some of the McCarthyesque assertions of the anti-porn crusaders. The Chicago Tribune articles are reprinted in Sexual Exploitation of Children, Hearings Before the Subcommittee, on Crime of the House Committee on the Judiciary, 95th Cong., 1st Sess. (1977) pp 428-42. The “statement of Guy Strait, producer of child pornography” appears in the same volume on pp 23-28.Some of this post is taken from an archived Anarchopedia post. That article doesn’t credit an author. Whoever you are, thanks
