Get Bent!
Just out this week, some nice coverage of Comstock Films and DAMON AND HUNTER in the glossy Australian magazine Bent. The issue closed just days before news of the OFLC decision came down, so there no mention of it in the article. But in a strangely prescient move, Bent printed the entire text of our About page as a sidebar to the article:
Comstock Films is founded in memory of Anthony Comstock, and is dedicated to using film to celebrate the freedoms and pleasures he fought so hard to suppress. We are pleased to offer explicit films that revel in the pleasures of sexual relations between consenting adults. We hope that viewing our films, either alone or with a loved one, will move you to revel in the pleasure of your own sexuality.
Anthony Comstock was a prude of the first order, but he was also a man who knew how to get things done. In 1866 he formed the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, and by 1873, he succeeded in getting the U.S. Congress to pass the “Act of the Suppression of Trade in, and Circulation of, Obscene Literature and Articles of Immoral Use” commonly known as “The Comstock Act”.
The Comstock Act was used to suppress erotic art and literature, (Comstock boasted about the number of “libertines” that he had driven to suicide) as well as making the distribution of birth control information a crime. In 1914 Margaret Sanger was prosecuted under the Comstock Act, with Anthony himself in attendance.
Anthony Comstock is widely acknowledged as history’s greatest censor. As a special, unpaid postal inspector for the U.S. government, he was responsible for the destruction of an estimated 160 tons of literature and photos. Among the destroyed material were novels now considered masterworks of the English language, information on birth control, and medical text books. In addition to his campaign against all materials that addressed sex, Comstock also campaigned against modern art and literature, which he labeled “impure”. Nearly 100 years after his death, the ghost of Anthony Comstock still casts a long shadow over our cultural and sexual landscape.
Here in the United States, only recently has the manifest right of adults to choose their own sexual partners, and then make love with their partner in the manner that most pleases them, free from the fear of government sanction, been recognized as a right that is protected by our Constitution.
That’s right, until the Supreme Court case Lawrence v. Texas, regulating whom you fuck and how you fuck, in the privacy of your own home, was still considered a legitimate government concern. Two of the affirming justices have since left the court. The three dissenting justices still sit on the court. Do the math.
