Discussed in this essay:
The Freaks Came Out to Write: The Definitive History of the Village Voice, the Radical Paper That Changed American Culture, by Tricia Romano. PublicAffairs. 608 pages. $35.
Street art by Curtis Cuffie outside the offices of the Village Voice, 1990s. Photograph by Grégoire Alessandrini © The artist
At 7:32 pm on Wednesday, July 1, 1998, my co-worker Ron sent me a message over ATEX, the editing system we used at the Village Voice:
if you ever work here late at night, when there aren’t many people around, you will notice tiny little bugs flying around . . . they come out of the walls . . . (when i was young, my father owned a grainary . . . it is well known that the only way to truly “rid” grainaries of insects is to burn them to the ground . . . )
Ron had been at the Voice for twenty years, and like most of the old salts was somewhat mysterious to me. Perennially garbed in a dark windbreaker and a Raiders cap, he arrived at the office near the end of most people’s shifts, to assemble the Letters section in relative silence. Outwardly mordant, Ron could be downright goofy in his ATEX messages, with deliberate typos and odd punctuation, designed to keep me—a copy editor, four years in—amused. He usually addressed me as “edwidge,” a nod to the author Edwidge Danticat, or simply “ ’widge,” which in his more garrulous moods sometimes expanded to “ ’widgeworth.”
His mention of a midnight infestation wasn’t just gallows humor. In another message, Ron explained that our offices, at 36 Cooper Square in the East Village, used to be “the original Hartz Mountain granary.” The Voice had moved there in 1991, six years after Rupert Murdoch sold the paper to Leonard N. Stern, the head of the pet-supply business Hartz, of two-in-one dog collar fame. In the Twenties, Stern’s father had imported canaries from Germany to New York, selling them to department stores; their popularity led to a successful bird-food concern. The seeds once sat where we sat now.
A few doors north was the Carl Fischer Building, home to the eponymous sheet-music company, with a giant eighth note painted on the façade. It overlooked a parking lot that I’d cross every day after emerging from the subway at 8th Street. By noon you’d sometimes see a tabletop porn vendor on the sidewalk, a few customers flipping through the bins with the insouciance of used-record hounds. Birdseed, sheet music, girlie mags: it was like a compressed history of obsolete twentieth-century diversions, all on the same block. Newspapers were next to go. We just didn’t know it yet.
I started at the Voice while in grad school in 1994. I was new to the city, in love with it but slightly terrified. I was looking for part-time work, and a friend of a friend put me in touch with the copy chief at the paper. I passed the test, armed with Webster’s 10th and Chicago 14 and a much-thumbed xeroxed packet covering house style. I took a couple shifts a week, usually from 11 am to 7 pm, working in a sunny room on the third floor with the rest of copy and fact-checking—about a dozen people, most days.
We stared at our ATEX monitors, which had the scrapyard aesthetic of Seventies science fiction: amber letters on scuzzy screens, chunky keyboards that crackled like small-arms fire. When a new story hit the queue, we newbies raced to give it a read. I’d swoop in if I saw, say, a piece by the art-house film reviewer J. Hoberman or the gossip columnist Michael Musto or the soi-disant “dean of American rock critics,” Robert Christgau. None of them ever phoned it in. Other names invited hesitation, and the copy chief would prod us over ATEX. Once you entered corrections and queries, you’d type your initials in the “c1” field at the top and return it to the editor, who would process the changes and send it back to the queue for a second read. (A friend would warn me of tedious pieces: “I read just now an entirely pointless article about airline monopolies. AVOID in copy2!”) A notes-mode “cq” next to an unorthodox spelling or funky syntax served as a “stet.” The Voice’s reputation as a writer’s paper meant that some articles sprouted cq’s like mushrooms on a board of Centipede. The issue was put to bed on Monday night. For those shifts, which began at 6 pm, I went to the fourth floor to go over the late-closing proofs, on the lookout for orphans and widows. We tacked up the finished pages, and it was satisfying to take in the whole issue at a glance, as though a strong wind had blown it up into constituent parts.
The Voice archives were similarly exhibited throughout the building, in the form of framed front pages. They decorated the exposed-brick walls, in no particular order, a reminder of the paper’s long legacy. Some bylines I’d get to know well, while others belonged to writers long departed. Mounted in the office of former music editor Doug Simmons was the ecstatic January 19, 1988, cover with a group portrait of more than twenty rap artists, from Doug E. Fresh to Roxanne Shanté, and emblazoned hiphop nation—apocryphally, the first use of “ _______ Nation” as a commonplace title formula. (Per VV style, “hiphop” was hyphenless, a formulation that bugged me, conjuring a phantom fricative.) Elsewhere, a Fred McDarrah shot of Robert F. Kennedy standing under a tilted portrait of Jesus marked his 1968 assassination; a 1970 issue showed a distraught Dustin Hoffman after the Weather Underground accidentally blew up the house next door to his on 11th Street. A more recent cover featured a tense photo illustration for “Driving While Black,” Peter Noel’s 1998 exposé on racial profiling.
The debut issue, from 1955 and priced at a nickel, hung by the first-floor elevator. The slogan was a weekly newspaper designed to be read, but the layout was jumbled, the writing stiff and hyperlocal: Washington Square folk singers take a break from busking; trucker sues Columbia; robbery goes south. It’s a holy relic only because of what it would become: the foremost alternative newspaper in the country. Despite its rambunctious origins—co-founder Norman Mailer handled distribution for a time, delivering papers on Wednesday mornings—the Voice hadn’t found its voice. The stories had no edge; they weren’t against anything yet. The only thing I recall from that issue, practically verbatim, is some filler in the lower-right corner titled “Manuscript by Phil (aged 4) goes on show.” The MS in question, on display at a neighborhood bank, was “A joke by Philip”: “A horse can’t say yes or say no—but a donkey can.”
By the summer of ’98, I’d been at the paper four years, with eight more to come. I must have read Phil’s joke a hundred times. What did it mean? Was I a horse or a donkey? Here was a koan to start the workday, as I waited for the elevator to take me up.
The Voice became many things to me: a place of drudgery and triumph and endless office politics, a writing school, a talent pool, my crucible and passport. For all its flaws, it is still the most diverse place I’ve ever worked. Eventually, I would move off the copy desk, file pieces almost weekly (a speed that alarms me now), and ultimately helm the Voice Literary Supplement. It all ended for me in the summer of 2006, when I was laid off with four other senior editors. In the aftermath, wounded but wiser, I distanced myself from the Voice. For a long time, I referred to it as the Paper That Shall Not Be Named. It meant so much to me, until it didn’t.
Perhaps I kept my distance too well. I recognize both the best and worst of my longtime employer in Tricia Romano’s excellent The Freaks Came Out to Write: The Definitive History of the Village Voice, the Radical Paper That Changed American Culture, but I do not appear in it. And though I was fascinated and occasionally shocked to read the thought-bombs of many former colleagues, my closest associates are nowhere to be found. (Romano and I overlapped; she was the nightlife correspondent, and a friendly face in the office.) At times, reading it felt like seeing photos on a realtor’s website of someplace I used to live, all Edwidgean traces erased.
Romano’s massive oral history weaves hundreds of Voice voices into a work so addictive that you wish more authors would tackle the form. It proceeds chronologically, each brief chapter homing in on a single event, internal crisis, movement, or personality from the paper’s nearly seventy-year run. Themes evolve; the eighty-eight chapters are like the eighty-eight keys on a piano, and as certain names and topics recur, different chords and colors are sounded. Pioneering Voice journalists from before my time, such as Mary Perot Nichols (of Robert Moses and the Mob) and Jill Johnston (a second-wave feminist with a near-stream-of-consciousness style), command their own chapters, as do some people I knew, like the densely allusive Greg Tate (1957–2021) and the dogged Wayne Barrett (1945–2017), who was one of the first biographers of both Rudy Giuliani and Donald Trump. (Barrett died a day before Trump’s inauguration.) Romano supplements her interviews with gleanings from other sources, including Ellen Frankfort’s 1976 book The Voice, radio transcripts, and memoirs by former writers, from the jazz critic turned First Amendment advocate turned pro-life stalwart Nat Hentoff to the fizzy Seventies scenester James Wolcott.
Freaks charts the rise and fall of a true force in the counterculture—an improbable stab at utopia that gained unbelievable cachet, only to be brought down inexorably by some of the energies and economies it helped to pioneer. At its best, the book shows how a New York newspaper’s particular brand of journalism—a mix of personal take, zealous muckraking, and hunger for the new—had repercussions in the culture at large. If the New York Times was the paper of record, the Village Voice was the B-side you kept coming back to.
Romano lucidly tracks the changes of ownership and the ungodly number of editors in chief, some of whom even I had never heard of. It has a killer origin story. Norman Mailer, a psychologist named Ed Fancher, and Dan Wolf dreamed up the paper in 1955, with the former two ponying up five grand apiece (totaling about $120,000 today). All three were World War II combat veterans. Despite the bland nature of the first issue, the purpose was to start a fight, to upset complacency: “At heart, I wanted a war, and the Village was already glimpsed as the field for battle,” Mailer reflected in Advertisements for Myself. Though initially less involved in the day-to-day than Fancher and Wolf, Mailer launched Quickly: A Column for Slow Readers a few months in. At once grandiose and blithely tossed-off (“I doubt very much if this column is going to be particularly well written”), combative and baffling (“I have only one prayer—that I weary of you before you tire of me”), the piece reliably stirred things up. “The only way I see myself becoming one of the cherished traditions of the Village is to be actively disliked each week,” Mailer wrote. It proved a self-fulfilling prophecy.
“Hip is not totally negative, and has a view of life which is predicated on growth and the nuances of growth,” Mailer mused in an April 1956 column. But his perpetually tardy filing led to error: nuances morphed into nuisances. After heated words with Wolf and others, he put the kibosh on Quickly after four months. (The copy editor sometimes is the most important person on staff.) For a swan song, he riffed on the Broadway debut of Waiting for Godot, which he hadn’t seen yet.
Romano gives us a taste of Quickly and a few other articles, but Freaks wouldn’t work half as well as an anthology of seminal pieces; its chief virtue is the raucous interplay of speakers, their mix of nostalgia, bravado, and prejudice. The juxtaposition is wizardly, often humorous, sometimes devastating. Part of the grand narrative is how, from the Fifties and well into the twenty-first century, the Voice confronted issues in society and within itself, a messy process. The bitchiness and backbiting can be entertaining, even when the grievances are real.
In a chapter about the efflorescence of female word-slingers in the mid-Seventies, including Ellen Willis and Karen Durbin, longtime editor David Schneiderman recalls Jack Newfield, one of the Voice’s marquee reporters, complaining about “all these Stalinist feminists.” Vivian Gornick recalls friction with the old-school “whiteboys,” who were upset that valuable pages were being given to stories not in their bailiwick—pieces only women could write. Laurie Stone simply says, “Is Jack dead? Good.” (Newfield died in 2004.) Elsewhere, male writers stick their knives into the dashing, aristocratic, pro-Soviet Alexander Cockburn. “He always had girls, and he never had any money,” James Ridgeway recalls, while Mark Jacobson grumbles, “He was upset when Mao died.” Calling him a “brilliant stylist in a certain limited way,” Paul Berman notes that Cockburn’s Press Clips was “a marvelous column if you ignore what he actually said in it.”
Though the Voice is frozen in the public consciousness as a staunchly progressive publication, Freaks shows that change was rarely smooth. Lucian K. Truscott IV, who started writing for the Voice fresh out of West Point (Fancher served under his grandfather in World War II), regrets the fact that, in his coverage of the 1969 Stonewall riots (the bar was on the same block as the paper’s watering hole, the Lion’s Head), he used the phrase “forces of faggotry” right in the lede.
Other former staffers recount the controversy when Jules Feiffer, the Pulitzer Prize–winning cartoonist whose visual style defined the Voice early on, turned in a comic for a 1979 Gay Pride issue that bizarrely and gratuitously used the N-word. This provoked Rudy Langlais, the Voice’s first black editor, to pen an open letter, signed by him and thirteen others; he recalls either Hentoff or Newfield writing a piece that valorized a golden age before political correctness; Langlais shot back about how white that era had been.
An important cover story by C. Carr (aka Cynthia Carr) on the “taboo art” of Karen Finley drives Pete Hamill over the edge, culminating in a sexist screed against both colleague and artist that’s at odds—or perfectly aligned—with his reputation as a misty-eyed Gotham sentimentalist . And it pains me to report that Wayne Barrett, in many ways a heroic figure—scourge of Trump, Giuliani, Al D’Amato, and other politicians—wore a dress to mock Karen Durbin, who was named editor in chief in 1994. “Doing battle with your colleagues was part of the paper,” says Richard Goldstein, who began at the Voice in 1966 and was still a key player when I was there.
Then there are the actual fights, which unfold in what feels like real time. On the copy desk, I had read incredulous accounts of some of them in an ATEX file named “TANTRUMS,” surreptitiously stashed in the queue. The chief offender was Stanley Crouch, whose powers as a jazz writer are here outweighed by his behavior. He lashes out at Hilton Als, hurls a homophobic slur at Guy Trebay, screams at Christgau (his editor), and feuds with Ron Plotkin—my Ron—over a letter. “Stanley either is about to cross the line with saying something homophobic,” one editor recalls, “and Ron I don’t think is gonna cross the line with something racist, but they are edging closer and closer.” (Another editor claims that Crouch hit Ron.) Finally, in a different episode, he manhandles Harry Allen, a seminal hip-hop writer—Crouch loathes rap—dragging him “towards the utility closet, like he was going to close the door and beat me up in there.” Crouch is fired. “Stanley was having problems,” the longtime jazz writer Gary Giddins drily notes. “He was doing cocaine.”
Though I’m making the Voice sound dysfunctional—well, it clearly was—it must be stressed that Freaks is a blast to read. The boldface trivia, for starters, is top-notch. We learn that Ed Koch, New York’s future mayor, was once the Voice’s lawyer; that both Blondie and Bruce Springsteen found their drummers via the paper’s mighty classifieds; that the music writer Nelson George was an investor in Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It; that the openly gay writer Arthur Bell was called by a bank robber during a heist and wound up becoming “kind of a negotiator” in the showdown that inspired Dog Day Afternoon; that Kevin Smith credits his desire to make movies to a review of Slacker by Amy Taubin, who later helped put Clerks (1994) on the map. Talking about the lack of newsroom diversity before the advent of Thulani Davis and her protégé Greg Tate, Goldstein notes, “Even the cleaners were white”; Romano’s wry footnote mentions that James Earl Jones had once worked there as a janitor.
Apart from a handful of book reviews, my name hadn’t appeared much in the Voice as the new millennium approached. Most of my writing energy went into composing my vast unpublishable novels, one and then another. Ron commiserated over my lack of progress within the Voice ecosystem. He wildly overpraised my scant contributions (“on the basis of that review i would say you’re one of the best writers reviewing for this paper . . . there are very few true stylists writing for the voice anymore”). Hyperbole, but it kept me going.
Things changed slowly. I became deputy copy chief, and in 2000, a senior editor, filling in for Ron and a few other editors when they were away; in this capacity I edited Nat Hentoff and Wayne Barrett. I was tapped to write the table of contents, a weekly lagniappe ($175) in which I indulged a fondness for puns: “Oh, the Humana Ts!” was my teaser for a piece about the Humana theater festival which mentioned its merch. For a long time I made tear sheets, as if compiling poems for an inscrutable chapbook. You stick around long enough and they start to notice. The film editor, Dennis Lim, threw a lifeline by assigning me movie reviews, mostly of overearnest indies or Hollywood dreck. It was great fun.
I took charge of the educational supplement, leading one of the fact-checkers to coin the tongue twister “Ed edits EdSupp.” The purpose of the EdSupp was to provide learning-related pieces against which to sell ads, but in my mind it was like a mini Lingua Franca. Thus the EdSupp also became home to pieces on arcane subjects (such as the nineteenth-century craze for the artificial language Volapük, taken up by my late friend Paul La Farge) and profiles of academics with niche interests, as well as newsier stories on campus controversies.
In April 2002, I wrote a feature about the scholarship surrounding the outsider artist Henry Darger, whose solitary existence belied the creation of an intensely beautiful and disturbing fantasy world he called the Realms of the Unreal. My piece was the distillation of months of work, the culmination of an obsession; with my unpublished manuscripts, I identified with this secret creator. I remember the glee I felt when I learned that it was chosen for the cover of the whole issue. I saw a preliminary design and went home that night, only to discover the next day that the designer had kept my name off the cover, for reasons that didn’t make sense.
I felt like quitting, but I didn’t. It was April 2002. Ron died suddenly that summer, following a cerebral hemorrhage that struck while he was at home on St. Mark’s Place. I wept, reading years of messages he sent me and that I’ve saved all these years.
Vivian Gornick, a contributor throughout the Seventies, cherishes how the paper helped her find her voice. “They gave us the most astonishing amount of space and time, and it was amazing. You would think that they were the internet,” she says, laughing. “They let us go on and on.” Mark Jacobson observes that, under Marianne Partridge (editor from 1976 to 1979), the Voice was “like Paris in the ’20s . . . It could have gone on forever, if it weren’t for the internet.”
The Voice got banged up for a while by the New York Press, its alt-weekly rival in the Nineties and Aughts, which you didn’t have to pay for, and by Time Out New York, whose pages of listings didn’t smudge your fingers. (You did have to pay for TONY.) The mortal blow, though, came from something less tangible, a San Francisco–based online resource for people to buy, sell, or trade items and services. You didn’t have to pay to place an ad. Anil Dash came to the Voice in July 2001 as a web developer, attracted by its storied arts coverage. His second day on the job, he asked his supervisor how the paper planned to cope with Craiglist. “They were like, ‘Who’s Craig? What are you talking about?’ ” On his third day, Craigslist launched in New York and swiftly nuked the profitability of the Voice’s classifieds. Akash Goyal, hired around the same time on the digital side, felt like Chicken Little, wanting to tell people: “I’m from the internet, and the internet is coming.”
Then 9/11 happened, and the lede to Alisa Solomon’s firsthand story—“A real war has come to these shores now”—echoes Goyal’s warning about Web 2.0.
Life is strange. One day you take a test, and then for the next five or six or twelve years report to the same office every day. In 2002, frustrated by the slow pace of my Voice career, I helped start a magazine with some friends. The Believer made its debut in March 2003. I worried what my bosses would say, but the editor in chief, Don Forst, was in fact delighted, because I’d written a nine-thousand-word piece for the magazine about “Charlie” Portis, whom he’d known when they both worked for the New York Herald Tribune in the Sixties. Things picked up. Don tapped me to edit a new section called The Essay; the first piece I ran, I think, was an email I’d gotten from a friend about her hilariously bad moving experience. This was Sloane Crosley. I soon moved to a dark but big office of my own, near Hoberman and Ridgeway and Lim. I took over the weekly books coverage and the quarterly Voice Literary Supplement. (One of my trusty interns was a young Rachel Aviv.) For a couple years, things were good. It felt at last like the ideal job. Then, in 2005, Village Voice Media was sold to New Times, a chain of alt-weeklies based in Phoenix that had bid for the paper before. The bloodletting was unrelenting. The granary was burning down. I remember bemoaning the new regime to Don, the seasoned veteran, who was beyond being rattled. “Whoever buys the rabbit gets to make the fur hat,” he told me. As a coping strategy, I started taking notes, as though knowing I wouldn’t see this place much longer: The view from Don’s window of the circling pigeons, the Holy Roller security guard, the bulletin board in the smoking room . . . the notes kept piling up, and I’d bend them into new shapes, and a few months in I realized I had a novel brewing. This would be a short one, I thought, not a postmodern doorstop—no, a comedy . . . or is it a horror story, set in a disintegrating workplace? A layoff narrative. I got laid off right before Labor Day 2006; they delivered the news by phone. The New York Post blared on September 1: silent scream at voice—out–of–of–town owners ax alt weekly’s vets, columnists. Freaked out by my sudden unemployment, I gave myself until Thanksgiving to finish my novel, a deadline I met. In 2008, it was published as Personal Days. My author portrait was snapped by Sylvia Plachy, the longtime Voice photographer, whose son, the actor Adrien Brody, used to play in the office as a kid. Bob Christgau reviewed my novel in the New York Observer. I remember being thrilled, though the headline—office drones, without the buzz—felt a little limp. I filed it away. But reading it now, sixteen years later, I’m touched. He notes that we were let go on the same day, and that my fictional workplace evokes the “fear and trembling” vibrating in the walls of 36 Cooper Square. Of my novel’s overtly lyrical finale, composed as a single forty-four-page sentence, the dean of American rock critics writes: “Its impassioned rhythms—so unlike most newspaper rhythms, though at the Voice sometimes we tried—bespeak Mr. Park’s deep-down belief that white-collar laborers needn’t lead alienated lives.” Sometimes we did try.
