If you spent any time south of 23rd Street between 1955 and 2017, you probably have a connection to the Village Voice. The alt-weekly newspaper and NYC counterculture institution occupies a near-mythical space in the collective memory of a specific subset of readers. It was the paper of record for Lower Manhattan, covering news and trends too edgy for the old grey lady uptown. It was where you went to find an apartment, plan your Thursday night, or have your mind blown by its incredible line-up of writers — Norman Mailer, Jill Johnston, Lester Bangs, Vivian Gornick, Robert Christgau, and Colson Whitehead (to name just a few). In the dark ages before Rotten Tomatoes, Pitchfork, and YouTube, it was where you learned about new music, films, and movements. Voice theater critics started the Obie Awards for off-Broadway experimental theater. Richard Goldstein hung out at the Factory with Andy Warhol. It was the first paper to report on hip-hop and break dancing. Jerry Saltz covered art there. Michael Musto wrote about nightlife.
I remember the Voice for the classifieds, clubs, and culture. In the late 90s, like most people living in the five boroughs, I found my apartment through the Voice classifieds. It was free by then (the Voice went free in 1996) and I always grabbed my copy at the newsstand on Astor Place and read it on the subway ride home. My favorite section was the Voice Literary Supplement (VLS). Their critics weren’t afraid to say what they thought. They wrote the way my friends and I talked about the books we read. And they picked titles that weren’t stacked on the tables in Barnes & Noble.
It never really registered that the Voice also had a long tradition of breaking actual news. I was unaware that the writer Mary Nichols didn’t just write about, but was the unsung hero of, the 1950s fight to save Washington Square Park. The campaign that took down Robert Moses and made Jane Jacobs famous. Or that while the New York Times devoted a few paragraphs to the 1969 Stonewall Riots and the beginning of the Gay Rights Movement, the Voice had two reporters covering the story – one outside with the protesters and the other inside with the police. Wayne Barrett, the paper’s official muckraker, was the first reporter to take a hard look at a real estate developer named Donald Trump in 1979 and wrote the first biography of the future president in 1991. The paper received three Pulitzers, the National Press Foundation Award, and the George Polk Award. It was always hyper-local in its coverage, which isn’t so hard when your hometown is New York City. But even when covering national and international stories, like Mark Schoofs’s Pulitzer-winning “Aids: The Agony of Africa,” it always stuck to the subjects that mattered to its audience.
It’s surprising how much material is out there on the Village Voice today. In addition to numerous anthologies collecting various columns, there are at least two histories of the early years. Ellen Frankfort wrote for the paper between 1968 and 1973. Her 1976 unauthorized The Voice: Life at The Village Voice, and Kevin Michael McAuliffe’s 1978 The Great American Newspaper: The Rise and Fall of the Village Voice couldn’t be more diametrically opposed while at the same time still in agreement that the paper’s best days were already behind it.* Frankfort applies a patriarchal framework over Dan Wolf’s editorship that reveals as much about the author’s preoccupations and grudges as it does about the Voice. McAuliffe positions his examination as a more objective study, but the overt sexism, homophobia, and racism are difficult to dismiss. So, while Tricia Romano’s The Freaks Came Out to Write: The Definitive History of the Village Voice, the Radical Paper that Changed American Culture isn’t the first book written about the Village Voice, it is — true to its very long title — the most comprehensive, enthusiastic and consistent with the ethos of the institution.
Romano, a former Voice staff writer, spent four years interviewing the men and women who passed through the many offices (six by my count) the Voice called home. She transferred those transcripts to the page, organizing her interviewees’ words around specific topics. The resulting oral history is organized chronologically and divided into five distinct periods. Romano provides a cast of characters and a timeline. She uses pull quotes as chapter headings, includes excerpts from stories that ran in the paper, and inserts all the obligatory photos, footnotes, and an index. The finished book is exuberant and noisy, like a crowded party where everyone is talking at once. The Freaks Came Out to Write recreates a New York literary scene young writers dream of being part of. It’s pure fun and pure nostalgia. And, for a 571-page brick of a book, it is a dazzlingly fast read.
Started in 1955 by Dan Wolf, Ed Fancher, and Norman Mailer, the Voice was a “writer’s paper” from its inception. One of the first papers to embrace the new journalism, writers were expected to write in their own voices and have opinions. Wolf, the paper’s first editor, didn’t want journalism school graduates. Some of his best hires, like Lucien K. Truscott, IV, were discovered on the Letters page. Over the years, Voice writers developed a genuine sense of ownership for their patch on the Island of Misfit Toys. And a strong belief in the importance of the paper and the work. This made for an interesting dynamic every time the paper was sold (which was a fairly frequent occurrence – I lost count around the fifth or sixth owner). It’s comical to read how the sky inevitably came crashing down each time a new editor came along, regardless of how despised their predecessor was. Proving what I’ve long believed: no one likes change.
I’m at an age where I’m thinking a lot about nostalgia – and so, apparently, are the journalists (many of whom went on to have powerhouse careers at other outlets) Romano interviewed. It’s not the things we feel nostalgic about that we miss, it’s the people we were when we held them in our hands. And if the diminishing of newspapers like the Voice represents a thing we’ve lost, then it is a “quirkiness” and dedication to local news. But that might be a projection. Because no one seems to be writing about the rise and fall of the Lansing City Post or the Cleveland Edition. Today, most online news outlets offer the combination of fact and opinion that was once the sole purview of the alt-weeklies. And the trajectory of the Voice only reflects and anticipates that of the news media as a whole. One of the ways in which The Freaks Came Out to Write shines is in identifying where the opportunities were missed. Part of why the Voice couldn’t survive the internet is because it made the internet – the style of writing we associate with online – possible and then waited too long to transition to the new medium.
But the reporting the Voice advocated still exists. Just like the Village Voice itself still exists. (I know, I was surprised, too). Like most things online, it’s just harder to find. The promise of the internet – access to all knowledge – has been broken by advertising and marketing, leaving us with too much information and too little curating. And while algorithms may not run everything, they’ve made “local” a relative term. As for the shaping of culture, influencers are no longer attached to a region or even a unique aesthetic. That’s a real game-changer. Imagine if Andy Warhol never had to leave Pittsburg for New York City. What would the art world look like if he’d only needed a camera phone and ring light to fulfill his ambitions?
The Voice was not a perfect institution. Like everywhere else, it had its share of racism, homophobia, and sexism in the newsroom. The writers Romano spoke to from the 60s and 70s describe “whiteboys” and “Stalinist Feminists” shouting at each other across the office. Writers from the 80s and 90s note how people of color were underrepresented among the writing staff. The front of the paper (news) was constantly fighting the back of the paper (culture) for column inches. And, at least in the early decades before the paper was unionized, writers were often underpaid, which management claimed was the price of the freedom to write about what they wanted. Finally, in the early oughts, there was an increased dependence on adult ads and the lawsuit over backpage.com and (alleged) sex trafficking. Romano doesn’t shy away from any of the bad, nor does she dwell on it. She’s moving too fast and has too much ground to cover.
If The Freaks Came Out to Write has a flaw, it is that there’s too little real estate available to give to any one subject. A prime example is when Sally Kempton tells Romano, “You can’t have a book about the Voice without Jill Johnston.” Romano gives the dance critic, lesbian separatist leader, and kooky stream-of-conscious writer an entire chapter all to herself, and it still isn’t enough for an oversized personality like Johnston’s. In her Author’s Note at the front of the book, Romano explains that “in instances where people were not alive or capable of speaking for themselves, I turned to surrogates … their writing … and archival interviews.” She doesn’t list Johnston among those who fell into that category, but Johnston died in 2010, so I suspect most of her contributions to the book are taken from her writings.
At the same time, part of the fun is using the book as a jumping-off point. If you’re interested, you can read Jill Johnston: The Disintegration of a Critic. Or watch the documentary Town Bloody Hall on YouTube, which James Wolcott describes as “a classic moment in New York life because you’ve got Mailer, Diana Trilling, Germaine Greer, Jill Johnston [on a panel], and in the audience you have Susan Sontag, Cynthia Ozick, Anatole Broyard, and a lot of Village Voice people.” Or you can mine the Voice’s online archives.
To represent 68 years of the Village Voice is a monumental undertaking, but Romano pulls it off. I can’t remember the last time I enjoyed a book this much. And while, at times, it may feel like a celebration and not a serious assessment of the paper and its legacy, no one ever picked up the Voice expecting balanced, unbiased reporting. Romano has given us a book filled with many, often conflicting, opinions on what the Voice accomplished and represented. On the opening page, she asks the writer James Hannaham, “What’s the greatest era of the Village Voice?” His response: “Whichever one you were there for.”
[Published by PublicAffairs on February 27, 2024, 608 pages, $31.50 US hardcover]
*Both books are out of print, but relatively inexpensive copies can be purchased from online sellers.