Athletes - Larry Flynt

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	Athletes - Larry Flynt

Larry Claxton Flynt, Jr. (born November 1, 1942) is an American magazine publisher. He is the head of Larry Flynt Publications (LFP), producing over twenty magazines, including Hustler, with an annual turnover of around $150 million. Over the course of his life he has taken part in several legal battles involving the First Amendment, and has run for public office a number of times. He suffers from bipolar disorder and is paralyzed from the waist down due to a failed assassination attempt.

Biography

Born in Salyersville, Kentucky, he spent his childhood in poverty. His mother divorced his alcoholic father and when Flynt was 10 he moved to Indiana with his mother. Flynt joined the US Army in 1958 at only fifteen, lasting barely a year. He then joined the Navy and served on the USS Enterprise. He left the Navy in 1964 and opened a strip club in Dayton, Ohio. He later owned several strip clubs and started his magazine Hustler in July 1974.

According to Flynt's autobiography, his first sexual experience was a mistaken encounter with a chicken after he'd heard from older boys that sex with chicken was similar in sensation to sexual intercourse with a woman. He proceeded to have sex with a chicken killing it afterwards to avoid any suspicion.

He was married five times, the longest marriage was to his fourth wife, Althea, from 1976 until her death in 1987. She had been suffering from AIDS and drowned in a bath tub, possibly as a result of a heroin overdose. He has five children.

He had a one-year flirtation with evangelical Christianity, converted by evangelist Ruth Carter Stapleton (sister of President Jimmy Carter) in 1977. He continued to publish his magazine, vowing to "hustle for God," became "born again" and claims he had a vision from God while flying his jet.

During a legal battle related to obscenity in Gwinnett County, Georgia, on March 6, 1978, he and his local lawyer Gene Reeves Jr. were shot outside the county courthouse in Lawrenceville. White supremacist serial killer Joseph Paul Franklin has confessed to the shootings, claiming he was outraged by an interracial photo shoot in Hustler. Franklin, who is serving a life sentence in prison, was never brought to trial. Flynt has made statements indicating he believes Franklin's story, and some law enforcement officials have the same opinion. There remain skeptics, however, so the issue is unresolved. Flynt's injuries left him paralyzed from the waist down, though Reeves recovered more fully. The injury caused Flynt intense, constant pain, and he was addicted to painkillers until multiple surgeries deadened the affected nerves.

After the attack, he renounced Christianity and moved with Althea to a Bel-Air mansion in Los Angeles.

Flynt disowned his eldest daughter Tonya Flynt-Vega after she became a Christian anti-pornography activist. In her 1998 book , she claims that Flynt sexually abused her as a child. Flynt denies the charges.

Flynt's enterprises

By 1970, together with his brother and life-long business partner Jimmy, he ran eight strip clubs throughout Ohio in Columbus, Toledo, Akron, and Cleveland.

In July 1974, Flynt first published Hustler as a step forward from the Hustler Newsletter which was cheap advertising for his businesses. The magazine struggled for the first year, partly because many distributors and wholesalers refused to handle it as its nude photos became increasingly graphic. The magazine targeted working-class men and grew from a shaky start to a peak circulation of around 3 million (current circulation is below 500,000). In November 1974 it showed the first "pink-shots," photos of open vaginas. The publication of nude paparazzi pictures of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis in August 1975 was a major fillip. Hustler has often featured more explicit photographs than comparable magazines and has contained depictions of women that some find demeaning, such as a naked woman in a meat grinder or presented as a dog on a leash - though Flynt later said that the meat grinder image was a self-criticism of the pornography industry. Flynt also has published thousands of racist and anti-semitic cartoons and images. One cartoon, entitled "Chester the Molester", depicted a man's repeated molestations of underage girls, however, the cartoon was discontinued in 1990 when the cartoon's creator, Dwayne Tinsley, was convicted of sexually abusing his own daughter. In 1983, Hustler published a feature called Dirty pool, in which a woman is depicted as being gang-raped on a pool table. At first the depicted woman protests, but as the gang-rape continues, she comes to enjoy herself.

Flynt created his privately held company Larry Flynt Publications (LFP) in 1976. LFP published several other magazines. It also included a distribution business, something that may have angered the Mafia, which traditionally organized the distribution of porn. LFP did not expand beyond pornography until 1986, but later its output included more mainstream work. The distribution business as well as several mainstream magazines were sold beginning in 1996. LFP started to produce pornographic movies in 1998.

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