Behind the scenes of The Village Voice
For some six decades, it took The Village Voice to tell the alternative story of New York each week – and with its publication late every Thursday — America itself.
Beginning in the white bread mid-Fifties when The Voice was founded by the likes of Norman Mailer and a couple of cohorts, through to the deranged Sixties and Seventies – think the Stonewall riots and Gay rights; the Vietnam war; civil rights; Tricky Dick; the Kennedys; the rise of feminism; hippies; The Mob; AIDS; Warhol and the Factory; Studio 54; rock n’ roll – The Voice dissected it all as America’s first alternative weekly.
From cheap apartments to cheap sex, the Voice’s classifieds were often more popular than any of the New Journalism up-front.
And often those raunchy ads saved the day for the sometimes financially struggling alt-weekly.
That fix of news, culture, politics and street life that was part of the quintessential Big Apple was first published a few days before Halloween, in 1955, and sadly ended, mainly for financial reasons, the Internet, competition from Craigslist, and downtown’s gentrification, in early 2018, the first year of Donald Trump’s reign.
And now comes ex-Voice journalist Tricia Romano’s consummate and gossipy oral history appropriately titled, The Freaks Came Out to Write: The Definitive History of The Village Voice, the Radical Paper that Changed American Culture, [Public Affairs].
As Romano sees it, The Voice was a “gaggle of talking heads…a place that took things seriously – small things, developing things, emerging things that other places didn’t.”
And the consensus of those who worked there told her it was “the best job” they ever had in journalism,” with free speech a prime issue.
As Romano observes, “The Voice will allow anyone to say or advertise what they want.”
One of the 200 or so sources she interviewed, an art director, acidly remarked that The Voice’s front covers often looked like, “The New York Post on acid and run by communists.”
One such classic about the AIDS epidemic, featured a huge condom.
Village Voice, R.I.P. — Caroline Howe
