"The Past is a Foreign Country."

As L.P. Hartley wrote, "They do things differently there."

One way it was different involved a certain student newspaper I'll call The Salient here. The traditional paper at the City College of New York was The Campus, which was founded early in the Twentieth Century. By the 1960s the student activity fee supported five papers, which had their offices lined up in a row on the third floor of Finley Hall, then the student center for the college.

The Salient name was created by the returning World War II veterans who founded it in 1947. For a while, it was a conventional publication, but by the 1960s and '70s, it was the school's hippie/countercultural paper. It was starting to lose its unconventional mojo by the time I joined it in the fall of 1973. The end of the war in Vietnam, and Nixon's resignation the following year, deprived it of much of the political commentary it had contained.

I was an eighteen-year-old freshman at the time, and I and a friend of mine were lured in by a help-wanted ad that was run in October. The line that caught my attention said, "if you like to work with weird people, this is the place for you." I always thought I was weird, although in a quiet way, so I joined.

By the way, the college library has scanned most of the issues and put them online, so I can reread material I hadn't seen in years. As time passed, I got rid of most of the back issues I had kept for myself, although a few still survive in my possession.

By the early 1970s, The Salient had published some unconventional - I should say pornographic - material. The most famous was, I think, in 1971 when they ran the famous Fuck Cover. It quite simply was a full-page photo of two people, well, fucking.

Even though I wasn't there yet, I had heard about its accidental creation. I'm guessing that drugs had to be involved somehow, but I never could confirm that.

The tale went that one night there were three people in The Salient office, two men and one woman. Somehow one of the guys got it on with the girl on the ratty old couch by the windows. Why they did this with a witness is not something I ever knew.

The third person was a guy named Peter, who was still on the staff when I joined later. He had a camera with him, and snapped a few photos of the copulating couple - seemingly without them caring about it - and then he left.

Somebody decided to run one of these photos in the next issue, apparently with or without the permission of the two subjects. Their faces weren't visible in this simple scene. A bare-ass guy was fucking the girl, who had her bare legs spread up and out. It was all very basic.

Other items would appear periodically, although nothing as dramatic as that. There was one guy named Bobby who considered himself a cartoon/artist in the vein of R. Crumb. However, he didn't have Crumb's wit or drawing ability, so sometimes he would just reprint one of Crumb's cartoons. Of course, he didn't worry about copyright violations.

The one that stuck in my mind - I think it was published in 1972 - was about the character of Joe Blow and his incestuous family. At one point Joe walks in on his teenage daughter as she is masturbating. Being the righteous father he was, he whips out his cock, gets blown by her, and then has vigorous intercourse with her.

Joe Junior then walks in on this scene, and he's so disturbed by this that he goes to discuss it with his mother. She asks him if he masturbates a lot, which discomforts him. Then she puts on a black dominatrix outfit and bangs him as dad did with his sis. "Gee, you're the greatest mom ever!" I guess from sonny's point of view, she was.

There was another staff member also named Bobby who was into writing, not art. In the first issue of the fall 1973 semester, he wrote, that as editor, "I also plan on trying some new and unusual things that have never been done in the paper before. I don't know what they are yet but I guarantee you'll know them when you see them."

There was already something to see in that issue. He had gone to a Times Square theater and seen a Danish movie called Animal Lover. The theme was bestially, and Bobby had a written a review of it which was published. Key scenes are of a Danish farm girl - well, having fun with her dog and horse.

This Bobby was just getting started. In November, along with articles about the Arab-Israeli War, there was a story called "Another Sexual Minority." It was a tongue-in-cheek autobiography of a Brooklyn necrophiliac. It had no byline, but it was pretty obvious who had probably written it. I especially liked lines like, "we seemed to agree that our society limits people in the way they can express close feelings for each other, especially when one is dead, and the other is alive."

The first issue of 1974 was where Bobby finally revealed his full hand. My contribution to that issue was an incredibly boring story about how the college would get its heating fuel in the middle of the first oil embargo. I wasn't interested in it, but as a neophyte reporter, I had to take what was assigned to me.

Bobby was a senior, and he got to strut his stuff with an entire page called "The Weird Section." He wrote about how the rest of the staff would view it. "They fear that with my new power, I will totally freak out and print things that are decadent, disgusting, and offensive. I probably will but above all, a story must be bizarre and funny in order to be printed." And, "let us rejoice. . . It's a dream come true."

This was long before online erotic literature became so common, so it had some novelty I suppose. The main story was written by a woman named Carol. She was a redhead with a huge behind and very tight jeans. I didn't ask her out because, well, she was about twice my weight. Also, I had never asked anybody out before, so I didn't know how to approach her.

Anyway, somehow she was familiar with the mating habits of cockroaches. Her work was about two bugs named Mona and Stanley, and what they did when they copulated with each other. It was extremely detailed and, I assume, accurate. I suspect Carol was trying to express her own sexual frustrations by writing it. Yet, despite her weight, I certainly would have banged her anyway if perhaps she had lasted a bit longer on the paper. At that point in my life, I hadn't banged anybody, so it was all just speculative.

The other main article was Bobby's review of a satirical Western novel entitled Lament, which was mostly about cowboys involved with homosexuality, BDSM, and various other activities of that sort. On a completely separate page, a guy had published a story about an America where heterosexuality, not homosexuality, was taboo.

All of this didn't seem to get much reaction from either the staff or the student body, but the next issue blew the lid off. That was because the other Bobby, the artist, had contributed his own work to the Weird Section. The most memorable thing in it was his drawing of a nun masturbating. She had removed all of her clothes except for her headgear and her thigh-high black stockings. As she leaned back, her left hand was moving the long end of a crucifix into her hairy cunt. The caption merely said, "Oh my God . . ."

It wasn't particularly well-drawn but it got its point across. What our amateur pornographers must have known but failed to account for was that religion and sex are a potent combination. That has been demonstrated in recent years by Muslims committing acts of violence against those who they think have depicted Muhammad improperly.

Our guys also failed to realize that, despite the First Amendment, they weren't publishing this on their own dime. The money to create it came from the students, and ultimately the Student Senate had a hand in that. The college and university administrations also had some influence over us, although the extent of their power was not completely clear.

Unfortunately, the college library at the moment only has digital archives for The Salient. There are none yet for The Campus, which was sort of the "paper of record" for the school. It would have been useful to see the view from the outside that was provided by that publication, which reported quite a bit about the ongoing controversy.

Unfortunately, I don't have access to those issues, so I have to depend on what The Salient said about itself during that period. And stuff was definitely hitting the fan regarding the masturbating nun.

By the next issue near the end of February, the paper was starting to walk back from the stance it had taken earlier. For one thing, there was no Weird Section in that one. On the front page, here was a photo of a girl with her head down on her knees, supposedly in shock from seeing the nun drawing. The caption read, in part, "this issue contains nothing that would prohibit its sale to minors, and thus, there is no need to chew any holes [in one's own pants]. Lean back and take delight in its contents."

Somehow I suspect that was written by Peter, the same guy who had snapped the photo for The Fuck Cover. That's purely speculation on my part.

We did get our first anti-nun letter, which we published and to which writer Bobby responded. He had some venom in him regarding that letter. "As far as my hang-ups about masturbation, from the sound of your letter it appears you are the one with the hang-up." He also stated that he was writing a short story about people with such sexual attitudes regarding self-pleasuring. "It will hopefully appear in a future issue. Stay tuned." I'm pretty sure it never appeared.

Artist Bobby also weighed in with a longer piece called "On Immoral Moralists." He had been raised as a Catholic, unlike the other Bobby who was Jewish, and he had a number of grudges against The Church. Certainly, he had lapsed in his religion. He claimed that he "had never fully accept[ed] the notions of celibacy and eternal damnation as a natural or desirable way of life. I rejected this lifestyle about 8 years ago (or at the age of 13)."

I admit that I can fully identify with his discontent, although I continued to attend mass until that year (1974) mainly to placate my parents. When I finally quit going, my father asked me if I wanted to "see a priest." He didn't seem to get how done with the religion I was. Like artist Bobby, I could no longer stand the hypocrisy, sexual and otherwise, of the whole enterprise.

In the next issue, March 13, a month after the self-pleasuring nun appeared, the situation was obviously becoming more yet more contentious. The Salient itself both tried to walk it back further - in a half-hearted kind of way - and also added a considerable amount to the controversy.

Now it is true that one can go online now and see many photographic depictions of misbehaving nuns and other clergy. Also online are reproductions of drawings and paintings of naughty nuns, priests, and monks going back to at least the 18th Century, if not earlier.

The difference was that the creators of those works either paid their own expenses or had patrons who approved of what they were doing. We, on the other hand, were working at a public institution with thousands of students involuntarily submitting their money to us for printing costs, among other things. Advertising that we sold brought in some funds but not enough for us to be truly self-sufficient.

The issues themselves were given away free; they sat in bins around the campus. And it was the college itself that provided us with office space, typewriters, furniture, and various other things needed to publish. We were not truly independent creators of our content.

A long-time editor, Steve, tried for a diplomatic approach. He had been involved with the paper for about eight years, and he had doubled the amount of time he had needed to be an undergraduate. I suspect to him, there was nothing in the outside world that could immediately give him the kind of status and influence he enjoyed at The Salient.

One thing was for sure: a lot of people commented in print for that issue, and most of it was quite wordy. Steve himself claimed that "no malice" was intended, but he also wrote that "perhaps we can be accused of lacking judgment in this incident, of not clearly delineating the context or purpose of the illustration, of not anticipating the highly emotional response from some quarters." Besides, Catholics themselves hardly agreed on everything, if they ever had.

There were letters, both "pro-nun" ("one must fight" to preserve one's pleasure) and "anti-nun" (we were "subhuman slime"). There were more op-ed pieces by staff members and faculty at the college. One of the professors was in the history department and had been mostly educated at Catholic schools and he had even taught at a Catholic college. He managed to waffle his way through a long editorial. Even reading it now, I'm not entirely sure where he stood on the issue.

But the most notable item was supplied by artist Bobby himself. At the last moment, down at the printing company we used in Manhattan, he inserting his nun drawing again. Except, this time he had a box across her genitals that said: "Censored." His caption read: "Freedom in America? Don't Expect Miracles."

I remember that there was quite a bit of dissension among the staff members present about printing this new version. Probably I chickened out, but I think I voted against running it again. If I can remember how my nineteen-year-old mind was thinking, I was truly worried about the paper being suspended, although probably it would be temporary. If that happened, I would have nothing to do at the college except go to classes. That had been pretty grim during my first couple of months before joining The Salient.

It was published anyway. But we were starting to collect some relatively powerful enemies. One was the Student Senate, which perhaps had the most direct responsibility over us. Through various political quirks, it was a mostly Black-dominated institution. They were at best unsympathetic to our seemingly anti-Catholic crusade. There were guidelines at the college against "racial and religious prejudice" and we were right on the edge with that.

Even though artist Bobby had been raised as a Catholic himself, he had complained bitterly about the institution in that earlier article. Had he simply written about it, and not tried a visual depiction, I suspect fewer people would have noticed or cared. But images have power that mere words can't convey.

We were also getting into trouble in Albany and Washington, especially with Senator Bill Buckley. He demanded an investigation into us, specifically from HEW's Office of Civil Rights and the Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division.

Buckley was pretty canny because he mentioned a fact that our people had somehow overlooked. He brought up the question of whether "anyone has a 'right' to publish such a cartoon in a paper supported by compulsory contributions extracted from the entire student body."

So did "freedom of the press belong to those who owned one?" It may not seem fair, but maybe there was some truth in that. We couldn't pay our typesetting and printing bills if it wasn't for those thousands of students paying their activity fees.

The two Bobby's also miscalculated in that they were seniors approaching graduation and were thus lame ducks. They were vulnerable to a coup from younger staff members like me who may not have been pro-Catholic but who wanted a viable paper around for the fall semester of 1974. It was definitely the early end of Bobby's Weird Section, but I doubted it could have survived the next year without him guiding it.

This marked a change in the times from the more free-wheeling late 1960s/early '70s period to an era that was surely more bland and less controversial. Nixon resigned that summer, which ended his reign as the great Evil One in the eyes of the Left.

Universities have to face the fact that there is a constant turnover in the student body, and college institutions have an entirely new set of faces every four or five years. That certainly happened at The Salient, which was never quite the same again.

For the following issues of Spring, 1974, things quieted down considerably. It was as if the whole masturbating nun brouhaha had never happened. We got one short anti-nun letter.

Then writer Bobby complained about the lack of student demonstrations. I'm not sure what he expected, since the war in Vietnam had ended. Maybe it wasn't really a complaint as it was a comment about how the world was changing. The Weird Section stayed in limbo. He was reduced to writing about how he had seen a Wackenhut guard peeing in a sink in one of the men's rooms.

******

In late May 1974, the last issue of that contentious term came out. There was no weirdness in that one. Much of the paper was about the first anniversary of the creation of "Open Admissions." Any high school student who graduated was guaranteed a spot in one of the four-year or community colleges, depending on their interests and grades. Of course, a lot of remedial classes had to be created for them. Many of them did get into City College

It was a bold move, and it lasted a long time. I think it was cut back in the 1990s to just the community colleges, but I'd have to do some research on that.

The two Bobbys and Steve graduated that spring. Peter, who had been an undergraduate for something like six years, stayed for one more year. Graduating staffers could write a "Thirty" column about their experiences on the paper and at the college in general.

Writer Bobby took the opportunity to write one. Even though he had lost only about three months with his Weird page project, he was quite bitter about being denied the chance to see it to completion. Perhaps he thought that someone else would continue the page by the next semester.

In the first paragraph, he wrote, "The last three months on The Salient have filled me with bitterness, some of it bordering on hatred. Perhaps it's not all called for, but I can't help feeling it."

He decided to focus his ire on his fellow colleagues on the paper, especially the newer ones - "the young upstarts" - whom he believed had thwarted him. "They wanted The Salient to be a pure newspaper. Their dream is to turn The Salient into another Campus.". He then named the five people he did like while calling the rest of us "mediocre hypocrites."

*****

The fall term rolled in, and the paper had changed quite a bit. Steve (eight years as an undergraduate!) and the two Bobbies were gone. As in ancient Rome, there was now a triumvirate of editors running the paper, two of whom were women.

They seem to have had no use for the old days, and without mentioning the nun, they run an op-ed on the opening page denouncing her. There was to be no more "ego fodder." "The Salient has not been without mistakes, but there has never been an attempt at distortion or maliciousness." Again, everyone seemed to miss, perhaps deliberately, that artist Bobby had specifically said he had gripes against the Catholic Church going back to his childhood. Anyway, from now on, the paper would be "observing a self-defined standard of good taste."

Good taste? That was something previously unknown there for a number of years. The mid-1970s had finally influenced the paper.

I know the need to get good clippings for job interviews was one of the motivating factors of the new regime. A handful of people did get positions at The New York Times and other papers. That wasn't easy, and masturbating nuns could get in the way. I knew one guy who went all the way to Stuttgart, Arkansas for a newspaper job.

I was too young perhaps to care one way or the other.