Larry Flynt, who died in February at 78, liked Sean Carnage. When the Cleveland native moved to Los Angeles in 2002—a gay man in his early 20s who’d answered an ad for a job at a “men’s specialty magazine,” Carnage says he “was hoping that it was (gay male-oriented) Men or Freshman or Unzipped. It turned out to be Hustler!”—he was “amped” to be working for the hillbilly provocateur himself.
In what I’m hoping is the first of many reminiscences about Flynt by those who knew him, Carnage writes on SeanCarnage.com:
When we first met, Larry asked me “Where are you from?” “Ohio,” I said—knowing that he could relate. Flynt chuckled, “that’s a great place to be from.”
Like many former Larry Flynt Publications (LFP) employees, Carnage had an emotionally-significant time working in Larry’s orbit in the tall LFP-branded building (“The Dark Tower,” as it is fondly remembered) on the southeast corner of Wilshire and La Cienega in Beverly Hills.
Officially the director of marketing and publicity for LFP and VCA (which LFP purchased in 2003), Carnage fielded calls from Arnold Schwarzenegger when both Larry and Arnold were running in the 2003 California gubernatorial recall election (Flynt placed seventh in a field of dozens, including porn star Mary Carey, Arianna Huffington, Gary Coleman, sumo wrestler Tachikaze, “cigarette retailer” Ned Roscoe, and pre-Kardashian Angelyne), organized publicity stunts on Larry’s behalf, and shepherded projects like Eon McKai‘s slate of films made for VCA, including “Neu Wave Hookers,” a tribute to The Dark Brothers’ 1984 classic “New Wave Hookers.”
But at LFP, Carnage also experienced an atmosphere that, years later, he’d recognize in the Trump administration.
“I don’t think Larry was anything like Trump as far as his motivation was concerned,” Carnage says, “(but) the issue here is what the net result was. They both create this atmosphere of distrust and paranoia amongst the people that work for them. They pit people against each other because it keeps them at the top of the heap.”
As Flynt’s health deteriorated, Carnage says that “all (Larry) had was handlers, (and) his relationships with the few remaining family members that he was close to were deteriorating at that time.”
contrary to the uplifting tale told in People vs. Larry Flynt, Larry never got off drugs. In fact he married his nurse (Liz Flynt) who made sure he always had his meds and lots of them by the look of things. I remember walking into Larry’s office and finding him sobbing—totally confused—crying out “my father boo hoo hoo hoo.” Yes, his father had recently passed away. But one look into Larry’s spiraling pupils told me this wasn’t just grief at work. Flynt was drugged to the gills and then some…I watched him closely when he pressed the secret button under the armrest of his gold-plated wheelchair. His wife or a female assistant would bring him to a back room to “recharge” so he could mellow out. Sometimes Larry was so mellowed that he would fall asleep, drooling in his throne like Jabba the Hutt.
Working for Flynt caused a special kind of PTSD, Carnage says, among a very talented and loyal group of people.
We all ended up having the same daddy issues Larry had—throwing each other under the bus to prove to Flynt that we were his number one kid.
“It really is like survival skills that you develop when you’re like in a gang or coming up from the street or you work in a family business,” he says. “(It) comes from trying to control a tightknit group of people and you don’t have sophisticated skills. I think that describes both Trump and Flynt.”
In 2003, shortly after Carnage arrived at LFP, Flynt bought the assets of VCA, which included The Dark Brothers’ “New Wave Hookers” and Steve Sayadian’s “Cafe Flesh.” Bad feelings still exist in the porn world regarding LFP’s treatment of VCA’s catalogue. Carnage, who grew up admiring the music and artistry of Dark Bros.’ films, walked into a wall of resentment when he started working with VCA, dealing with employees loyal to and bereft at the recent retirement of founder Russ Hampshire (Hampshire died in 2019).
long-time employees hated the incoming Hustler regime and wanted to string us up on a light pole for chopping their wildly artistic adult classic movies like The Devil in Miss Jones and New Wave Hookers into standalone sex scenes for internet consumption…the VCA folks were 100% justified in their anger.
Among many, many talented writers who worked for LFP over the years was “Permanent Midnight” author Jerry Stahl, Ernest Greene of “Master of O” fame, and Allan MacDonell, who chronicled his two decades at Hustler into the memoir “Prisoner of X.”
Hustler was a transgressive publication, and Carnage says his own sexual orientation was not an issue [Gram adds: I’ll reiterate here that most people who work in porn are here for the intriguing, often ridiculous lifestyle, freedom, and indulgence of professional curiosity it affords, independent and often exclusive of which way one’s genitals point] . But, by the time he got there, “Hustler” was several entities that weren’t exactly interchangeable (including a casino that opened south of Los Angeles in 2000).
“As far as me being gay, at Hustler magazine there was definitely no issue with that and I think everyone knew. I’m fairly certain that everyone at VCA knew. At Hustler Video it was very strange; I tried to keep very quiet about the fact that I was gay even though I was the head of marketing there.”
Because when Hustler started making videos and internet content in Porn Valley as opposed to occasionally using porn talent in the pages of its magazine, a new division was created that required a different skill set and a bridge to another part of the adult industry. As could be expected in the early 2000s, Hustler Video began to take a lot of oxygen away from its print publications.
“I have no idea what Larry thought about all the VCA pictures catalogue,” Carnage says. “Larry at that point as far as I could tell was only concerned about two things: VOD and Hustler.com content. VCA provided that content and he was going to use it however he saw fit to make some money online.”
After five years with LFP, tired of the “backstabbing,” and discouraged that passion projects had been gutted, Carnage quit LFP and later became an editor for Freshman and Unzipped before entering the far-pornier world of advertising and L.A. music promotion.
But as a goodbye to his mentor and dysfunctional father figure, Larry Flynt, Carnage on his site has taken the porn out of several movies, as “revenge” for LFP’s cannibalization of the VCA catalogue and the cancelling of Carnage’s own projects.
Read Sean Carnage’s “Look at the crazy revenge I’ve taken on my late mentor Larry Flynt” here
Previously on Porn Valley Observed: Twilight of the Hustler Studio; Hustler’s Inferno
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