Robert Rosen

Fifty years ago, during my final undergraduate semester at City College, I created a new section in the culturally and politically radical newspaper Observation Post (OP). I called the section "Mind Ooze." It was, for the most part, a collaboration with the late Robert Attanasio, an artist whose greatest talent was stirring up outrage with his drawings and cartoons.

 

Attanasio was raised Catholic, and his childhood experiences at the hands of nuns and priests in his Bronx church had traumatized him, perhaps leaving him with a case of PTSD. He drew on these experiences to produce some of his most powerful artwork.

 

One of the set pieces in the book I've been working on involves an Attanasio cartoon published in Mind Ooze that The New York Times, in their inimitable way, described as "a nun using a cross as a sexual object." The Times was writing about Attanasio's art because ultra-conservative New York senator James Buckley was so outraged by the cartoon, which he described as "a vicious and incredibly offensive anti-religious drawing," that he called for the Justice Department and the Department of Health, Education and Welfare to investigate OP for violating federal discrimination statutes, and demanded that City College suspend OP and expel the editors responsible for publishing the nun.

 

OP found itself in the eye of a media firestorm focusing on the First Amendment, free expression, and whether a student newspaper supported by student fees has the right to publish anti-religious material. Many people inside and outside the college came to OP's defense, and as I look back at an issue published March 13, 1974, at the height of the controversy, one story in particular stands out. Leonard Liggio, a Jesuit-educated history department lecturer, provided a scholarly analysis of the social and political implications of Attanasio's nun. That analysis remains as relevant today as it was 50 years ago.

 

Here are the main points of Liggio's essay:

 

· There has been a huge outflux of priests and nuns from the Catholic Church, principally because of their unwillingness to accept celibacy as a condition of remaining in the clergy.

· The nun cartoon is not the cause of the controversy; it's a reflection of an ongoing controversy in a society that was originally defined in Puritan terms.

· As American society attempts to find rational guides to a happy life in the wake of the failure of Puritanism, those still committed to Puritanism refuse to allow others the freedom to seek a happy life.

· Puritanism does not respect the autonomy of each person and his or her free choice. Therefore, it has always opposed tolerance.

· Puritanical politicians like Senator Buckley appeal to special interests and sub-groups. Therefore, they are opposed to tolerance.

· Catholic politicians like Buckley want to force non-Catholics to adhere to the demands of a Puritanical state.

· Catholic politicians would never dare interfere in the affairs of colleges operated by religious orders. Why should they have any say in non-Catholic higher education?

· Every person and newspaper on campus should be free to criticize any newspaper. Mutual exchange of commentary and criticism is an important part of the learning process and contributes to tolerance. No one is forced to read any of the several papers published at City College.

 

Spoiler alert: The First Amendment won. The editors were not expelled, and OP continued to publish for five more years until it finally found a way to push the authorities too far. 

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I never met James L. Buckley, but he was familiar with my work and he did have an impact on my life. Buckley, who died August 18 at age 100, was William F. Buckley's brother and an unlikely Conservative senator from New York, who served from 1971 to 1977, occupying a seat once held by Bobby Kennedy.

 

During Buckley's term in office I was editing Observation Post, or OP, a radical student newspaper at the City College of New York. I often published in OP the surreal drawings of the late artist and filmmaker Robert Attanasio. Attanasio, who was brought up in the Catholic Church and later rejected its teachings, had strong feelings about the church's myriad hypocrisies, which he expressed in his art.

 

In 1974, the church had yet to be exposed as a haven for pedophilic clergy and was considered by many, including Buckley, to be untouchable—an institution off limits to criticism by anybody for any reason. One did not criticize those who spoke for God. It was also a time, one year into Richard Nixon's second term, that the despair and rage his presidency and his endless war in Vietnam engendered were giving rise to a punk sensibility whose mode of expression was outrage for the sake of outrage. OP was a font of this sensibility, and that's why I published an Attanasio cartoon that The New York Times would later describe as "a nun using a cross as a sexual object."

 

The cartoon infuriated Catholic organizations on campus and beyond. In a speech before the senate, Buckley characterized Attanasio's nun as "a vicious and incredibly offensive antireligious drawing" and called for a federal investigation of OP and the expulsion of the students responsible for publishing it. The media firestorm that ensued galvanized OP, giving it a newfound sense of purpose: defending the nun in the name of transgressive art.

 

But there would be no investigation and nobody would be expelled. The First Amendment and a Times editorial in support of the student press (despite "inexcusably irresponsible or offensive actions by undergraduate editors") got in the way of politicians who wanted to cut off all funding for campus newspapers at public colleges. OP, a bastion of free expression, would continue publishing for five more years. And thanks to James L. Buckley, I learned more about the Constitution and the power of the press than I learned in any class I took as an undergraduate.

 

May the senator rest in peace.

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Please join me for a discussion of Nowhere Man: The Final Days of John Lennon on Wednesday, October 4, 6 p.m. at Subterranean Books in St. Louis.

 

All my books are available on Amazon, all other online bookstores, and at your local brick-and-mortar bookstore.

 

I invite you to join me on Facebook or follow me on X (the site formerly known as Twitter) or my eternally embryonic Instagram.

All three parts of "The Provocateur," my series on artist and filmmaker Robert Attanasio, are now posted on Erotic Review.

In the 1970s, I worked with Attanasio on Observation Post, the radical student newspaper at the City College of New York. We published a lot of controversial material, much of it having to do with pornography and religion. Working on OP changed the course of our lives, but we drifted apart after graduation and eventually lost touch. I hadn’t heard from Attanasio in 30 years. Then, in February 2015, he contacted me and we reunited. By November he was dead—from cancer.

“The Provocateur,” adapted from a book I’m working on about the moment in the 1970s when the student left gave way to punk, is a retrospective of my relationship with Attanasio, and a journey through his art and film.

Click here to read Part I, Part II, and now Part III.

Attanasio appears at the beginning of this episode of The Madness of Art.

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The way things are in publishing these days, it's as difficult for me to sell a magazine article as it is to sell a book. So I usually don't bother writing articles because even if I do sell one, it'll be around for a month at best. My books, however, tend to endure. Nowhere Man remains in print 17 years after publication.

Ironically, both my books began as failed magazine articles. In 1982, Rolling Stone and Playboy turned down an early version of what became Nowhere Man--because I couldn't prove to their satisfaction that what I'd written was true. I started writing Beaver Street in 1995 on assignment from The Nation. It was supposed to be an article about the economics of pornography. They rejected it for not being “political enough.”

But sometimes the stars line up and something I write finds its way into a magazine. This month, the first part of a three-part series called “The Provocateur” has been published on a British site, Erotic Review. The series is an excerpt from a book about the 1970s that I’ve been working on, and it’s the story of my old friend Robert Attanasio, an artist and filmmaker who died in 2015.

It was Attanasio’s death that helped me find a focus for the book and made me realize what its central theme should be—the moment when the student left gave way to Punk.

Part I comes with multiple trigger warnings and a big NSFW. Stay tuned for parts II and III.

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