Imus, Lenny and Me

My position on the current brouhaha about Don Imus is self-evident. Imus is a cutting- edge satirist not unlike Lenny Bruce. The puritanical society of ours not only took away Bruce’s cabaret card and made him unemployable, but drove him deeper into his addictions for food and, most lethally, heroin. Though I saw Lenny perform live at the Village Gate, I never met him because I was not worthy or famous enough at the time, but merely an undergrad at Pace University. I did have three dates with Lenny’s daughter, Kitty, who was a junkie too but she stood me up three times.

I admired Lenny so much that I hired his mother Sally as a contributing editor for Screw and paid her 400 a week for 20 years. In her younger days, she worked in burlesque and brought Lenny to work with her, which helped him develop his outsider point of view. Unemployed and savaged by the press, he was constantly chided for obscenity. He was a turd in the toilet of the entertainment biz, was referred to as “Dirty Lenny” by Time Magazine and eventually, he was killed by society for our sins in 1966. Lenny’s enemies were hypocrisy and the anti-sex ethos of the world.

Don Imus, who was a cocaine user in the 1970’s and fired from many jobs, is like Lenny Bruce in that they both were hung on the cross of society’s hatred of sexual candor and the appreciation of the flesh. Howard Stern has become a millionaire, hundreds of times over, for being a cheap imitation of Lenny, Red Foxx, Richard Pryor and everything I did in Screw and my TV show Midnight Blue for over 30 years.

While Howard was peeing in his diaper I was opening the doors to honest sexuality. I was not unlike Dr. Kinsey, Masters and Johnson and candid writers such as Henry Miller and James Joyce. One could not import Miller’s books Sexus, Plexus and Topic of Capricorn into the United States or England.

Everyone who paid Imus his $10 million a year did it because he was like a car accident - repulsive and fascinating. One does not go to Coney Island and be surprised that there is an ocean and sand there. Websites such as Booble and my Screw Magazine had an audience that was riveted by the spotlight that was put on the secret world of our sexuality.

In Egypt, 3000 years ago, sex was revered and the priestesses were prostitutes. It was the Puritanism of the church, which has made sex the enemy, and even though priests were carrying on with their pedophilic lifestyle, they fought masturbation, the sexual emancipation of women and birth control. In addition, the church was very quiet about slavery and the murder of Jews in WWII.

It is no surprise then that all the corporations have abandoned the sinking ship of free speech and Imus stands alone just as every free-thinking, sane humanist and atheist does. Let’s not forget America’s most famous atheist Madeleine Mary O'Hare was murdered, as was her whole family.

We are all formed by our past experiences and that is the reason I am running for president today. That is why I ran for Sheriff of Broward County and out of 11 candidates I came in third. My running for president is my symbolic commitment to the kind of honesty and humanity that we will not find coming out of the mouth of Obama, Hillary, Rudy, McCain, et al. We have certainly not seen this manifested in our current president - who because of his past drug use, alcoholism and a life filled with no consequences where everything has been handed to him - does not value the sanctity of life and see the true obscenity in this world which is war.