The prosecuting counsel held the publication up disdainfully. “It deals with homosexuality,” he told the jury. “It deals with lesbianism – on the front cover! It deals with sadism; it deals with perverted sexual practices; and, finally, it deals with drug taking. You will, having read the magazine through, ask yourself: ‘Does such a magazine in fact tend to deprave and corrupt a person in whom those sort of practices are latent?'”
The date was 1971, the place the Old Bailey and the trial that of three editors. Nearly 40 years later, the media and an editor have been in the dock again over the coverage of sexual practices but the issues are as far apart as the intervening years. That earlier case, brought under the Obscene Publications Act, was the trial of the three editors of Oz – Richard Neville, Felix Dennis and Jim Anderson – who were convicted and jailed briefly, before the Court of Appeal freed them, for producing what was seen then as a subversive, not to say perverted, magazine.
Content from our partners
