The Stories

Outspoken’s cast of characters differs widely in content of expression and place in society. Rick Nuccio enjoyed a position of official authority as a special advisor to the Clinton administration until he concluded that he was unwittingly abetting concealment of human-rights abuses in Guatemala and moved inexorably from loyal insider to whistleblowing outsider. Mike Diana was a prototypical alienated outsider, long-haired, tattooed, and living with his parents in Florida, where he produced and distributed copies of “Boiled Angel,” a “splatterzine” featuring drawings of grotesque women, raped babies, and Christ with a venereal disease. A visit from the state police searching for a serial killer transmogrified into the only trial in America to convict a cartoonist of obscenity.

Outspoken puts a human face on First Amendment theories and cases. Levinson’s accounts of interviews convey the hesitancies as well as the convictions behind voices that persisted in speaking under pressure. The most illuminating moments touch on human ambivalences and conflicting motives that don’t altogether go away. Margaret Randall decided not to reveal her sexual orientation so as to avoid any distraction from the campaign to restore her U.S. citizenship based on the content of her political writings. Firefighter Steve Johnson was smarting from a dispute over union finances when he challenged regulations barring Playboy to assure a non-hostile environment for female employees: “If they ever stumbled again on a policy or anything I was going to make them jump through hoops for a couple of years.” Performance artist Annie Sprinkle modified her Post-Porn Modernist piece when warned about police in the audience because “I had tickets to Europe the next day.”

Another dimension comes from learning how these individuals responded to the public light. Kwame Mensah, a conscientious objector during his military service in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, looks back ruefully on the organizations that championed him: “I didn’t see a difference between the racism within the peace movement and the regular Marine Corps.” In a roundtable discussion Ifé Franklin and Michael Willhoite differ on whether notoriety is a form of success for an artist. As an “utter outsider to the art world,” Mike Diana was particularly vulnerable to prosecution for his comic books.

Extensive research and footnotes aim to put the accounts in context, though some of the most intriguing assertions are unsupported, such as a comment that the 1980s were the first time that “a significant number” of artists earned a living from their work and several outrageous anecdotes of provincial small-mindedness.

The Debate

Levinson notes at various points the tensions between free speech and other values and the discomfort of defending some forms of expression, like “splatterzines” or the word “nigger.” At the conclusion she identifies herself as something other than the First Amendment absolutist who began the book. Her reported interviews would thus benefit from more than mild devil’s-advocate challenges to her subjects, offering a bracing dialogue in addition to a series of laudatory profiles in courage. Levinson does present a multi-faceted and dynamic discussion, among seven artists at the roundtable on controversy their work encountered. On the topic she perhaps knows best, as a leading figure in Feminists for Free Expression, Levinson builds on her interview with the not-always sympathetic Steve Johnson to offer a nuanced balancing of free expression, pornography, and sex discrimination.

A more direct description of the framework against which First Amendment cases are determined would enhance Outspoken’s organization. While Levinson aptly notes that suppression of speech comes from many sources and expands her scope beyond government censorship, open-handed invocation of the First Amendment throughout the book obscures the requirement of state action to trigger a free-speech challenge under the US Constitution. Many of what Levinson calls “the shut up, the shoved aside, the left out, and the picked on” have less recourse than they might imagine before talking to a lawyer. The stories do vividly capture the frustration and bewilderment of encountering the law as a protagonist unfamiliar with legal doctrines like public forum analysis; time, place, and manner restrictions; or the qualified free speech rights of public employees. By discussing the standards and background only in passing, however, Outspoken may leave some readers with only a fragmented idea of why each story turned out as it did and of how to think about free speech stories beyond those detailed here.

Finally, while all of the speakers suffered costs of time, affronts to dignity, and damage to reputation, they are portrayed as rather easily gaining access to justice with a phone call to the American Civil Liberties Union or the Center for Constitutional Rights. Levinson warns that for each of these accounts she knows several others like them. Recounting frustrated efforts to secure pro bono representation or years-long struggles to pay enormous litigation costs would even further bring home the costs, the chilling effects, and the value of going to battle for free speech. Nan Levinson has enhanced that value by learning and sharing these twenty free speech stories.