CULTURE
banned the Outlaw — volume two, number two, page four. “The minutes of the April 5th Board meeting describe the Outlaw as ‘a radical and obscene newspaper,’” it notes. “Alderman Harloe is down on record as opposing ‘the sale of pornography and filth.’ But many found value in an alternative press. The stranglehold on U.S. media made no room for reporting on union busting, the disabled welfare recipients march, women’s liberation, abortion rights or the imperative to let one’s frea flag fly. “Nobody could sell out, because no one was buying,” Lipsitz says. The Outlaw held open editorial meetings, he recalls — many held in Wash U’s Holmes Lounge. In the middle of a discussion during one meeting, a long-haired newcomer’s pockets started to squawk — the undercover cop forgot to turn his radio off. “There was obvious surveillance,” Lipsitz says.
[HISTORY]
Left to Their Own Devices Remembering the St. Louis Outlaw, the Gateway City’s premiere 1970s counterculture publication Written by
DEVIN THOMAS O’SHEA
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rolling through newspaper archives for the good stuff can take months or years. The quirky, the weird, the offbeat is always buried in the backlog, in the rubble of a thousand columns on cat parades and debutante balls. That’s not the case for the St. Louis Outlaw, a homegrown counterculture magazine running from 1970 to late 1972. Physical issues of the magazine are hard to come by these days, but local historian Mark Loehrer has gone out of his way to digitize and host 27 issues in a public, free-to-download Dropbox (head to this link to check it out for yourself: bit.ly/3qpemMH). As an affiliate of the iberation News Service, the Outlaw was a New Left, anti-war underground magazine written and produced by St. Louisans. Liberation News was a press distribution network providing local publications like the Outlaw with national bulletins, photographs and illustrations — especially cool are the drawings from the underground comix movement. R. Crumb cartoons punctuate the Outlaw’s columns. Many contributors were civil rights activists, women’s liberationists and members of the Washington University chapter of Students for a Democratic Society. Most of the writing comes from young people trying to find their way through political chaos, war and entrenched bigotry on a local scale. ou can find the still relevant question “Who Controls The Loop” in volume two, number eight, page fourteen. To get an idea of the political moment that birthed the Outlaw, one month after the first edition
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For a few short years, the St. Louis Outlaw chronicled the city from a radical leftist viewpoint. | SCREENSHOT ran in April 1970, the National Guard shot four college students at Kent State. They were guilty of protesting the Vietnam War. One day later, on May 5, 1970, St. Louis protestors torched the ROTC building on the Wash U campus. One of the Outlaw editors, Devereux Kennedy, served as Wash U’s student assembly president, and was questioned in the aftermath of the T building fire. Kennedy was a member of the W.E.B. DuBois Society and SDS while the FBI conducted illegal monitoring through COINTELPRO. In the first volume of the Outlaw, page seven, Kennedy’s “Chicago Comes to St. Louis” discusses the legal aftermath of the T fire. Professor George Lipsitz, previously an editor and writer at the Outlaw and now a professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, describes the readership as “long-haired kids hanging out in front of the Magic Market.” It was young people who were angry with the dominance of plain white suburban culture, the war in Viet-
nam and a world teetering on the edge of nuclear annihilation. With all the buttoned-up sanctimony of the mainstream media — which constantly lied about Vietnam — the Outlaw searched for alternatives. Nothing was permanent, there was a broad range of subject matter, and would it kill you to crack a joke now and then? One page advocated pissing on Richard Nixon’s attorney general, John Mitchell; another features a record review by Marvel Wand; on the next, a female reader calls out a male reviewer of Klute (1971) from the last Outlaw edition: “Why is it so hard for men to admit that the situation of prostitutes are merely the more emphasized side of the lives of many women in this society?” Some parents of subscribers to the Outlaw found the publication in their mailbox and complained that the post office was delivering degenerate filth. In T you can read the editorial response when Manchester, Missouri’s oard of Aldermen unofficially
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any considered Fred Faust the lead editor for the Outlaw; he was a homegrown south-city boy, an Eagle Scout and a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War who sat during the pledge of allegiance at Busch Stadium. Norman Pressman, who was a fellow editor of Washington University’s Student Life alongside Faust, tells RFT that Faust once got arrested while selling the Outlaw at the South County Center, but it was on purpose. Faust was trying to produce antiwar documentation. His father was a candy salesman, his mother a secretary for the board of education, and Faust had a draft number — he was not a senator’s son. To get himself in a better draft position, Faust left St. Louis in late 1972 bound for Oakland, California. There, he received an induction notice, but the U.S. attorney in San Francisco wasn’t prosecuting every case, and Faust escaped the war. Naturally, the war in Vietnam occupies many of the Outlaw’s pages. Toward the end, “St. Charles GI Says No” runs in volume two, number eleven, page two. The article covers Sgt. Bruce Porter, who became a conscientious objector after working on aircraft like the F-4C Phantom that dropped heavy bombs and napalm on Vietnam.
JANUARY 5-11, 2022
Continued on pg 27
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