Review: James Ledbetter on an Oral History of The Village Voice

Feb 16, 2024

Here are two challenging facts to chew on: 1) In the approximately sixty-two years that The Village Voice published a weekly print newspaper out of downtown Manhattan, Rupert Murdoch was not the most nefarious owner the Voice had. That accolade would probably go to the later owners who were federally indicted for money laundering, sex trafficking, and facilitating prostitution. One of those owners committed suicide last year shortly before his trial was to begin.

And 2) The Village Voice still exists. If you go to villagevoice.com, you will see recently published articles and reviews, including from the trenchant political commentator Ross Barkan, as well as reporter Robert Hennelly and culture writer Elizabeth Zimmer; the latter two have been affiliated with the Voice since at least the 1990s.

These nuggets emerge from Tricia Romano’s sprawling oral history The Freaks Came Out to Write (the title was brainstormed between Romano and the late, much-missed Voice writer Greg Tate). Other readers will inevitably have their own reference points. It could hardly be otherwise; the Voice for decades twirled like a zeitgeist kaleidoscope, and no one ever sees the same kaleidoscope image at the same time or for very long. Even to list the areas where the Voice had outsized influence is dizzying: the Greenwich Village folk and beatnik scene; local and national politics; the women’s movement; the anti-Vietnam War movement; taking rock, jazz and hip-hop seriously as art forms; counterculture and drugs; indie cinema and film criticism; the public emergence of what mainstream media once never discussed but now routinely calls the LGBTQ community; the AIDS crisis; sounding the alarm about the radical right; the performance art and the downtown painting scene of the eighties—the paper’s remit was as broad and variegated as its contributors—and the city itself.

Sometimes history is written to make events seem inevitable, but as Romano’s book powerfully conveys, the Voice was always a real-time argument—occasionally violent—about what the Voice was and should be. Personal feuds, staff petitions, threatened and actual resignations—this was all out in the open, going back almost as far as 1955 when the paper was founded by Norman Mailer and Dan Wolf. Readers can easily lose track here of the number of times that editors use “chaos” to describe the environment. Romano tackles head-on a dynamic that’s politically delicate to this day: the tension between the “front of the book,” dominated by straight white men like Nat Hentoff and Jack Newfield, and the “back of the book,” where at least some women, like Karen Durbin and Ellen Willis, as well as people of color and gay and lesbian contributors, held forth. “White boys” and “Stalinist feminists” were some of the epithets that shot regularly through the pages and the Voice office.

It’s understandable that an oral history devotes attention to longstanding feuds, but there is a nuance that is hard for any one person’s testimony to capture : How does a media enterprise so riven with political and cultural conflict not merely survive but thrive? What was the Voice, as a sun, to keep planets that hated each other in their orbits?

Here is a stab at an answer: the Voice was not merely a newspaper—it was a regularly updated vision of what New York life should be. To lay these ideas out now feels two-dimensional, but let’s: The Voice articulated a New York where people could express their identity and sexuality in whatever manner they chose. Access to housing, transit, education, and other amenities was regarded as a necessity. Government should be honest, responsive, and transparent. Arts and culture are the lifeblood of the city, and should be celebrated and challenged. Forces, like racism, patronage, corruption, and ideology that stand in the way of the needs of the city should be called out.

It is remarkable—especially given the marginal, sometimes transgressive nature of what the Voice covered—that it was a viable business, almost from the beginning. A huge boost came from the four-month daily newspaper strike at the end of 1962 to the beginning of 1963 that delivered the Voice a news-starved audience. Later, the ads that led readers to an apartment, a futon, or a date were extremely lucrative and gave the Voice profit margins that would make twenty-first century media companies weep with envy. Of course, the internet in general and Craigslist in particular put a stop to that.

Could it be a viable business today? Several characters in Romano’s book point out that by the early nineties, the “alternative” scene moved to the mainstream, and so to what would a new Voice be an alternative? But that shouldn’t really be the barrier; every generation, every year, finds new barricades, and The New York Times will never cover them thoroughly. Especially as the Times has successfully reimagined itself as a national lifestyle brand, there are plenty of coverage gaps—in local investigative reporting, in the vibrant city music and arts and theater scene, in community activism—that a revived Voice could fill.

As a business, a new Voice would probably not look like the old Voice. Pervasive layoffs in the first few weeks of 2024 have shown for the umpteenth time the frailty of existing media funding and distribution modes. But other models exist, including the low-fi approach—small groups of journalists pooling their resources to write for audiences of subscribers—with which Hell Gate and 404 are showing tentative success. Could such a model support an editorial vision as broad and eclectic and populous as a Village Voice needs to be? Journalists who cover tech have expressed the hope that “the developers and the nerds” are working on new ways to distribute and finance journalism. What is lacking is a leader who wants to take the task on. It won’t be Murdoch; surely there is someone out there who wants the legacy and the prize. The Voice’s mix was demonstrably combustible, but the right combination of anger, conviction, humor, and curiosity could still be just what the city, and the rest of the world, needs.

James Ledbetter was a Village Voice staff writer from 1990 to 1998. He is the author or editor of several books, most recently One Nation Under Gold.

Book Post is a by-subscription book review service, bringing snack-sized book reviews by distinguished and engaging writers direct to our paying subscribers’ in-boxes, as well as free posts like this one from time to time to those who follow us. We aspire to grow a shared reading life in a divided world. Become a paying subscriber to support our work and receive our straight-to-you book posts. Coming soon: John Banville on Emerson, Sarah Ruden on Marilynne Robinson,

Still time to join Book Post’s winter reading of Willa Cather’s My Àntonia with critic and scholarChris Benfey! Discounted copies of the book are available from our partner Square Books.

Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi, is Book Post’s Winter 2023 partner bookstore! We partner with independent bookstores to link to their books, support their work, and bring you news of local book life across the land. We’ll send a free three-month subscription to any reader who spends more than $100 with our partner bookstore during our partnership. Send your receipt to info@bookpostusa.com. Read more about Square here in Book Post.