The Meese Commission, the 1986 report that declared war on pornography

In July 1986 the Attorney General of the United States received a 1,960-page report on pornography in front of a bare-breasted statue and admitted he had not read it. Its 92 recommendations brought a federal crackdown on adult material, gay porn included, and the age records that every producer still keeps today.

Washington, 9 July 1986. In the Great Hall of the Department of Justice, Attorney General Edwin Meese III receives the final report of the commission he had set up a year earlier to study pornography. Behind him stands the Spirit of Justice, a 1930s aluminium statue of a woman with one breast bare, and the press photographers make the most of it. Meese tells reporters he has not read the report yet. The Government Printing Office has printed so few copies that they sell out at 35 dollars each¹.

The report ran to 1,960 pages and ended with 92 recommendations. It became known simply as the Meese Report, and it set the agenda for a decade of federal prosecutions of sexually explicit material, including gay porn. This is how the commission worked, what it said about men who desire men, and what it left behind.

A commission for a new decade

The Attorney General's Commission on Pornography was chartered on 22 February 1985 by Meese's predecessor, William French Smith, at the request of President Ronald Reagan. Meese, sworn in three days later, announced its eleven members on 20 May 1985. Its mandate was to determine "the nature, extent, and impact on society of pornography in the United States" and to recommend more effective ways to contain it¹.

The chairman was Henry Hudson, a prosecutor from Arlington County, Virginia, known for closing adult bookstores. The executive director was Alan Sears, another prosecutor with a record in obscenity cases. Among the members were James Dobson, founder of the evangelical organisation Focus on the Family; Father Bruce Ritter, a Franciscan priest who ran Covenant House, a shelter for runaway young people in New York; the psychiatrist Park Dietz; and the law professor Frederick Schauer. Two members came from outside this world: Judith Becker, a psychologist who treated sex offenders and their victims, and Ellen Levine, editor of Woman's Day².

It had one year and a budget of 500,000 dollars. The commission itself pointed out that its predecessor, the President's Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, had had two years and 2 million dollars, and had held only two public hearings¹.

Six cities and a list of titles

The commissioners took evidence in public. They sat in Washington in June 1985, in Chicago in July, in Houston in September, in Los Angeles in October, in Miami in November and in New York in January 1986. Each hearing had a theme: the law in Chicago, the behavioural sciences in Houston, the production side of the industry in Los Angeles, child abuse material in Miami¹.

Witnesses included police officers, prosecutors, psychologists, anti-pornography feminists such as Andrea Dworkin, and people who said their lives had been damaged by pornography. The anthropologist Carole S. Vance, who followed the hearings for The Nation, criticised how the witnesses and the material put before the commissioners had been selected³.

Commission staff also went into sixteen adult bookstores and copied down every title on the shelves: 2,323 magazines, 725 books and 2,370 films. The list was printed in the report, and it included dozens of gay titles².

What the report said about gay men

The report divided pornography into classes. It concluded that sexually violent material caused harm, and that "degrading" material, a category it defined broadly, probably did too. On material that was neither violent nor degrading the commissioners could not agree¹.

Homosexuality was the issue they argued over without naming it in the findings. During the Scottsdale debates Ritter asked whether the commission was obliged to say that heterosexual activity was no more normative than homosexual behaviour, since so much of the available pornography was homosexual². The majority refused to make that judgement.

It appeared instead in the description of places. The report described peep-show booths in adult bookstores as dirty, rarely cleaned and "a particularly common location for male homosexual activity", with films often aimed at gay men¹. In his personal statement Dobson went further. He called adult bookstores "centers of disease and homosexual activity", described holes cut in the walls between booths and asked why health departments, in the middle of the AIDS epidemic, did not regulate them¹.

Becker and Levine answered in their dissent. They refused to count as "antisocial behaviour" private sexual practices such as masturbation, premarital sex or "homosexuality between consenting adults", which, they wrote, were "not the province of government to regulate"¹.

The letter to the convenience stores

The report's most immediate effect came before it was published. On 11 February 1986 Alan Sears sent a letter on commission letterhead to the heads of 23 companies, among them convenience store chains. It said that the commission had received testimony that they were involved in selling pornography, enclosed that testimony and gave them a chance to respond before the final report was drafted. The testimony was by the Reverend Donald Wildmon, a Methodist minister who campaigned against sex on television, but the letter did not say so⁴.

In April 1986 the Southland Corporation announced that its 7-Eleven stores would stop selling Playboy, Penthouse and Forum. Other chains followed. 7-Eleven later said the letter had not been the reason and that its own customer research had turned against adult magazines².

Playboy and other publishers sued, joined by the Magazine Publishers Association. On 3 July 1986, six days before the report was handed over, Judge John Garrett Penn of the federal district court in Washington ruled for the publishers on First Amendment grounds. He ordered the commission to write again withdrawing it and barred it from publishing any list of retailers in the report⁴.

Contradicting 1970

Every reader compared the report with the one that came before. In 1970 the President's Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, chaired by the law dean William B. Lockhart, had found no reliable evidence that explicit material caused crime or delinquency and had recommended repealing the laws that stopped adults from buying it. The Senate rejected that report and President Nixon denounced it⁵.

The Meese Commission reached the opposite conclusion with a fraction of the money and without commissioning new research. Its critics said so loudly. Becker and Levine wrote that "no self-respecting investigator would accept conclusions based on such a study"¹. The psychologists Edward Donnerstein, Daniel Linz and Steven Penrod, whose laboratory experiments on violent films the report relied on, argued that their findings concerned violence, not sexual explicitness, and did not support the commission's conclusions about ordinary pornography⁶.

The American Civil Liberties Union called the report a national crusade against dirty pictures. Hudson replied that anyone looking for censorship in it would be disappointed².

Prosecutors, a new law and 2257

The recommendations were put into practice. By early 1987 the Department of Justice had set up a National Obscenity Enforcement Unit, and federal obscenity indictments rose from none in 1983 to 66 in 1987⁷.

In November 1988 Congress passed the Child Protection and Obscenity Enforcement Act, part of a large anti-drug bill. It allowed the government to seize the property of businesses convicted of obscenity under racketeering law, and it added section 2257 to the federal criminal code⁸. Section 2257 put into law an idea from the report: every producer of sexually explicit material must check the identity and age of each performer, keep copies of the documents and print on each product where those records are kept¹.

The case that had shown why this mattered had broken in July 1986, the month of the report, when it emerged that one of the best-known actresses of straight films had been under 18 when she made most of them. After years of litigation over the details, the 2257 notice became a fixture of every adult video box, gay or straight, and later of every adult website.

Project PostPorn

The new unit's best-known strategy was aimed at mail-order companies. Under what the Justice Department and the Postal Inspection Service called Project PostPorn, launched in 1988, a distributor could face indictments in several districts at once, often in conservative parts of the country far from its base, unless it agreed to plead guilty and stop selling explicit material altogether⁹.

The most famous target was Adam and Eve, a mail-order company in North Carolina founded by Phil Harvey. A local jury acquitted the company in 1987, but federal prosecutors went on with indictments elsewhere. In 1990 a federal judge in Washington, Joyce Hens Green, found that the government's campaign showed bad faith calculated to suppress constitutionally protected material and blocked it⁹.

For gay producers, who sold much of their work by mail to men far from the big cities, the risk was real, and catalogues grew more cautious. Within a few years the Internet made the strategy obsolete. One commissioner met a scandal of his own: in 1990 Father Ritter resigned from Covenant House after several young men who had lived in its shelters accused him of sexual misconduct, which he denied. The wider story of gay porn in the years of the epidemic is told in the chapter on the AIDS years.