Hella Nation - Evan Wright [5]
My career as a mainstream journalist owes its start to the 1973 Miller v. California obscenity case, in which the Supreme Court ruled that a work, such as a magazine, might be considered obscene only if “taken as a whole” it “lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.” The result of this ruling was that porn magazines like Hustler had a policy of publishing one article each month that aspired to be of serious value. My first non- adult industry article would be published by Larry Flynt as a form of anti-obscenity case conviction insurance.
I had fewer than sixty days sober in the summer of 1996 when I arrived in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, to write a feature about the Aryan Nations white supremacist group based in a walled compound outside the town. Weeks earlier I had met photographer Nathaniel Welch on the set of Jasmin St. Claire’s World’s Biggest Gang Bang II, which he was covering as a sort of freak show for the now defunct alternative weekly Los Angeles Reader. Welch was interested in photographing American underworld subjects and had proposed that we collaborate on an Aryan Nations story that I would write for Hustler. Larry Flynt had a personal interest in publishing an exposé of white supremacists, since he believed the 1978 shooting that left him paralyzed had been carried out by a white supremacist enraged by an interracial photo spread published in Hustler. The day before I left to meet the Aryan Nations members, Flynt had called me into his office, bizarrely decorated with Tiffany lamps, Ertés and what looked to be knock-off Baroque oil paintings. Seated across from me in his gold wheelchair, flanked by his personal bodyguard rumored to be armed at all times with a MAC-10 submachine gun, Flynt gazed at me with his head cocked to the side. “When you meet the top man there,” he said, “make sure you ask him why they shot me.”
When Welch and I drove our rental car up to the security booth outside the Aryan Nations headquarters, manned by guards in SS uniforms, we had no plan in place to gain access. We had agreed that we would not pretend to sympathize with the supremacists or use any other ruses to gain their trust, with the exception that we would tell them we were freelancers (and not that we were on assignment for Hustler). In our first approach the guards told us to leave the property. But over the next few days, low-key persistence paid off. We met one member of the group in town who was eager to talk, which led to contacts with more of them, and then an invitation to spend time inside their compound. It was a pattern that would repeat itself, with almost mathematical predictability, with just about every subculture I would later cover.
The fact that Welch and I had told our neo-Nazi subjects that we didn’t sympathize or agree with them worked to the story’s advantage. It seemed to make them all the more eager to explain themselves. Much as I found their half-baked ideologies repugnant, I was fascinated by their extreme alienation. In my own jangly state of raw-nerved sobriety, their alienation was something I could connect with. I used that connection—a genuine though extremely limited form of empathy I was able to feel for my subjects—to elicit unexpected revelations from them about the intense fears underpinning their hatred and lunatic beliefs. Or maybe it was simpler than that. As A. J. Liebling pointed out, Americans—“pleased by attention, covetous of being singled out”—will always talk to a reporter.
What didn’t make sense during the time that I spent among the neo-Nazis was the absence of the many phobias that had long plagued me, and which I had feared