The thing about Midnight is that they didn’t need much to build an issue. A couple of phony, sex-oriented stories, some outraged letters to the editor, their monthly “Hollywood Confidential” column, a bunch of sleazy little ads for the back pages, and they were good to go. In this issue from forty-three years ago today we learn that a UC Berkeley co-ed is earning enough credits to graduate by performing a “first hand” survey of American sex practices. For that, she needs volunteers. Lots of them. Another story, written by Element J. Pussypimple (seriously) discusses a Sheffield, England sex school that teaches teens to get it on without getting pregnant. But the real gem in each issue of Midnight was John Wilson’s column “Hollywood Confidential,” which was as libelous an effort as ever appeared in an American tabloid. In this issue alone, Wilson claims Elvis Presley placed an emergency call to his plastic surgeon because his new nose was sagging, Chris Noel ditched her date Richard Boone at the Whiskey-a-Go-Go and ran out the back door with Tom Tryon, Jack Lemmon hit a man over the head with a brass ashtray, and Barbara Stanwyck resorted to paying tabloids to arrange trysts for her with young men. Wow! Spinning a web of lies that vast is no easy feat, but it's go big or go home at Midnight. Check out more issues by clicking keyword "Midnight" below. See you Monday. 

Inside News was yet another low rent, late-’60s/early-’70s tabloid, like the National Examiner, Keyhole, Midnight and others, that basically printed fiction in the guise of investigative journalism. In a race to the bottom of the market, Inside News focused on sex, the outrage of homosexuality, the outrage of sex associated with drug use, the outrage of sex between whites and blacks, and rape—which they presented not as an outrage, but as titillation. The example above, published today in 1970, is typical. She was raped, but she was a stripper, therefore here she is in a bikini, and boy howdy, it’s pretty easy to see why she was raped, isn’t it? Of course, the report is 100% fabricated, and it’s possible some readers of Inside News even suspected as much. But since it was ideas being sold, rather than literal truth, we can see with the clarity of years that what we have here is a magazine catering to a readership fearful about the direction of the times—i.e. sexual liberation and racial equality. We have two or three more issues of Inside News, but we’re searching for more. We’ll share them as we find them.     

From today in October 1968 we have another issue of Midnight. You see cover star Gloria Marsh, who offers $100,000 to any man who can manage to satisfy her aching loins. But by now you may have noticed a theme with this magazine—namely, the contents are complete fiction. Stunning revelation, right? And after this story in particular seemed so plausible.

October 14, 1968 issue of Midnight, with lip-licking cover star Leslie Winters, who’s willing to change for the right man. We like her just the way she is, tongue and all.     

Midnight Cowboy was a very good book before it was a very good movie. It was written by James Leo Herlihy in 1966, and immediately hailed as a classic. Herlihy sort of faded from the writing scene over time, and died at age 66 after taking an overdose of sleeping pills, but Midnight Cowboy — shown here with art by the incomparable James Bama—stands as a major achievement in U.S. literature.