“Everything that we read now has a debt to the Village Voice.”
Tricia Romano, author of The Freaks Came Out to Write, highlights a few of the trailblazing pieces that appeared in the pages of the legendary alt-weekly the Village Voice.
Tricia Romano got the idea for her fantastic new oral history, The Freaks Came Out to Write: The Definitive History of the Village Voice, the Radical Paper That Changed American Culture, at a 2017 reunion of Village Voice alums not far from the storied alt-weekly’s longtime headquarters in the East Village neighborhood of New York.
“I’m sitting here, and I’m watching these 80- and 90-year-olds who were there in the ’50s and ’60s when this thing first started,” Romano, a Voice nightlife columnist in the aughts, tells Depth Perception. “There were our elders — the Village elders, literally — and I thought, We gotta get them before they go. We have to know everything.”
Out today, The Freaks Came Out to Write is a 600-page instant classic drawn from more than 200 interviews. In a review for the New York Times, Dwight Garner called it “a well-made disco ball of a book” that “may be the best history of a journalistic enterprise I’ve ever read.”
The Voice, cofounded by Norman Mailer in 1955, did groundbreaking reporting on the AIDS crisis, hip-hop, Donald Trump, and so much more. The influence of the alt-weekly on today’s media landscape is profound. “I feel like everything that we read now has a debt to the Village Voice,” Romano says. “The first-person, opinionated, loose style of writing was something that was just not seen before the Voice.”
We asked Romano, who now lives in Seattle, to pick some of the most noteworthy pieces to ever appear in the pages of the Voice. Below she explains the thinking behind her list. —Mark Yarm
“Women’s Liberation: The Next Great Moment in History Is Theirs” by Vivian Gornick (Nov. 27, 1969)
“Vivian Gornick started writing about feminism during the second-wave feminist movement. This piece is called ‘Women’s Liberation: The Next Great Moment in History Is Theirs.’ And as Susan Brownmiller, another feminist writer from the Voice, pointed out, it should have been ‘Ours.’ But it’s still a perfect piece, because it really lays down all the ideas about feminism, and arguments about the patriarchy, that we take for granted now and are still talking about. I mean, the Barbie movie, to me, was really fun and interesting, but it was also like, Haven’t we been saying this for 50 years?”
“How a Young Donald Trump Forced His Way From Avenue Z to Manhattan” and “Donald Trump Cuts the Cards: The Deals of a Young Power Broker” by Wayne Barrett (Jan. 15 and 22, 1979)
“Wayne Barrett was not yet on staff when he first started working on these stories. He got a tip to check Trump out. Trump and his father, Fred Trump, owned a bunch of properties around New York, but they were not renting to Black people. These stories are the template. The whole personality of Donald Trump comes across in these pieces: the scheming and the bribing and the cajoling and the flattery, all of that.”
“New Jack City Eats Its Young” by Barry Michael Cooper (Dec. 1, 1987)
“Barry Michael Cooper was a young Black writer at the time. He had been doing music criticism but wanted very badly to become more of a New Journalism–style investigative feature writer, though he hadn’t been trained necessarily to do this. That’s the thing about the Voice: You did not have to come in with an Ivy League journalism degree to start writing there. This story is about the crack epidemic in Detroit, and the movie New Jack City was based on it. It’s famous because it helped change the Voice into more of a national paper.”
In 1988, local authorities imposed a curfew on Tompkins Square Park in New York City’s East Village, which had previously been open 24 hours a day. Protestors opposing the move clashed with police that summer, and the Village Voice covered the story extensively.
For more on the Tompkins Square riots — and how it contributed to chronic misuse of less-lethal weapons by the police on protesters — explore “A History of Violence,” the interactive timeline included in Long Lead’s production, “The People Vs. Rubber Bullets.”
“On a Clear Day You Can See Your Mother” by Jill Johnston (May 6, 1971)
“Jill Johnston read [some of] this essay at Town Hall, as part of a debate with Norman Mailer, Germaine Greer, and a bunch of others. She was the wild one, and she got up there and started with ‘The title of this episode is a new approach: All women are lesbians except those who don’t know it naturally they are but don’t know it yet…’ The Voice published this, and it was thousands of words long. When we say ‘The Voice was like the internet before the internet,’ this is a very good example of that.”
“Cult-Nats Meet Freaky-Deke” (Dec. 9, 1986), “Jean-Michel Basquiat, Flyboy in the Buttermilk” (Nov. 14, 1989), and “Yo Hermeneutics! Hiphopping Toward Poststructuralism” (June 1, 1985) by Greg Tate
“These are Greg Tate’s three big hits, his well-known pieces. He just has such an original voice. When I read him, I hear him, I hear his voice. A lot of our culture writing in America, and the West in general, is centered around the white canon, and he recentered art around the Black way of thinking and living in the world. I don’t think that anyone in the early ’80s would have printed him the way he wrote, because it was so unconventional for criticism or journalism. The irony is that by the time he passed away [in 2021], he was starting to become this academic, literary hero. It took 40 years for him to finally get his flowers.”
What are your memories of the Village Voice? Any favorite stories? Let us know in the comments below, or share on social media and tag Long Lead on Threads, Instagram, LinkedIn, or Bluesky
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