24 Facts About Al Goldstein

Al Goldstein is known for helping normalize hardcore pornography in the United States.

Al Goldstein was born in Williamsburg, Brooklyn to a Jewish family.

Al Goldstein captained the debate team at Pace College and interviewed Allen Ginsberg for the college newspaper.

Al Goldstein served in the Army in the Signal Corps as a photographer.

Al Goldstein worked as a photojournalist, taking pictures of Jacqueline Kennedy on a 1962 state trip to Pakistan and spent several days in a Cuban jail for taking unauthorized photos of Fidel Castro's brother, Raul.

Al Goldstein regularly ran, without permission, photos and drawings of celebrities.

In 1974 Al Goldstein began Screw Magazine of the Air, soon renamed Midnight Blue, a thrice weekly hour-long adult-oriented public access television program that ran for nearly 30 years on Manhattan Cable's Channel J; federal regulations regarding public access to cable TV systems made it impossible for the cable system to refuse his program.

Al Goldstein put the pickles in baggies and sold them to patrons.

The October 17,1977, issue of Screw contained an advertisement for "Al Goldstein's Cinema", located at 8th Avenue and 46th Street near Times Square.

In 2001, on Saint Martin, an island in the Lesser Antilles, Al Goldstein planned to open the Rabbit Ranch, the first of what he hoped would be a chain of 10 to 30 bordellos that would flourish wherever prostitution is legal.

Al Goldstein intended to use the profits to finance his second run for sheriff.

Al Goldstein said that Flynt's Hustler magazine, founded seven years after Screw, stole the Hustler format from Screw, but that he was not angry.

Al Goldstein married five times and had a son, Jordan Ari Al Goldstein, with his third wife, Gina.

Al Goldstein owned a 10,000-square-foot mansion in Pompano Beach, famous for its statue, 11 feet high, of a raised middle finger on the back lawn, visible to boaters on the Intracoastal Waterway.

Al Goldstein never filed, saying that he could not afford the campaign.

Al Goldstein served six days before the charges were overturned on appeal.

Al Goldstein lost his Florida mansion and his townhouse on Manhattan's Upper East Side.

Al Goldstein was fired from New York's well-known Second Avenue Deli for sleeping in the basement, after a brief stint there as a greeter.

Al Goldstein worked in 2005 as a commissioned salesman for New York City Bagels.

Al Goldstein was financially supported in his last years by his friend the illusionist Penn Jillette, on whose floor he once slept, and who admired Al Goldstein for his First Amendment activism.

Al Goldstein's final residence, prior to a nursing home, was a small apartment in the Far Rockaway neighborhood of Queens, paid for by Jillette.

Al Goldstein died on December 19,2013, aged 77, from renal failure at a nursing home in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn.

In 2003, Lancaster Pictures produced a documentary on Al Goldstein entitled Al Goldstein: The Trials of the Sultan of Smut.

Unless otherwise noted, Al Goldstein appeared as himself in the following movies:.