Alvin Goldstein (January 10, 1936 – December 19, 2013) was an American pornographer best known for helping normalize hardcore pornography in the United States.

[4] He also sold insurance, wrote freelance articles, ran a dime pitch game at the 1964-65 New York World's Fair, sold encyclopedias, rugs and his own blood, drove a taxi (he kept his taxi license active until his death), and landed a job as an industrial spy infiltrating a labor union, an experience that so appalled him he wrote an exposé about it for the radical newspaper New York Free Press, a weekly periodical.

[1][5] In November 1968, Goldstein and his partner Jim Buckley, investing $175 each (equivalent to $1,530 today),[6] founded Screw, a weekly New York City tabloid.

It featured reviews of porn movies, peep shows, erotic massage parlors, brothels, escorts and other local offerings of the adult entertainment industry.

"Screw grew from a combination of many factors, chief of which was my own dissatisfaction with the sex literature of 1968 and my yearning for a publication that reflected my sexual appetites," Goldstein wrote.

[11]) Venue-shopping prosecutors selected conservative Wichita, Kansas, to prosecute Goldstein for obscenity;[12] when he was found not guilty, he flew the jury to New York to attend a party at the swing club Plato's Retreat.

Had he not written a rave review of a low-budget film called Deep Throat ('I was never so moved by any theatrical performance since stuttering through my own bar mitzvah'), it would never have become a hit at New York's World Theater, would never have been targeted by the vice squad, would never have spawned a First Amendment cause célèbre, and might not have led to the modern porn industry.

Also included in the premiere issue was an interview with actor James Caan, and a centerfold of a man shot by a female photographer.

[16] In the same March 11, 1974 issue of Screw, Goldstein also ran an ad seeking subscribers to Smut, a magazine "so filthy that not only do you have to wash after every page, but every reader must disinfect after reading!

[20] The February, 1980 issue had a picture of Elvis Presley on the cover, "Grim Reaper Awards", "Eulogy to a War Lover", "Death by Hanging", "Femme Fatales", and other articles.

[22] In 1973, "Screw Magazine present[ed]" It Happened in Hollywood, a pornographic movie, produced by Goldstein's partner Jim Buckley.

At the 2nd Annual New York Erotic Film Festival it won awards for Best Picture, Best Female Performance, and Best Supporting Actor.

In it, he regularly interviewed porn stars, other adult industry figures, and sympathetic celebrities and "freaks", and ran advertisements for brothels, phone sex services,[citation needed] and Sammy's Roumanian Steakhouse.

[26] In the later years, after departure of original director Alex Bennett, Goldstein featured on each program a "Fuck You" segment, a few minutes in which he viciously attacked celebrities, politicians, the judge who presided over his latest trial, the New York County District Attorney, and businesses he felt had wronged him.

[citation needed] "In its early years, Midnight Blue captured porn star Georgina Spelvin doing her nude tap-dance act at the Melody Burlesque; Tara Alexander attempting the world's biggest gang bang at Plato's Retreat, the New York swing club; the 10th anniversary Screw party, where Buck Henry and Melvin Van Peebles hobnob with Goldstein's jurors; and an early look at the S&M community in New York.

Throughout its run, Midnight Blue interviewed almost every major porn star, and regularly tested the limits of what was acceptable for cable television.

[4][30] 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.

[33] In 2001, on Saint Martin, an island in the Lesser Antilles, 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.

Pornography thus becomes a way of defiling Christian culture and, as it penetrates to the very heart of the American mainstream (and is no doubt consumed by those very same WASPs), its subversive character becomes more charged."

[38] While mostly associated with the city of New York, Goldstein was also a well-known figure in Broward County, Florida, making the cover of a local alternative tabloid, New Times.

[4] He owned a 10,000-square-foot mansion in Pompano Beach, famous for its statue, 11 feet (3.4 m) high, of a raised middle finger on the back lawn, visible to boaters on the Intracoastal Waterway.

[39][40] In 1992, he filed to run for sheriff against Nick Navarro, who had gained Goldstein's enmity by arresting on obscenity charges 2 Live Crew members and a record dealer who sold their album As Nasty As They Wanna Be.

[34] In 2002, Goldstein was found guilty of harassing a former employee, having published her telephone number and place of employment in Screw and encouraging readers to call her and tell her "to stop being such a cunt."

[4] His final residence, prior to a nursing home, was a small apartment in the Far Rockaway neighborhood of Queens,[51] paid for by Jillette.

– of Playboys, Pigs, and Penthouse Paupers, an American Tale of Sex and Wonder, former Screw writer and editor Mike Edison documents Goldstein's rise and fall against the successes of his peers Larry Flynt of Hustler, Bob Guccione of Penthouse, and Hugh Hefner of Playboy.