Вредно для несовершеннолетних

Within days, the University of Minnesota Press was inundated with calls. Half were demanding that the press’s management resign and Harmful to Minors—and maybe its author—be burned. The rest were from producers from talk shows. My publicist in New York was playing off requests from The Today Show against Good Morning America and Fox’s Greta Van Susteren. The AM-radio shock jocks were the most numerous and persistent. “My host is very fair, very intelligent,” one from Los Angeles told me. With the sensitivity of an eagle a mile downwind of a field mouse, he could sniff his prey through the phone line. When he realized he was stalk­ing an egghead, he added, “She’s an NPR type.”

She wasn’t.

“So, Judith, do you have any children?” the host asked, a few minutes into the interview.

“No, no children.” I confessed, followed by a petition for indul­gence: “I have a niece and nephew.”

“Do you touch your niece and nephew?”

“Of course I touch them.”

“And how do you touch them?”

I could feel where this was going, but was powerless to escape. “I hug and kiss them, I stroke their hair, I rub their backs.”

“And at what age would you say it was appropriate to start touching your niece and nephew in order to initiate them into sex?”

I gulped, then declared, “Never, never!” But it sounded feeble. She’d already asked me when I stopped beating my wife.

I hung up the phone and dialed my publicist, Katie. “Tell the next person who calls that Judith is unavailable,” I said. “It’s the second night of Passover, and she’s out eating Christian children.”

A few minutes later, a friend phoned in from her car: “Hey Judith! I just heard Dr. Laura denouncing you on the radio. Congratulations!”

So, Dr. Laura was the force behind my sudden fame. I’d soon learn that she had been alerted by Judith Reisman, who also called Robert Knight, with whom she’d worked at the Christian-conserva­tive Family Research Council. He was now at a sister organization, Concerned Women for America. In the mid-1990s, CWA had run a massive campaign against America’s flagship advocate of main­stream comprehensive sexuality education, the Sex Information & Education Council of the U.S., generating 30,000 letters to Congress calling SIECUS and its sex-ed guides “blatant promoters of promiscuity, pornography, abortion, pedophilia, and incest.” Now Dr. Laura had uncovered another member of “the pro-pe­dophile lobby.”

I started to weep. It was late, but I called Katie again. My voice was little: “I’m cooked.”

Katie answered with the un-flak-like candor I would grow to love. “You’re right. It’s pretty bad.” She put me on hold to decline several invitations from other AM talk-radio shows. When she re­turned, she’d regained her professional pluck. “Don’t worry,” she said. “We’ll spin it.”

The good news was the book would get tons of publicity. Within the next two months, it was covered by scores of media outlets, from the Lancaster, PA, New Era to the New York Times, the gay and lesbian out.com to the neo-Nazi Jeff’s Archives, WNBC Radio to college stations in rural Wisconsin. The bad news was that most of the publicity was about a book I didn’t write.

Never mind what Harmful to Minors is about, though. Most of my critics didn’t read it. And even those who did, and took it seri­ously, felt obliged to lead their stories with the allegation that it was an apologia for sexual abuse, “the most controversial book of the year.” Spending up to 12 hours a day being interviewed, I just could not spin the story back to sanity.

In these stories, my “critics” got equal time. These were always the same few. Knight led the charge. Although he hadn’t read the book, he pronounced it an “evil tome.” Reisman made more secu­lar, if no less satanic, associations. She had not read the book either, she told one major daily, but she didn’t have to. She averred that she hadn’t read Mein Kampf and she knew what was in it. I thought of writing a letter to the editor noting a small evidentiary difference be­tween that book’s author and myself: I had not yet invaded Poland.