Castrated- My Eight Months in Prison by Ralph Ginzberg

Playboy was a three-year-old upstart when rival publisher Arnold Gingrich, impressed with his An Unhurried View of Erotica (1958), hired Ginzburg (1929-2006) as an editor at Esquire. “Playboy was a peanut whistle at that time, but it was a comer,” recalled Ginzburg, “and they figured that the best way to get rid of the problem was to cut the sex out of Esquire, which, in effect, was self-castration. So that was the end of sex in Esquire; they just gace the field up to Playboy.” Eighteen months later, Ginzburg was fired. He moved on to Eros, a high-priced magazine of classy erotica. Only four issues were published before he was indicted on charges of violating federal obscenity laws. Ginzburg was found guilty and sentenced to five years in prison (he was released after eight months). A number of First Amendment advocates protested the conviction, including Hefner: “The sustaining of Mr. Ginzburg’s conviction by the Supreme Court is an anachronism and a true tragic abrogation of First Amendment freedoms. The true ‘victim’ in Mr. Ginzburg’s case is, unfortunately, the Bill of Rights itself.”