Richard Neville

The one-off segment titled "Jail Bait of The Month". An example of provocative imagery printed in OZ magazine, the counterculture publication Richard Neville edited and became famous for.

Richard Neville (15 December 1941 – 4 September 2016) was an Australian writer and social commentator who came to fame as an editor of the counterculture magazine Oz in Australia and the United Kingdom in the 1960s and early 1970s. Neville first published the magazine in Sydney in 1963, launching a parallel version of Oz in London from 1967.

In both Australia and the UK, the creators of Oz were prosecuted on charges of obscenity. In particular, No. 28, Oz: Schoolkids Issue became the subject of a high-profile obscenity case conducted at the UK's Old Bailey in the summer of 1971. The defendants were initially found guilty and sentenced to up to 15 months imprisonment, but their sentence was later quashed on appeal. At the time, the case was the longest trial under the 1959 Obscene Publications Act, lasting from June 1971 to 5 August 1971. For Neville, "The long-running Oz trial was both a victory for free speech and the end of an era."

The Schoolkids Issue had been edited by 20 British teenagers, 5th-and 6th-form students (usually aged 15/16-18). Among various aspects discussed in media and raised in Court, sensitive items included a cartoon montage of Rupert Bear having sex (created by Vivian Berger, male aged 16), and a "Jail Bait of the Month" photo page featuring Berti Graham (female aged 15). Vivian (16) was named in the trial indictment, and of the six editors who were interviewed, "all were enraged by the sentences." Berti (15) said that "The charge of corrupting minors is a fallacy [...] We were the minors, and we did it." In his memoir (2009), Neville described Berti as "a fifteen-year-old from Aldershot who was sweet and pretty, and dreamed of living in a commune." "Beside her," he wrote, "was Vivian Berger, sixteen, the wildest of the bunch, a self-proclaimed anarchist who claimed to have smoked pot at nine and tripped at eleven." Anne Townsend, 16 when she contributed the article "I Wanna be Free" - described by Neville as a "plea for spontaneous copulation" - reportedly "found it crazy that we were in the nick for what she and the others had written." An example of the guilt-free, playful spirit of Oz magazine, 16-year-old Anne wrote that:

This society, although labelled permissive (by society itself) is not free enough to permit man it revert to his natural instincts in public. This ruling does not extend as far as animals.

Freedom of sexual expression in public has many tight restrictions. One may kiss in certain places but only fuck in a few places at certain times. Surely this idea is as pretentious and puritanical as the old forms of censorship. Its purpose is to prevent corruption and protect the individual from disturbing or immoral sights. This is ironical in itself and only made to satisfy the so-called moral conscience of, society. Everyone knows what copulation is. Animals perform the act everyday in public, so why not let humans have the same freedom if they wish it. Surely we should have the right to make the choice. If the act disturbs some, then they do not have to watch and if they want to then why not?

The act making love is beautiful and natural and should be admired.

Richard Neville and Age-Gap Sex

In 1970, Neville wrote a manifesto for hippie culture, Play Power, which argued that the "underground culture" of the Sexual Revolution was "turning sex back into play"; "happy, hippie playful sex [...] free, uninhibited, fun-oriented sexual anarchy." The book began with a poem from D. H. Lawrence ("A Sane Revolution"), which implores readers "If you make a revolution, make it for fun," and draws on other authorities like Jean-Paul Sartre, who argued that "As soon as man apprehends himself as free and wishes to use his freedom ... then his activity is play."

In Play Power, Neville briefly alludes to a sexual experience with a consenting 14-year-old female student, writing:

I meet a moderately attractive, intelligent, cherubic fourteen-year-old girl from a nearby London comprehensive school. I ask her home, she rolls a joint and we begin to watch the mid-week TV movie. It is The Woman of the Year, and Spencer Tracy, almost against his will, finds himself in Katharine Hepburn’s apartment. (He kisses her, flashes his look of ‘there’s a volcano bubbling inside me’ and hurriedly leaves.) Comes the Heinz Souperday commercial, a hurricane fuck, another joint. No feigned love or hollow promises. [...] A farewell kiss, and the girl rushes off to finish her homework.

Later, in his most sustained and overt contribution to the debate on intergenerational sex, Neville hosted a national radio broadcast on the topic of Pederasty.

on 14 July 1975, Neville hosted an episode of the ABC Radio series Lateline entitled "Pederasty" in which "three men in their thirties who admitted sex relations with boys, and a teenage boy who said he had been involved in such relationships since he was 12, discussed their experiences frankly with (Neville)"