Underground scene papers were economically outflanked by sex tabloids riding the same counterculture

Evidence

With no advertising and only avant-garde pornography, Gothic Blimp Works was a luxury EVO could not afford—the paper lived on sex ads and kinky personals. Rat was not above putting nude women on the cover to increase sales. The New York Free Press preferred to use a naked Kusama happening. By mid-1969, New York’s underground papers were outflanked and outsold by the sex tabloids that followed Al Goldstein’s Screw. As the Freep morphed into the New York Review of Sex and Politics, a raunchy tabloid named Pleasure came on the scene, courtesy of Rat’s business manager. “A moron can make money with a porn sheet,” EVO’s publisher Joel Fabrikant told the Voice, which was interested in “the financial bonanza” of “hip pornography.” — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1476

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Directly relevant to the book’s core argument about material conditions enabling scenes — here the material condition is advertising revenue from sex ads, which shaped what the scene could sustain.
• XREF: A concrete instance of the reader’s shelf thesis: economic conditions (not genius) determine what a cultural scene can produce. Complements the reader’s interest in why culture stagnates now — a cash-flow constraint logic that applies both directions.