A Short Bio of Charles Keating: Anti-Smut Crusader and Convicted Fraud

Editor’s Note: This post is the second in a series by YNOT’s LynseyG that gives an overview of the history of anti-porn sentiment in America. Look for additional installments in the series in the days ahead. Read the first post in the series here. 

In this week’s look at anti-porn crusaders through the decades, I decided to look at the 1969 President’s Commission on Obscenity and Pornography. Originally, I hoped to link the commission to the other presidential attempt to defame and denounce pornography—Reagan’s 1986 commission, AKA the Meese Report. But, folks, that’s before I became familiar with Charles Keating.

As I stated in my introduction to this series, someone is always out to destroy pornography, and I’m sure that was true long before the mid-1960s, when Keating burst onto the prudery scene. But the 1960s saw the proliferation of smut in both print and film, with adult bookstores and theaters on the rise, as well as film projectors in private homes. And as such, that’s when public outcry against pornography caught on—largely due to the very public, very hypocritical outrage of Charles Humphrey Keating, Jr., one of the first people to get famous largely because of his extremely loud distaste for smut.

In 1958, Keating—a lifelong Catholic and a lawyer at the time—testified before the U.S. House Judiciary Committee about the dangers of mail-order pornography. He claimed that porn led to juvenile delinquency because it was “capable of poisoning any mind at any age and of perverting our entire younger generation.” The testimony must have given him a thrill—likely due to the proximity it gave him to political power—because, in the same year, he founded Citizens for Decent Literature, an organization that, for decades, under several different names, and across 300 chapters, advocated for censorship of sexually explicit media.

The CDL also produced, using Keating’s own funds, a 1965 film called Perversion for Profit, in which ”outstanding news reporter” George Putnam insisted that pornography degraded the morality of its consumers. Putnam (and thus Keating) was particularly concerned about its effects on young people and suggested that there was a slippery slope between homosexual porn, child molestation, and the Communist threat to America.

“Never in the history of the world have the merchants of obscenity, the teachers of unnatural sex acts, had available to them the modern facilities for disseminating this filth,” Putnam intoned. “In this day especially, we must seek to deliver ourselves from this twisting, torturing evil.” (You can watch the entire film, including lots of shots of sexy magazine covers, spicy literature, and more, on YouTube.)

The success of Perversion for Profit, which was screened around the country, made a national name for Charles Keating as an anti-porn zealot. That’s likely why, when Richard Nixon assumed oversight of the President’s Commission on Obscenity and Pornography in 1969, he appointed Keating as his own personal anti-smut advocate. 

The commission had been convened by Nixon’s predecessor, Lyndon B. Johnson, in response to the U.S. Supreme Court’s unanimous decision in the 1969 Stanley v. Georgia case, which set the precedent that American adults had the right to view pornography in the privacy of their homes. The Supreme Court dismissed the state of Georgia’s claims that possessing so-called obscenity would lead citizens into “deviant sexual behavior” and “crimes of sexual violence.” The ruling sparked moral outrage across the country—particularly in LBJ’s White House. So Johnson convened a commission to study the effects of pornography consumption, which Nixon—and thus Keating—inherited. 

Moral outrage notwithstanding, the commission issued a report in 1970 stating that “pornography does not degrade the morals of adults or cause crime.” The commission further recommended that “all federal, state, and local laws preventing consenting adults from obtaining pornographic materials be repealed.” 

Keating led the dissent, in which he wrote, “One can consult all the experts he chooses, can write reports, make studies, etc., but the fact that obscenity corrupts lies within the common sense, the reason, and the logic of every man.”

Nixon, in turn, categorically rejected the commission’s scientifically backed findings. “Smut should not be simply contained at its present level; it should be outlawed in every State in the Union,” he wrote. “The Commission on Pornography and Obscenity has performed a disservice, and I totally reject its report.” (It should be noted that, in his “total rejection” of the commission’s scientifically backed findings, Nixon set a precedent that today’s social conservatives continue to follow. Science, Nixon implied, can only be trusted when it confirms conservative beliefs. Today, we see this dynamic at play in everything from Republicans denying the existence of climate change to the “public health crises” that many state governments have declared in regards to pornography in recent years.) 

Charles Keating’s dissent saw his anti-smut star continue to rise, so he stuck with the cause. Over the next decade, his anti-porn proselytizing would essentially make his hometown of Cincinnati a porn-free dystopia and, in turn, make Keating a national celebrity for the cause. Between 1969 and 1976, when he moved to Arizona, Keating attempted to—and sometimes succeeded—in shutting down public showings of sexy films in Cincinnati and around Ohio, closing porn theaters, keeping smutty magazines out of newsstands, shutting down adult bookstores, removing prurient materials from public libraries, and publicly denouncing the Ramada Inn chain for offering adult programming to guests. According to a 1977 report from Fortune magazine, “In 1975, Oui magazine gave Keating the top spot on its ‘Enemies of pornography’ list.”

Although Keating had decamped to Arizona by the time Larry Flynt went on trial in Hamilton County, Ohio, in 1976, his influence had effectively established that “community standards” in the Cincinnati area were stringent enough to convict the Hustler tycoon on charges of pandering obscenity. The conviction was, of course, overturned, but Keating had clearly made his mark.

To anyone with an understanding of porn’s history in America, the self-serving, fame-seeking nature of Keating’s anti-smut evangelism will be familiar. In many folks who spend their days policing the morality of others, there’s a streak of self-aggrandizement. And Keating most certainly possessed a wide one. But it wasn’t until after he’d largely abandoned his role as a defender of American sexual decency that Keating showed his truest of colors—as a hypocrite for whom nothing, and no one, was sacred.

In Arizona in the late 1970s, Keating took up a life as a banker, real estate developer, and financier for a string of companies—American Financial Corporation, American Continental Corporation, Lincoln Savings and Loan. Wherever he went, rumors of his arrogance and aggressiveness followed…as did investigations into fraud, bribery, and outright theft.

Keating regularly cried to the press that regulators were “out to get him” because of his strong moral views—and perhaps he was right. But after one of his companies went bankrupt and another was seized by the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, it seemed that his persecutors were on to something. More than 23,000 of Keating’s customers were left penniless, and many claimed to have suffered emotional trauma when their life savings evaporated along with their dignity. Keating, who had made his name as a crusader for American morality, became known as a major player in the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s. He was sentenced to a total of 22.5 years in prison on state and federal charges in the early nineties, but served only 4.5 of those before his convictions were overturned on technicalities. In 1999, he entered a plea agreement admitting to four counts of wire and bankruptcy fraud, but was sentenced only time served.

Charles Keating died in 2014 at the age of 90, leaving behind him a legacy that included suppressing freedom of expression in America in the name of American morality…as well as a name synonymous with swindling thousands of Americans out of their life savings through fraud. 

And, as we continue to profile the people who have made their marks by hounding the producers and purveyors of American porn through the decades, we’ll likely find that Keating wasn’t alone in using smut as a convenient stepping stone on the path toward their own personal aggrandizement.

Armor photo by Mikebirdy from Pexels