ANSWER Me! is a discontinued magazine which was edited by Jim and Debbie Goad and published between 1991 and 1994. Extremely misanthropic in its editorial content, it focused on the social pathologies of interest to the Los Angeles–based couple. The magazine was a major source of inspiration for the editors of Vice Magazine, for which Goad has written. Issue 4 of ANSWER Me! was the subject of a high-profile obscenity trial against two booksellers whose magazine store carried the issue.
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Released October 31, 1991.
Featured Russ Meyer, Timothy Leary, Holly Woodlawn, Kid Frost, Public Enemy, Iceberg Slim, Bakersfield, California, Sunset Boulevard, masturbation in literature, and Twelve-Step programs.
Released July 17, 1992.
Featured Anton LaVey, David Duke, Al Goldstein, El Duce of The Mentors, the Geto Boys, Ray Dennis Steckler, 100 serial killers and mass murderers, Vietnamese gangs, and Mexican murder magazines.
Released July 19, 1993.
Featured Jack Kevorkian, Al Sharpton, NAMBLA, The Kids of Widney High, Boyd Rice, Suzanne Muldowney, 100 suicides (including Colleen Applegate, Diane Arbus, Linda Marie Ault, Craig Badiali & Joan Fox, Thomas Barker, Raymond Belknap & James Vance, The Bergenfield Four, William Lee Bergstrom, Anilia Bhundia, Felix Bourg, Thomas Lynn Bradford, M. Jay Briggs, Buddhist Monks in Vietnam, Dan Burros, Chris Chubbuck, William Corcoran, Inocencia Rosa Cortes, Dennis & Lindsay Crosby, Ian Curtis, Carl Czerny, Jeffrey Davis, Jeanine Deckers, The "Deer Hunter" suicides, Giuseppe Dolce, The "Dungeons and Dragons" suicides, R. Budd Dwyer, Sergei Esenin, Donald C. Forrester, the "Gloomy Sunday" suicides, James Green, Charles Haefner, William Gordan Hall, Ernest Hemingway, Ann Hemmingway, Andrew L. Hermann, Dr. Albert Herschman, Adolf Hitler, Abbie Hoffman, Danny Holley, Derek Humphry's wives, the Ingersoll suicides, Jack the Bum, Joe, the Boy with Elastic Skin, Roop Kanwar, Doug Kenny, Thomas Kenny, the Kevorkian suicides, Mike Keys, David Koresh & Friends, Veronique Le Guen, Diane Linkletter, Mattrew Lovat, Paul Lozano, Tina Mancini, Donald Manes, Masada, Rich & Jamie Masters, Leanita McClain, Albert Medrano, the Mount Mihara suicides, Karl Miller, Yukio Mishima, Marilyn Monroe, Donnie Moore, Lillie Norwalk, the Old Believers, Frank R. Olson, Gerald Olson, the "Ozzy Osbourne" suicides, John Parks, Peregrinus, Scott Phillips, Sylvia Plath, Freddie Prinze, George Reeves, Rufus Ripley, Edgar Rosenberg, Gregg Sanders, Sappho, William Sexton, Del Shannon, Stephan Simon, Mitch Snyder, Stockbrokers during the Great Depression, Charles Stuart, Harry Swart, Jacques Vaché, Vincent Van Gogh, Vatel, Popo Walker, Doodles Weaver, John Webster, George C. Wheeler, Dan White, Dennis Robert Widdison, Mary Woodson, Wrzesinaski, John B. Young, and Zeno), guns, Andrei Chikatilo, pedophilia in Steven Spielberg's work, Mexican deformity comics, paintings and drawings by murderers (Kenneth Bianchi, Mark David Chapman, Gary Heidnik, Henry Lee Lucas, Ottis Toole, Charles Manson, John Wayne Gacy, and Richard Ramirez), and a suicide hotline.
Released 1994.
Known as "The Rape Issue", features fake teen-mag interview with Richard Ramirez, Donny the Punk, work by Molly Kiely, Boyd Rice, Randall Phillip, Shaun Partridge, Adam Parfrey (on Andrea Dworkin), Peter Sotos (with illustrations by Trevor Brown), pieces on amputation, the police, racist country & western music, and Chocolate Impulse.
In 1995, a complaint about of this issue being sold at a Bellingham, Washington magazine store known as The Newsstand resulted in owners Ira Stohl and Kristina Hjelsand being tried on charges of distribution of obscenity. The defendants were found not guilty.[1][2][3] A later lawsuit against the City of Bellingham by Stohl and Hjelsand resulted in the City paying $1.3 million to the plaintiffs on the grounds of violation of First Amendment rights and infliction of emotional distress.[3][4]
The first three issues were released in a collection with autobiographical introductory pieces by Debbie and Jim. It was first published as ANSWER Me!: The First Three (ISBN 1-873176-03-1) by AK Press. It has since been reissued, along with 60 pages of new material, by Scapegoat Publishing (ISBN 0-9764035-3-6).
Chocolate Impulse was a "hoax zine" created by Jim and Debbie Goad, publishers of ANSWER Me!. Frustrated by the negative feedback they'd received from the zine community, the Goads wrote and distributed a pseudonymous screed against themselves (in which they claimed to be the lesbian couple "Valerie Chocolate" and "Faith Impulse"), going so far as to set up a fake address for it in Kentucky. The zine received some positive response from the publishers of Feminist Baseball and other zines that had negatively reviewed the Goads. In issue #4 of ANSWER Me!, Jim Goad revealed the prank and insulted those who had taken the bait.