If nothing else, 2026 will be remembered as a year in which quite a few 1990s alt-culture legends passed on. The death of provocateur extraordinaire Jim Goad followed that of Creation Books founder James Williamson by roughly two months, and while I’m not sure their passing leaves much in the way of a cultural void (I’ve largely ignored Goad and Williamson’s recent output, and am hardly alone in doing so), it’s undeniable that both men made quite a ruckus in their day.
Jim Goad was, together with his late wife Debbie, the guiding light of ANSWER ME!, a self-published zine that ran from 1991-94. Standing out in the zine scene of the 1990s (which was so insanely overcrowded a quarterly periodical, FACTSHEET FIVE, devoted itself to listing and cataloguing them) was an achievement ANSWER ME! handily attained, and in just four issues. Sold as “The Only Magazine Worth Hating,” it embodied the type of boundary pushing content that so many other zines promised but largely failed to deliver.
A standout attribute of ANSWER ME! was its literate edge. At a time when (in the words of SHOCK CINEMA’s Steven Puchalski) “you couldn’t open your mailbox without some high school dropout cranked on cheap speed ranting about the joys of ILSA flicks,” ANSWER ME! offered a notably learned and refined blast of unfiltered rage that showcased Goad’s background in legitimate journalism. As author John Strausbaugh said of Goad, “You may disagree with his ethics, they may even repulse you, but you can’t deny that he’s thought them through, can articulate them with unusual clarity, tries to live by them more faithfully than you live by yours and if you debated him on them he’d probably kick your ass.”
Of ANSWER ME!’s content, issues 1-3 were quite scurrilous, with articles like “Babies Are Dirty,” “The Family Must Be Eliminated” (subtitled “Kill your mom and dad, Feel Good About It”) and “The Homeless Can Eat Shit,” as well as interviews with fringe figures like Russ Meyer (“the world’s breast director”), Anton LaVey and David Duke amid much assorted anger and bile. Issue four, the so-called “Rape Issue,” was something else entirely.
Featuring Goad’s notorious screeds “Let’s Hear It for Violence Toward Women!” and “Rapeworld,” and a “Rape Game” that promises “all the THRILL of rape without any of the headaches!,” ANSWER ME! #4 may well be the single most repellent document ever created by human hands. Even serial killer Richard Ramirez (who famously had a fan letter published in issue 3) opined that the issue “went a little too far.” It attained the ultimate alt-culture seal of approval by being censored, with the owners of a Bellingham, Washington based magazine store arrested in 1995 for distributing it.
Following this “triumph” Goad’s fortunes declined. In 1997 he wrote THE REDNECK MANIFESTO—AMERICA’S SCAPEGOATS: HOW WE GOT THAT WAY AND WHY WE’RE NOT GOING TO TAKE IT ANYMORE, which somehow got published by Simon & Schuster, and which I didn’t bother reading. I have no doubt that the book was sincere in his claims, and that the racism charges levied against it are overblown (Goad apparently included a disclaimer reading “I’m no fan of white supremacy—everyone knows the Jews and chinks are superior”), but the fact remains that, as with white trash gurus like Jeff Foxworthy and Kid Rock, the Portland based, university educated Goad was not a redneck. I’ll also cite a promotional appearance on POLITICALLY INCORRECT in which Goad was handily shouted down by host Bill Maher and guest Karen Finley (Goad later admitted he “sucked” on the show), which further soured me on THE REDNECK MANIFESTO.
1997 was also the year Jim and Debbie Goad divorced. This followed Goad beating up Debbie (he admittedly “Hit her maybe 10 to a dozen times over 10 to a dozen years, and would gladly trade being hit as many times as I hit her with being slogged with her neuroses”) and cheating on her with Anne Skye Ryan, an ANSWER ME! groupie and self-proclaimed “Psychotic Neo-Nazi Bitch With a Whip.” As if all that weren’t enough, Debbie contracted ovarian cancer in ‘97 and died in 2000.
During the interim Debbie took out and rescinded a restraining order against her ex, who in 1998 was given a 2½ year prison sentence for assaulting Ryan, from which he emerged even more pissed off than he previously was. As Goad informed a SPIN magazine interviewer, “love, in my life, has always caused more trouble than hate. Hate’s been pretty much a smooth ride.”
Hate was something Goad spewed plenty of in his remaining years, spent as a columnist for the right wing blog Taki’s and his personal website, and writing tomes like SHIT MAGNET, JIM GOAD’S GIGANTIC BOOK OF SEX and WHITENESS: THE ORIGINAL SIN. I’ll confess that outside the Goad scripted 2004 comic book TRUCKER FAGS IN DENIAL, an outrageously scabrous account of homophobic truckers, I largely passed on Goad’s post-2000 output. I say he leaned too far into race-baiting; despite the apolitical stance Goad tried to cultivate (likening America’s left and right to “two asscheeks surrounding the same hairy bunghole”), he ended up becoming the patron saint of Neo-Nazis the world over (in fairness, his fandom encompassed left-leaning figures like Patton Oswalt and Chuck Palahniuk). He also, I’d argue, embodied the old saying “You get out of life what you put into it.”
If Jim Goad deserves credit for anything, it’s that in an age of provocateurs undergoing nice guy makeovers in their later years (Howard Stern, anyone?), he maintained his confrontational edge literally to the end of his life. He was known to ridicule counterculture author Jim Hogshire for starting a “Free Jim Goad” website during Goad’s incarceration, and, when asked if he was remorseful about abusing Ryan, retorted “Absolutely not. I enjoyed it.” The man, in short, may have been an obnoxious, self-absorbed, unpleasant and (probably) racist asshole, but he wasn’t a poseur.