Robert Clark Young - Controversy Over One of The Guys

Controversy Over One of The Guys

One of the Guys is a satire about a man impersonating a U.S. Navy chaplain on a ship that suffers a series of comic misadventures in the Far East. The novel gained notoriety shortly after publication when the American Family Association objected to Young's portrayal of a man posing as a Christian chaplain during deployment to ports where an alcoholic crew avails itself of child prostitution. The AFA, which had previously used the work of artists to attack the funding practices of the National Endowment for the Arts, lobbied the U.S. Congress to have the agency defunded.

Young responded, in The Washington Post and elsewhere, that the controversial sections of One of the Guys were not pornographic, but had been written to expose what he saw as the U.S. Navy's complicity in child prostitution overseas. He perceived an inconsistency in the AFA objecting to taxpayer funding of a book that exposed and criticized sexual exploitation, when the AFA could have been objecting to taxpayer funding of the exploitation itself.

One of the Guys was subsequently nominated for the PEN/Newman's Own First Amendment Award, which recognizes authors who have stood up to censorship in the United States.