Anti-porn crusader owns signs advertising X-rated dancing

Tuesday, Feb. 18, 1997 | 11:59 a.m.

The owner of Young Electric Sign Co., he has organized protests and used his own money to build cautionary billboards along Utah's Interstate 15: "Don't Get Hooked: Pornography Can Kill."

But travel a few hundreds miles south along I-15 into Nevada and Las Vegas and Young's billboards carry a very different message.

"Wild J's Dance Preview! ADULT! Videos, Books, Toys, Arcade, Previews," pronounces one. The YESCO acronym - Young Electric Sign Co. - is clearly visible at the bottom.

Copies of a photograph of that sign were distributed by an attorney representing a private dance club fighting a Senate Bill that would ban virtually all nude dancing in Utah. Young had made a passionate plea for the bill minutes earlier.

Attorney Phillip Dyer, who represents the Million Dollar clubs in Salt Lake County, said he passed out the photographs to make a point: "I just think we need to be consistent," he said. "Mr. Young has made his fortune down there. He lights up the Strip."

Young said he has done business in Las Vegas for 50 years. The advertisers there "seek us out," he said.

"I personally do not like it," he said. "But it's hard to change."

Young said he did not know whether, even as a private businessman, he could refuse to sell his services to smut advertisers.

"I'd hate to face legal consequences," he said.

Last week, however, another Utah outdoor advertiser, Bill Reagan, refused to construct billboards for a local rock 'n' roll station that featured a pair of men dressed unmistakably like Mormon missionaries. Reagan said he was concerned the billboard might be offensive.

Brent Ward, the former U.S. attorney for Utah and a member of Citizens for Positive Community Values, said Dyer's attack on Young was nothing more than a "diversion" from Senate Bill 244.

That bill, sponsored by Sen. Craig Taylor, R-Layton, would adopt a much more stringent definition of nudity and then make it much easier for prosecutors to pursue charges.

The measure met with concerns of committee members, who worried that it could be used to prosecute nude models in art classes, nudity in legitimate plays or consenting adults who choose to get naked with one another.

"This would apply to an amazingly wide range of things," said attorney Andrew McCollough, who represents the state's Naturist Society. "This is a shotgun approach ... it's outrageously overbroad."

He said the bill, in one form or another, had been considered and rejected by the state Legislature six times in recent years.

"This will roll back the clock to the 1920s," he said, pointing out that a person could be considered nude if they don't cover their entire buttocks. "Nobody covers themselves like that today.'

Ward said the bill was based on an Indiana law that has withstood the scrutiny of the U.S. Supreme Court.