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1966-74

Scandinavian Porn

The first full color high quality pictures of explicit sex emerged out of Scandinavia in the mid '60s. Flamboyant car salesman Berth Milton began publishing Private Magazine in 1965, the first periodical in the world to legally show sexual penetration.

Private contrasted with the pattern of earlier publications whose covers promised much but delivered little. Issue two showed a close-up of a vagina. A man shows up in the next issue and by number nine Private shows full intercourse. The cum shot arrived with issue 14 in the summer of 1968

By that time, the Danish capital of Ko had achieved international recognition as the center of the world's pornography industry.

High quality Scandinavian stag films formed the transition to the full-blown adult feature. Simple and mechanical, this technically proficient Northern European product used performers who appear to just go through the motions.

The king of Euroloops was Lasse Braun, the pseudonym of an Italian named Albert Ferro. He produced films with diverse themes: a tropical series, shot in the Caribbean featuring black performers, a prostitution series about professional sex, an historical series devoted to the sexual adventures of Casanova, another series devoted to the sex life of the Vikings; and three top-secret episodes from the adventures of Sex-Agent X-69. Lasse focused on anal sex in Deep Arse.

Operating out of his home in the Netherlands, Braun ranged all over the world, the continent and Scandinavia, searching for locations and new talent. On one of his trips to Sweden, he met Brigitte Maier, the young American porn starlet. A few months later, she moved in with Braun and his wife as a permanent houseguest.

Lasse began his role in the sexual revolution on September 20, 1961 when he learned through the newspaper that a young man, with the same surname as one of his Milanese girlfriends, had been arrested in Genoa by the Italian police for carrying three suitcases of pornography bought in Monte Carlo. Lasse called his girlfriend who, in tears, said that the man arrested was her older brother Dino.

Lasse got from the girl the name of her brother's attorney and visited him. As the lawyer had no experience with this kind of felony, Lasse suggested a line of defense that he'd researched six years previously for his doctorate in Law thesis at Milan State University - that representation of licit sex couldn't be considered illicit.

After getting Dino out of jail, Braun chased up the lad's source of porn to a tobacco shop in Brussels, Belgium.

Lasse speaks five major European languages, and as the son of a diplomat, he belonged to the Diplomatic Corps in Austria. He drove a Mercedes with DC license plates and passed through customs with impugnity.

Alberto Ferro aka Lasse Braun traveled around the world from 1962 to 1967 shooting high quality loops and distributing explicit books and magazines. He believed that making quality erotica would allow for the eventual legalization of the product. Ferro inspired a young Danish MP of the Social- Democratic Party to sponsor legislation that decriminalized sexually explicit books and pictures.

Lasse founded Beta Film in Stockholm and began producing hardcore ten minute loops shot in color on Super 8mm. He starred in his first loop, Golden Butterfly, with his girlfriend from Monte Carlo. She dressed up as a Japanese Madame Butterfly and Lasse played a naval officer. Instead of singing, the couple had sex.

Lasse shot more loops by picking up girls in the discos of the Swedish capital city. His early titles included Blow Up 70, Chains of Eroticism, Sex on the Motorway, Susie la Blonde and Dream of a Nymphomaniac.

Aside from Ferro and Milton, other European contributors to the porn revolution included the Theander brothers from Denmark who combined Jen's kill behind the camera with Peter's business acumen, Ole Ege, Leo Madsen, Ole Djerberg, Lee Hessel - all six from Denmark - and Bernt Aspin in Sweden and Beate Uhse, Hans Moser and Peter Schmidt in Germany and Tuppy Owens and John

Lindsay in England.

In 1971, a major American distributor Reuben Sturman visited Alberto Ferro in Copenhagen and they produced peep-show machines - Super 8mm projectors closed in solid boxes - that Sturman distributed to virtually every state in the Union.

By enclosing coin-operated projectors in a small booth with a screen and a door that could be locked, Braun and Sturman gave their customers the chance to masturbate while viewing porn in private.

"The invention was an immediate success. Sturman put peep booths into all of his stores. He supplied the booths to other adult-bookstore owners, free of charge, in return for half of the receipts. He started a company to manufacture peep booths and another company to service them. The huge demand for sex films to show in these booths helped establish the nation's adult film industry. During the 1970s, the public exhibition of hard-core films, such as Deep Throat, attracted a great deal of attention in the media. But the annual revenues of the nation's peep booths were much larger - four times larger, by some estimates - than those of adult theaters." (Eric Schlosser in the 2/10/97 US NEWS)

The main production sites for American color loops by the late 1960s were New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. New York turned out the M Series, many featuring Linda Lovelace and Eric Edwards, and the G Series which featured Tina Russell. L.A. had the Pretty Girls and Playmate series, San Francisco had the 200 series, the OZ series, Collection Series and Diamond Collection. Before Swedish Erotica, there was the NM series, Erotica Unlimited, Danish International, Watergate Girls and later Limited Edition, Golden Girls and Rolls Royce.

Other well-known loops include School Daze, #245, part of the SF 200 series, which stars Fran Spector of the film Harlot and the guy from the School Girl feature. Playmate #6 - Deeper Throat features Bridgitte Mair and John Holmes. Playmate #11 - Wild Beauty features the West Coast Queen of Loops, redhead Linda McDowell, who takes John Holmes up her ass. It can be found in the feature Beyond Fulfillment. In Pretty Girl #11 - Playmate of the Year, Linda McDowell gets penetrated vaginally and anally at the same time by John Holmes and Rick Cassidy. In

Box Ball, an uncircumcised guy sticks his wound tight scrotum into a brunette's vagina, then adds his penis for a unique double. Pool Orgy features hot four-way action between John Leslie, Joey Silvera, Christine Kelly and another woman, and can be found on tape as part of Sexations.

Stags played in sperm-spattered booths in sex shops where patrons deposited a quarter to watch about a minute of spliced-together Super 8MM loops of sex. If a patron wanted to watch more, he deposited more quarters.

This part of the masturbation industry grosses about two billion dollars a year according to the 1986 Meese Commission. Owners of peep booths tend to under-report their revenues to avoid taxes.

Loops differ in purpose from stags because they primarily seek to satisfy rather than arouse. Loops differ from post-1972 porn features in their inferior technical quality, lack of dialogue and plot, disregard for women's pleasure, and the self-consciousness of the performers who act directly to the camera.

The sexual revolution peaked in the late 1960s. Salon magazine columnist Cintra Wilson looked back 3-98 on these days with regret after viewing a recent video by photographer Robert Frank, The Cocksucker Blues. Ever feel down in the dumps? Tired of being flamed on RAME? Perhaps you have the Cocksucker Blues?

It's the name of a new video by photographer Robert Frank. And it prompted this meditation by Cintra Wilson, who writes a column entitled THE AWFUL TRUTH for www.salonmagazine.com:

"The late '60s/early '70s is one era that will never really be able to repeat itself. It was an ignorant, selfish, sexist, self-destructive time. You could never repeat any of the backstage action featured in "Cocksucker Blues" -- even the lowest slag-level of coke and cum-famished groupies have more self-respect than that now. It was an era with no boundaries whatsoever, and Mick navigated the ungainly sea of IV drug accidents and weepy orgies and omnipresent star-struck coke-gabbling morons better than any other lacquer-pants glam King of yore. It is amazing that Mick was ever Mick, looking at him now, and it is doubly amazing that he wasn't found dead years ago in a hotel room with needles in his feet and the remains of some horrible sex act stuck to his person.

"It was crazy watching that video: Nobody (except Prince) could get away with that much genital focus these days. Let's say no white man could do it. The Red Hot Chili Peppers sort of did it, but it was more tongue-in-cheek, or rather, dick-in-sock. Ha ha, they were cutely saying about the male sex object phenomenon. There was nothing cute and reasonable about Mick at his gangly big-haired best, when he was wearing spangled body socks with extra codpiece sections for his legendary cod and long chiffon scarves and numerous cloth belts, with Lady Bianca pouting around the dressing room, smoking in Halston dresses. He was completely non-ironic; there was something very powerfully unconscious and self-contained about his outrageous sexual persona that made men and women of the '60s and '70s just die wanting to lick his velvet hems. He was, perhaps, the most sexually sought-after human on the planet at one point, a male Helen of Troy. The entire band was cadaverous from sweating off eight pounds a night and eating nothing but narcotics; they were blown into wraiths from all that attention, all that masturbation aimed at them, the whole writhing mass of hippy culture imploding into death and debasement right in their hotel rooms."

Porn and rock music share much in common - an immediate, animalistic, primitive appeal.

Peraino/Mafia

An initiated member of the Colombo Mafia family in New York, Anthony Peraino jumped in at the start of the burgeoning pornography business, which became organized crime's biggest new moneymaker since drugs. Porn is big business with a take that's soared into the billions of dollars since Deep Throat. Law enforcement officials in the 1970s and 1980s estimated the Mafia's take as about half.

In the late 1960s, Peraino and the Colombo family led the Mafia into sex movies. John "Sonny" Franzese, a Colombo member, began supplying 8-millimeter hardcore stag movies to the coin-operated peep show machines in sex shops around New York's Time Square. The Colombo family soon controlled its own plant for processing 8mm movies - All-State Film Labs in Brooklyn.

The official owner of the lab was Anthony Peraino's 26-year old son, Louis "Butchie" Peraino. A capo in the Bonnano crime family, Michael Zaffarano aka Mickey Z. ran the porno operations at the lab, which also turned out mainstream product.

Anthony Peraino and Michael Zaffarano dominated distribution of porno loops to Mafia-controlled outlets in New York City. According to the FBI, they sold their films secretly out of automobile trunks, coffee catering trucks, unmarked warehouses, several restaurants, a chain of meat markets and a Brooklyn candy store. Their primary sales representative was Cosmo Cangiano from Brooklyn, a convicted pornographer with an arrest record for larceny, forgery, mail theft and interstate shipment of stolen securities.

Cangiano became "a millionaire at least four times over" from a variety of illegal activities, according to the sworn affidavit of an FBI agent who monitored the operations of Peraino and Zaffarano for five years. Besides selling porn to customers in New York, Pittsburg, South Carolina, Baltimore and elsewhere, Cosmo Cangiano dealt in counterfeit Chanel perfume, Omega wristwatches and Department of Motor Vehicle documents. Cangiano also furnished false identification - licenses, registrations, birth certificates and Social Security Cards - for the underworld in the New York area and other places in the United States.

Godfather theme - 'You Don't Get Out'

Louis Peraino entered the legitimate movie business through All-State Film Labs. When he presided over Bryanston Distributors in its Hollywood heyday, a company brochure said it all began in 1965 when "Mr. Peraino combined a hobby and a deep interest in cinema techniques by forming his own motion-picture processing laboratory All-State Film Labs, specializing in processing and editing facilities and high-speed animation..."

Law enforcement investigators consider Louis, along with his older brother Joseph S. Peraino, a Colombo family "associate" rather than a "made" member.

One veteran investigator echoes the consensus among his peers when he says of Louis, "His grandfather was in organized crime, his father is in it, his uncle is in it, his brother is in it, so he's in it. That's the way it is. You don't get out."

That "You don't get out" is the theme of the Godfather saga, the book and the movie that defines the Mafia in the minds of millions of Americans. The Godfather gives a romantic portrayal of traditional New York Mafia life. "A scene right out of the Godfather" was a common refrain amongst those who talked about Louis to the LA Times for its 1982 piece on the Perainos. Louis is described as a Michael Corleone figure - the brightest of the Peraino men who's driven by a desire for respectability.

Actor Al Pacino portrays Michael Corleone - the college-educated favorite son of Mafia boss Vito Corleone (Marlon Brando) - in Francis Ford Coppola's Godfather movies. Michael wants no part of the family business but gets sucked in after his father is shot and ultimately becomes the godfather.

"There is nothing ominous about Butchie Peraino," movie producer Frank Avianca told the LA Times (6/13/82). "He's a big teddy bear."

Peraino financed and distributed Avianca's 1975 movie The Human Factor, and did the same for producer Sandy Howard's The Devil's Rain and Echoes of Summer.

"Lou wanted to make an image for himself as a decent man," says Howard. "He tried to build a legitimate business."

Movie distributor Fred Biersdorf: "Louis Peraino was the best, the nicest guy. You'd think that you had known him for years when you first met him." Biersdorf distributed all of Peraino's legitimate movies in the Southwest U.S.. "It was the best business relationship I've ever had."

Linda Lovelace gives a different picture of Butchie in her 1980 bestseller Ordeal. Louis was "heavy and sloppy... What I remember most about him was his loud mouth. He was always yelling at somebody about something. And he never went anywhere without his bodyguard, Vinnie."

Linda Lovelace

"I'm not going to sit here and say I'll never do another hard-core film because I was forced into this one, that I needed the money... I did it because I loved it. It was something I believed in. And if, when I'm 65 years old, they're making an X-rated movie and they need a little old lady to be in it, I'm gonna say, hey, I'm right here."

Linda Lovelace in 1974 to Variety.

Director Gerard Damiano created the last name of Lovelace for his Deep Throat star Linda during the film's shoot in Miami in January, 1972. At the same time, he created the name Harry Reems for Linda's partner.

Born Linda Boreman, the daughter of a New York policeman, she grew up in Yonkers, attending Catholic schools such as St. John the Baptist in Yonkers and Maria Regina High School in Hartsdale. Linda's dad allowed his wife reign of the home and she frequently beat Linda.

The story of Linda Lovelace is well known due to the success of her third published autobiography, 1980's Ordeal. The book sold out several print runs and remains the best selling book ever on the adult film industry. No other book comes close. Ron Howard plans a movie entitled "The Linda Lovelace Story."

In 1986, Linda published her fourth book about herself - Out of Bondage. Together with Ordeal, these two books shape public perception of the adult film industry as exploiters of vulnerable women. This view developed not so much from the contents of the books, but from what millions of people believe - due to sensational media coverage - the books describe.

As she received increasing attention, Linda increased the horror she claimed she suffered as a sex object. Appearing on TV shows and in media interviews, Linda Lovelace turned Linda Marciano, developed upon the degradation described in her books by claiming such things as that a gun was held to her head during the filming of Deep Throat to make her perform such disgusting tricks. But as Bill Margold put it during a TV interview with Linda, the only gun held to her head was the gun of poverty. Margold confronted Linda about her many contradictory statements and damaged her credibility.

Not only was no gun held to her head while she did Deep Throat, but even in her book Ordeal Linda describes those two weeks in Miami filming Throat as among the happiest days of her time with her husband and manager Chuck Traynor.

A careful reading of Ordeal, taking it on face value, reveals a woman suffering domestic abuse and finding relief only on occasion, such as when she performed sex on camera.

The writer of Ordeal and Out of Bondage, who fashioned Linda's latest stories, previously created a pornographic novel in 1969 resembling Deep Throat.

Mike McGrady developed the idea for the literary hoax Naked Came The Stranger for Lyle Stuart - publisher of the sensational. Naked and Deep Throat are both silly stories about a woman who craves sexual satisfaction and only finds it through sex with loads of men.

Chuck Traynor, portrayed as a villain by Linda in her last three autobiographies, confirms the basic truth of the events described in Ordeal, but denies Linda's claim to being a victim. Along with most persons who knew the couple in the early '70s, Chuck says Linda was a willing participant in Deep Throat, porno loops, prostitution, rough sex, and their other exploits.

I summarize Linda's life by using her contradictory stories and other information I've gleaned.

Despite the book's flaws, particularly its dishonest depiction of Linda as a victim, Ordeal, as the all-time best selling book on the adult film industry, demands serious coverage. When I summarize or quote from Linda's latest accounts, I place those contents in italics.

Her parents gave her no sex education. When Linda asked her mom what the word "f---" meant, she got slapped, kicked in the butt and sent to her room.

The first time Linda menstruated, she believed it was punishment from God. After eventually telling her mom, Linda was pointed to the Kotex in the bathroom and told to wear them when bleeding.

During grade school, Linda wanted to become a nun. She says that few guys dated her more than once because she wouldn't put out. She earned the nickname Miss Holy Holy.

"I was the type of girl who liked to go down to the ocean and hold hands," recalls Linda. "I still am."

Miss Holy Holy lost her virginity at age 19 and the next year she gave birth to an illegitimate child that her mom forced her to put up for adoption.

Linda lived in New York City until a car accident wrecked her life and body. She returned to her parents in Florida to recuperate.

At high noon on a hot Florida day in 1967, Linda dozed in the sun. Despite scars from her accident that criss-crossed her 21-year old body, she wore a bikini. Woken by her friend Betsy, Linda noticed a young man looking at her, and out of modesty she covered herself with a towel.

As her eyes focused, Linda checked out Chuck Traynor. The 27-year old blonde stood six feet tall, and best of all, he drove a Jaguar.

After sharing a joint with Chuck and Betsy, Linda joined the two in the Jaguar for a drive to Chuck's bar, the Vegas Inn, located in North Miami, just across the street from a police station.

After seeing Chuck for a few weeks, Linda accepted his offer to move in with him. They had sex that night for the first time. He asked her to suck him but she refused.

Chuck behaved like a gentleman, buying her many gifts, lighting her cigarettes, opening doors for her and listening to her thoughts and feelings. She reveled in the attention. While easy going with Linda, Chuck displayed an air of authority in dealing with others that turned her on. He seemed always in control.

Through hypnosis, Chuck helped Linda quit her two-pack a day cigarette habit, and opened her to further auto-suggestions.

Initially, Chuck had a difficult time convincing Linda to take his penis into her mouth.

"Everyone does it," he told her.

"Before I met you," whined Linda, "I had never even heard of it."

"Well, just touch it then. See, it's not going to bite you."

"Chuck, please..."

"Pet it," he said. "It likes to be petted."

(Ordeal)

Artie and Jim Mitchell

Chuck Traynor and the Mitchell brothers began their porn careers in the late 1960s in the same way - shooting still photographs of naked women. They both opened strip clubs. The Mitchells created the O'Farrell on Polk Street in San Francisco and Chuck developed the Las Vegas Inn in North Palm Beach in Southern Florida.

Jim and Artie's father J.R. Mitchell, a gambler and con man, lived fast and died young. The boys loved him. As time passed from his funeral, they increasingly revered him. Their easygoing mother Georgia Mae lives in Sacramento.

The closest that the two future pornographers got to sex in high school in the rural Northern Californian town of Antioch was watching The Nun - a black-and-white 8mm stag film distributed by salesmen who looked both ways before opening the trunks of their cars.

"Like mainstream films, pornography reflects the society that produces it. In every corny old Western, there is always the same old tired scene. John Wayne wraps his arms around a feisty, independent young lady and tries to kiss her. The young lady beats his chest with her fists and struggles to break free. Then she melts, closes her eyes, and passionately returns the kiss.

"The pornography of the time was that scene over and over again. Only instead of a kiss, the girl ends up eagerly submitting to sex.

"Pornography was a male's adolescent version of the romance of sex. Boy meets girl; girl fulfills boy's every carnal desire. Life isn't like that (and therein lies pornography's appeal), particularly in a conservative, working-class town like Antioch, where a girl was likely to put a death grip on a young man's wrist, look him in the eye, and say, "I'm saving that for my husband."" (Bottom Feeders)

But in The Nun, things happen the way young men wish they happened. A woman dressed as a nun walks into a room and a Peeping Tom watches as she undresses. He finally enters the room. She resists, but like the leading ladies in the old John Wayne films eventually submits. (Bottom Feeders)

For years, journalists repeated the myth that Jim and Artie turned to each other while watching the film and said, "Hey, bub. An ole boy could make himself a lot of money with these movies." Supposedly, in that moment, their careers in porn were born.

In truth, neither Jim or Artie had a clue what they were going to do after high school. Jim ended up minoring in Film at San Francisco State University and in 1968 he began shooting stills and later 16mm moving pictures of naked women.

Topless dancing took off in San Francisco in 1964 with people lining up around the block to see Carol Doda at the Condor Club. Soon, San Francisco's North Beach was wall-to-wall topless joints and the arcades in the city also prospered. Theater owners like Harold Greenland began charging men a couple of bucks to sit in a nice dark theater and watch nudie films.

"In the mid-1960s, a theater like the Roxie showed two hours of loops that were strung together and set to music that was totally unrelated to what was happening on the screen," says Lowell Pickett, who, with his beautiful partner Arlene Elster, became one of San Francisco's leading pornographers in the late 1960s and early 1970s. "Can you imagine anything worse? I've often thought that if there is a hell, I'm going to be condemned to watching those films through eternity."

In these revolutionary times, the personal, including the sexual, became political.

"Pornography was anti-establishment, another way of changing things," says Lowell Pickett. "We were conscious of trying to break down barriers. In the late 1960s, my partner Arlene and I went to the first meeting of the Adult Film Association in Kansas City. We took along a projector and ran some San Francisco loops and people were dumbfounded! They'd been showing movies of nudists playing volleyball."

Through porn, the Mitchell brothers got to make money and revolution.

"The outsider-outlaw feeling was much alive in Jim and Artie," says psychiatrist Dr. Martin Blinder. "Their bent may have sprung from the same anti-authoritarian, sociopathic drive that formed Bonnie and Clyde."

Artie told his new girlfriend Meredith Bradford that porn was a public expression of women's new freedom, a way for a woman to say, "This is my body, I'm proud of it, I'll do with it as I please!"

Jim and Artie were inseperable. They seemed more like identical twins than brothers - never staying in the same room together for longer than a few minutes without going over and dropping a hand on the other's shoulder. In temperament they differed - Artie was friendly and outgoing while Jim was serious and subdued. They never tolerated criticism of the other behind his back for loyalty was their supreme value.

"They tormented each other daily," remembers an associate. "Jim loved Artie and Artie loved Jim, but there was no in between, no understanding what the other one might be going through. When they fought, they fired cannonballs."

In the end, big brother Jim won the battles, like big brothers usually do. (Bottom Feeders)

Alex deRenzy

The Mitchells sought to catch up with America's leading porn filmmaker prior to Deep Throat - Alex deRenzy. In 1968, the former photographer for the Gordon News Service in San Francisco and craps dealer in Reno, was 33 years old and handsome, with long blonde hair pulled back into a pony tail and a Fu Manchu mustache. He had a deeply scarred face and walked with a limp, the result of a motorcycle race up a steep hill in San Francisco that ended when he crashed into a car that had stopped in an intersection.

DeRenzy later told friends that he liked the scars on his face because before the accident he looked too pretty. A loner, Alex lived in his hillside estate in Marin with a couple of women and several of his children from a previous marriage.

To compete with deRenzy's Screening Room and Pickett's Sutter Cinema, the Mitchell brothers opened the O'Farrell and began showing "beaver" films - endless reels of women masturbating with their fingers or pulling their labia apart to reveal huge on-screen vulvas and deep vaginal tunnels.

"If the cops hadn't bothered us," says Jim Mitchell, "we probably wouldn't have gotten into stories. The purest form of titillation is the single girl automasturbation film...and the beaver film was a truer form for getting off on some autoerotic fantasy. When it opened up and you added f---ing, you had to show the man and you covered up the girl.... It disrupted the autoerotic trend of sex films. It was boring because all anyone wanted to see was the close-up penetration shots."

Aging beatnik Lowell Pickett tried to eliminate the external cum shots but people stopped showing his films because while they were funnier and more dramatically developed, they violated pornographic convention.

As Jim Mitchell was fond of saying, "The only Art in this business is my brother."

By early 1969, San Francisco hosted two dozen theaters showing beaver films and nobody objected except Diane Feinstein, a candidate for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and leader of a band of anti-porn crusaders.

"What distinguishes San Francisco from any place else is the style with which porn is marketed, its practitioners' attitude toward it and the tolerance most square citizens display concerning the whole question," wrote the New York Times Magazine in a January 1971 article called "The Porn Capital of America."

"The flourishing underground press in San Francisco all share the idea that porn, even at its sleaziest and most bizarre, is an important and healthily revolutionary ingredient of the new culture."

One day Jim's roommate Bob Cecchini came home from work hungry. He opened the refrigerator and found it empty except for a small salami which he ate in a sandwich. Half-an-hour later, Jim burst through the door.

"I was hoping you'd be here!" Jim said. "I've got something to show you."

Jim threaded the 16mm projector and turned off the lights. The words Sacramento Salami appeared on the screen. Cecchini felt sick but forced himself to watch the loop. A woman masturbated with a small salami, plunging it in and out of her vagina.

"I just ate that salami," said Bob.

Jim turned off the projector and started laughing so hard he collapsed in a chair.

Porn became raunchier. "Some jerk in the Tenderloin showed a man-pig beastiality film. The DA and the brass in the police department were so sickened by it they decided to go after everybody," says brunette Arlene Elster.

In response, the Mitchell brothers took on radical young attorney Michael Kennedy who'd worked with William Kunstler, and fought back against increasing police raids. Working the media was a strong suit for Jim and Artie, and they packaged themselves as defenders of free speech.

Journalists became friendly with the Mitchells and took to hanging out at the O'Farrell. "Reporters weren't interested in seeing the films," says San Francisco Chronicle journalist Sandy Zane who did an early series on the porn business. "We'd go up there to drink their tequila and smoke their dope. The Mitchell brothers corrupted a generation of reporters - assuming that we could be more corrupted than we already were."

The stories that Zane and other reporters wrote taught the Mitchell brothers that in porn, there is no such thing as bad publicity. The more ink the brothers got, the larger the audiences at the O'Farrell became.

The fun that Jim and Artie created at the O'Farrell set the Mitchells apart from other pornographers. The brothers took chances, and created striking moments on film such as the 15-minute Requiem where a gorgeous redhead in probably her lone porn appearance mourns the death of her husband at his grave, and then returns home to masturbate to Gregorian chants.

"That film was as close as I ever came to liking a masturbation film," says Artie's girlfriend of the time, Meredith Bradford. "She was so good, so beautiful, and so striking at the cemetary it was painful to watch. And when she went home and got into bed, it turned into an erotic movie with a message. When a lover dies, sex doesn't."

"Requiem...is a significant departure in the dreary annals of American sex films," writes John Hubner. "The lizards in sharkskin suits in New York who were making beavers that featured lifeless, tattooed hookers would never have used a Gregorian choir in a film. The smooth operators in L.A. who cranked out loop after loop that were as devoid of feeling as an industrial film that follows a can of soup from the vat to the shipping crate would never have come up with a story line that involved a grieving widow...

"Jim and Artie knew they could concoct the wildest plots and craziest characters imaginable and the horn dick daddies wouldn't care, as long as a woman climbed out of her panties."

"Acting is believing, and the New Age people who acted in those films believed in what they were doing," says Lowell Picket, who now runs a convenience store in the San Francisco Bay Area. "It could only have happened in San Francisco in the 1960s. Arlene and I would go up Haight Street and say, 'We're making sex films. Beaver films. Want to be in one?' We got eighty percent of the women we wanted and no one ever got angry..."

I Am Curious Denmark

In 1967, Denmark became the first Western country to rescind all laws against pornography. The decision made news around the world, especially when government statistics showed a decrease in sex crimes the year after the abolition.

Alex deRenzy and a partner traveled to Copenhagen to film Denmark's first sex fair and in 1969 they released the first feature film showing sexual intercourse - Censorship in Denmark. Made for $15,000, the documentary grossed $25,000 the first week on its way to an eventual box office of over $2 million.

The flick was clumsy and boring but it was IT!

Breakthrough

Documentaries first broke through the hardcore feature barrier in 1969 in San Francisco with Censorship in Denmark. Sexual Freedom in Denmark from LA's John Lamb followed in 1970.

In New York that same year, Gerard Damiano made SEX U.S.A. starring Linda Lovelace and Harry Reems, and This Film Is All About... while Donn Greer's 101 Acts of Love gives the education approach.

Alex deRenzy gathered classic stags into A History of the Blue Movie followed by Bill Osco's inferior Hollywood Blue. The first advertised porn feature in the major New York newspapers was Mike Henderson's Electro Sex '75 released on Labor Day weekend 1970. Freddy Hanson made Animal Lover in Denmark featuring farm girl Bodille doing a dog, pig and horse. Matt Cimber, the husband of Jayne Mansfield, made the first 35 mm porn film to get national distribution Man and Wife.

Bill Osco is part of the Osco drug chain family that developed Sav Ons. He produced, wrote and directed the first classic porn feature - 1970's Mona The Virgin Nymph which starred Fife Watson, Judy Angel, Susan Stewart, Orrin North and Calvin Victor. Bill got help from two experienced loop makers on the West Coast - Mike Light and Howard Ziehm.

Mona displays dramatic structure and credible relationships with the actors developing their characters through dialogue. Unlike the various documentaries, Mona has a story - virgin named Fifi developes her oral sex skills under her father's instruction. She refuses to have intercourse with her fiance until her wedding night though she will perform fellatio on her man or any other man who turns her on. On one occassion, she satisfies her fiance's longing for sex by going down on him in the middle of a field. Osco takes many chances to shoot in the open air, giving both a variety of settings and risk-driven excitement.

To ensure its having redeeming social value, Mona has a moral: Distorted sexuality is often the product of repression and hypocrisy, and the rigid, unrealistic Victorian standards under which women must wait for marriage to have intercourse are false and harmful.

Mona is pornographic in intention and execution. Following the classic pattern of erotic scenes - from dalliance to sadistic orgy - the movie also contains many of the significant thematic elements of traditional pornography: seduction, incest, a permissive-seductive parent figure, dirty words, nymphomania, lesbianism, masturbation, orgies, oral sex, oral fixation, bondage, sadomasochism, and sex toys.

"Early films tried to expand the boundaries of this new form of artistic expression, and films from '70 to '75 had content that distributors of today would never dare to include. It is a unique irony that under Nixon's presidency, adult films were rougher than they are currently. Golden Age films had plot, production values and hot sex that would embarrass 99% of current features, as well as budgets ten to one hundred times the current project allotment.

"The monster growth of the video technology available and the shrewdness of pioneer marketers brought an end to adult theaters, which went from an all-time high of nearly 1000 to fewer than two dozen scattered nationwide. When "shot-on-video" product achieved its stranglehold in the mid-80s, most astute entrepreneurs saw the handwriting on the wall and began to bail out of the film biz.

"Today, there are few giants, plenty of tiny companies creating monthly releases, a load of amateur releases, and a return to creativity." (Jim Holliday, AVN 9/91 p.70)

I devote the rest of my book to developing the themes that Holliday outlines in a few sentences.

San Francisco

In December 1970, Arlene Elster and Lowell Picket hosted the First International Erotic Film Festival. Don Simpson, who become famous as half of the production team Bruckheimer and Simpson before killing himself in 1995, handled publicity. Arthur Knight, the Saturday Review film critic, was one of the judges.

The winning entry was a three minute film of a woman peeling an orange.

Adult theaters popped up all over America and their owners sought San Francisco porn.

"We'd shoot two versions, a hard-core for here and a soft-core for elsewhere," remembers Lowell Pickett. "The places we shipped hard-core versions always surprised me - San Diego, Indianapolis, and small towns all over the country where, I presume, the authorities were being paid off."

Public concern over pornography led to a Presidential commission which included the Nixon apointee Charles Keating, the founder of Citizens for Decent Literature. In his home town of Cincinnatti, Keating was known as "Mr. Clean."

In 1992, after his role in the Lincoln Savings and Loan debacle, Keating became known as "Mr. Swindle."

After spending $2 million dollars and two years in research, the 1970 Report of the Presidential Commission on Obscenity and Pornography found little evidence that porn caused harm. The Commission recommended that the United States follow Denmark's lead in abolishing censorship of sexually explicit materials.

Furious with the majority report, Keating, along with Father Morton Hill and several other commissioners, alerted the White House to the moral damage the report could cause the country.

Richard Nixon, who was known to appear on the beach at San Clemente in a business suit with all three buttons buttoned, issued a statement "totally rejecting" the majority's recommendations. A Democratic President (Lyndon Johnson) had appointed the commission; the Democrats were as soft on smut as they were on Communism. A Republican President would never relax the national effort to control and eliminate smut from our national life.

Until 1957, U.S. law governing obscenity patterned itself after the Hicklin decision in England in 1868 which said that a book could be banned if as much as one paragraph on one page was deemed to be lewd.

But in a majority decision of the U.S. Supreme Court, written by Justice William J. Brennan in 1957, obscenity became defined as material "utterly without redeeming social importance."

The Mitchell brothers' 1971 conviction (later overturned) for showing obscene films which had no plots, led to an important evolution in porno. To give their explicit films "redeeming social importance", the Mitchells and other pornographers in 1971 began adding stories to their films.

The brothers pioneered both the featurette and the pornographic feature film in San Francisco, pumping out 336 of them before doing Behind the Green Door. The films were easier to defend in court and the audience had come to expect films with a story and characters.

Features also drew larger and more varied audiences than the single lonely men who dominated the viewers of loops.

The other adult theaters in San Francisco followed the Mitchells lead. Lowell Pickett's features aimed to be both erotic and artistic.

As for pioneer Alex deRenzy - he'd fallen into a funk. In trouble with the IRS, he made endless attempts at recapturing the success of Censorship in Denmark, pouring out psuedo-documentaries with couples romping around at staged orgies.

George McDonald

Orphan George McDonald graduated high school in Fresno in 1967.

In his senior year at Herbert Hoover High, George served as student body president, received the class of 1967's vote for "Most Likely to Succeed" and took the North Fresno Exchange Club's "Boy of the Year" award. He dreamed of becoming governor of California.

Hitting bad luck after graduation, he eventually became a clerk at a dirty bookstore in the Tenderloin. One night friends paid for him to see a sex film which starred a stunning actress with short blonde hair. When she took her clothes off, she was even more beautiful than George imagined - large breasts, a flat stomach, trimmed blonde pubic hair and long legs.

The woman gives a man a blowjob but by the time she's finished, he's still soft. The audience groans. Shifting to the man's face, the camera reveals he's terrified.

George decided that he could perform sex on film and he pestered Jim and Artie Mitchell until they give him a chance. His costar was Lelania - the beautiful blonde in the flick that inspired him to give porn a chance. Though George had been laid many times, this was his first blow job.

Jim then told George to perform cunnilingus - another first. He'd always wondered what it'd be like, and now he got to find out on camera.

Moments later, he bolted up, gasping for breath. George had so immersed himself in his work that he forgot to breathe.

The couple moved into the missionary position and after several changes of camera angle, George received permission to come. He stroked hard, burying his face in Lelania's hair before pulling out and achieving another first - watching his own orgasm.

Jim showed George where to clean up and told him they were going to Ocean Beach to shoot the socially redeeming part of the film.

While washing himself, George reflected that porn is the opposite of life. In life, you meet a girl, date and perhaps go to bed. In porn, you go to bed and then you have the date.

In all his features George played a sensitive young man who wanted to get to know a woman before having sex - a radical departure from the typical male characters in porn whose lines were usually confined to "Suck harder, baby."

George McDonald became San Francisco's first porn star, liked by almost everybody except the Mitchell brothers and their film crew who despised those on the wrong side of the camera.

Linda Lovelace

Linda found it difficult to even touch Chuck's penis, let alone allow her mouth to get near it. A few times Chuck held her head in his hands and forced his dick into her mouth.

Because of his drug and alcohol abuse, Chuck rarely achieved full erection.

Chuck told Linda that her problem was her gagging instinct and that through hypnosis he could rid her of it, just as he had rid her of smoking.

"It's a conditioned reflex and you can control it," said Chuck. "You can learn to relax your throat muscles completely. That's something I learned in the Orient - there were a lot of chicks there who could swallow the whole thing. Their whole philosophy was to completely satisfy their man."

"Chuck, I don't like the taste."

"If the man is all the way in, you don't taste a thing."

Linda learned more about Chuck and his club. He warned her to stay away from a barmaid named Roxanne who was bisexual.

"What's that?" asked Linda. "She's into chicks as well as men," said Chuck. (Ordeal)

Late one night, Linda and Chuck closed the bar. Walking into the dark club, they saw Roxanne dancing naked on top of the bar. A man sitting in front of her pushed a dollar bill into her vagina. Roxanne saw Linda and Chuck but kept dancing. The second barmaid, a cold girl with black ragged hair, lay on top of a table in the back of the room. One customer penetrated her missionary style with his trousers down around his ankles. Another guy had his penis in her mouth. A third man fondled her breasts.

It was beyond Linda wildest imagination. Most shocking was that they were doing a private act in public and seem unbothered by Linda and Chuck's presence.

A couple of days later, an old friend of Chuck's visited. Therese told Linda she was lucky to live with a wonderful man like Chuck. Later, Chuck told Linda that Therese used to be one of his hookers.

As business declined at the bar, Chuck returned to pimping.

Linda told the 1986 Meese Commission: "Chuck Traynor was incapable of any kind of sexual act without inflicting some kind of degradation or pain on another human being. When I decided to head back for home and informed Mr. Trainor of my intention, that was when I met the real Mr. Trainor and my two and a half years of imprisonment began. He beat my physically and mentally from that day forward. He made a complete turnaround. I literally became a complete prisoner of his. I was not allowed out of sight or allowed to use a bathroom without his permission. When speaking to either my friends or my parents, he was on the extension with his Walther PPK .45 automatic 8-shot pointed at me.

"I was beaten physically and suffered mental abuse every day. In my autobiography Ordeal, I detail the atrocities that I was put through, from prostitution to porno films to celebrity satisfier. The things that he used to get me involved in pornography ranged from this PPK automatic and an M-16 semiautomatic machine gun to threats on the lives of my friends and my family. I have seen the kind of people involved in pornography and how they will use anyone to get what they want. The coldness and callousness that they possess is immense."

One afternoon, Chuck drove a hungry Linda to the Holiday Inn but instead of taking her to lunch, he took her to a private room where five men waited to give Linda a different type of feeding. All five were prominent citizens says Linda as she describes a lurid story that had its analogue in Florida in the 1990s with the Kathy Willets scandal.

Chuck took Linda to a private room and told her that the men paid him to gangbang her. Linda claims she begged out of the fun but Chuck pulled a gun and persuaded her to change her mind.

She walked into the room naked. One man jiggled Linda's breasts, then led her over to the nearest bed and clammered on top of her. He entered her. A second man stuck his penis into her mouth. Man number three brought his stiff cock to Linda's side, took her hand and put it on his penis.

"Jerk me off dear," he said.

"Don't listen to him," said another voice. "Just go on sucking."

"Okay," said a third voice. "Let's switch now."

The three men played musical chairs with Linda's body while another man complained to Chuck that Linda showed a bad attitude. The fifth man, a 35-year old blonde, stood aside. For a while, Linda almost liked him, but then he joined the orgy with the fourth man.

Someone suggested making a sandwich and Linda felt relieved, even though she was no longer hungry. Then she realized that the men intended to make her the meat in the sandwich. The man who made the suggestion lay on his back and the other men mounted Linda on him. Then a guy got on Linda's ass and after a struggle penetrated her anus with his penis. Linda cried. It was her first experience with anal sex.

"Oh lookie here," one of the men said. "We must have a new baby here."

Linda felt her anus ripped apart by the man's thrusting cock.

The men didn't talk to Linda but instead treated her like meat. She kept her eyes closed most of the time.The men picked her up, moved her around and spread her legs this way and that. They pounded her without mercy, working themselves up to orgasm then ejaculating all over her body and rubbing it in.

Linda couldn't understand how five human beings could act that way to another human being.

"Hey, let's try to get in two at once," someone said.

"Nah, that's impossible," another said.

"Crowded, but not impossible."

Two men pushed their cocks into her vagina. Linda became numb as the men mauled her. Eventually they got bored. Chuck came over to Linda.

"You're a f---ing mess," he said. "Go take a shower."

After the men left, Chuck counted his money. Each man paid $40, but the one who complained about Linda's attitude demanded a refund and he received half his money back.

Linda never realized that men could act that way. She knew prostitutes offered sex for money, but she figured they would make love, with kissing and caressing and gentleness.

As Linda got into Chuck's car, he yelled at her. "You were lying there like some vegetable, like some f---ing turnip... You don't know what to do and you don't know how to do it... You better start getting your shit together Linda."

For her next customer, Linda claims she lay lifelessly on the bed while he pumped away at her. After the man finished and left, Chuck entered the room and beat her up for being a lousy lay.

From this time on, Chuck raped, kicked, beat, punched or choked Linda most every day. But what bothered her the most were his words.

"He never let up," she recalls. "I was so dumb; I was so ugly; I was so fat; I was so thin..."

Linda turned several tricks a day. Chuck added other girls to his staff who got the nice customers while Linda got the degenerates. Through a hole in the wall, Chuck watched them "rape" her. Eventually, Linda figured out the reason why Chuck denied her attractive johns.

"You're jealous," Linda told Chuck.

"Bullshit."

"Your jealous. If I didn't know better, I'd swear you had some normal human feelings."

"Better not count on that, cunt."

One trick came in every week and asked for his eleven year old friend. And every week he gave Linda a script he'd written with lines such as: "Please don't hurt me, sir. I'm only eleven years old. Ooh, you're so big and strong - please, sir, don't take away my cherry."

Greg, a 38-year old architect, frequently hired two girls. Melody would wait outside while Greg did Linda. Then she'd come into the bedroom, throw off the sheet, and say, "Gregory, what are you doing with this cheap girl? I think I'm going to have to spank you!"

The next week the two women might switch roles.

Linda says this was her dramatic training.

One customer got off on pain. He paid $75 to enjoy anal sex with Linda while hitting her. But Linda was a lousy lay and the man refused Chuck's offer of a second time with her for free. Other customer complaints led to more beatings for Linda.

One day she and Chuck visited the messy home of pornographer Lenny Camp for a lesbian pictorial of Linda and a five-foot 18-year old model named Chiclet. Linda again went into auto-pilot, but Len and Chuck yelled at her to get into it. Afraid for Linda's well-being, Chiclet took her aside.

"Listen to me." Chiclet lowered her voice. "Just do it. We'll just go through the motions together... When you go down on me, just fake it."

After Lenny had enough pictures, he brought out a strap-on dildo. Linda says it was her first time with a dildo. Chiclet strapped it on, assumed the male role, and screwed Linda while Lenny snapped more pictures.

Chiclet was Linda's first female sex partner, but because Chuck saw how much pain it caused Linda, he set her up with many more women.

Linda became friends with one woman she regularly worked with - Melody. Linda thought her a strange hooker for being intelligent and always carrying a book around with her, even on tricks. Melody had her own operation and she transferred all her kinky customers to Chuck who gave them to Linda. Whenever Melody needed an extra woman to turn a trick, she'd call Chuck and request Linda. Melody understood Chuck and fed him stories of perversion. For example, she'd tell Chuck a customer wanted two women to tie up and urinate on. Chuck would reply, "Far out. Take Linda." Or Melody would tell him a john wanted to give a girl an enema, and Chuck would again jump at the bait.

Melody and Linda shared an old guy in a wheelchair every week. He'd hire six or seven girls for fifty dollars each and have them make love to each other while Linda sucked him off. In those rare times apart from Chuck, Linda poured out her heart to Melody about how miserable she was. Linda said she couldn't leave Chuck because he threatened that he'd kill her and her parents if she ever left.

Linda told Melody that Chuck demanded she think up one new freaky sex act each week and if she didn't Chuck would beat her.

"He's a real sicko," Melody said. "Sometimes I get the feeling that the world is full of sick people."

"There can't be anyone else as bad as Chuck," Linda said.

"Don't kid yourself. Look, I'll tell you the kind of thing to tell Chuck. Tell him today that I tied all the other girls together, locking them into strange positions, and then the old guy began beating on everyone with a cane. Tell him that some of the girls were really screaming; one was yelling, "No, no more, no more pain! And another one was saying, "Hit me! Hit me! Harder, harder!" Tell him that some of the girls got excited and had orgasms."

Melody regularly told Linda every unnatural act she had ever heard of, and then she made up some brand new ones just for Chuck. And almost every day, she managed to find Linda a trick and this got her away from home.

Melody turned a $150 a week customer over to Linda who weighed 400 pounds. Chuck felt happy for two reasons - the money and the revolting john who Linda had to get off.

Throughout her sufferings, Linda maintained her faith in God and believed that one day He'd set her free. Linda enjoyed none of the sex and only thought about escape.

One day a customer asked her why she did such degrading work.

"I'm a prisoner of Chuck Traynor," said Linda, "who happens to be insane."

The customer offered to help Linda escape but she chickened out. In time, Linda learned to satisfy men like Chuck who got their kicks from pain. Traynor had taught her how to relax her throat muscles, so that she wouldn't gag during oral sex. By using similar techniques, Linda learned to relax any set of muscles at will. When Chuck began fisting her vagina, Linda relaxed and felt little pain. Chuck found a two headed dildo which he used to penetrate Linda vaginally and anally. Again she relaxed and went with the flow. But she wouldn't reveal her comfort to Chuck. Instead, she claims she'd scream for mercy and that made Chuck hard and he'd ejaculate immediately, thus leaving her alone for a while.

"I was becoming an actress," recalls Linda. "I learned that it was never enough to fake pain, you had to fake pleasure at he same time."Oh, Chuck, that hurts...that hurts too much...but please don't stop."

Linda used her sword-swallowing technique that she'd learned form Chuck to her advantage. When working parties with 10 to 20 men, Linda preferred to suck cock than to allow a man into her vagina or anus. Because of her ability to deepthroat, Linda became popular with a lot of guys who were into oral sex. She heard over and over again comments such as, "Nobody's ever done that to me before." And then the men would call friends who'd also want blowjobs. Chuck called it word of mouth advertising.

When asked why she didn't escape, Linda replies "that it's hard to get away when there's a gun pointed at your head." Linda says she has no difficulty relating to what happened to Patty Hearst. She believes that the two of them could be close friends.

"When several Playboy Bunnies in Great Gorge, New Jersey, were drugged, photographed and forced to work as whores, I could understand the process. I can even comprehend the Jonestown massacre, hundreds of people standing in line, waiting to drink their cyanide. I know what inhumane doses of fear and pain can do to any human being."

Chuck asked Linda to marry him so that she couldn't testify against him at his drug trial. Linda turned him down. Chuck beat her up and then married her the next morning. He later was acquitted of drug charges.

"People ask me why I never called the police. It seemed to me that the system would never work for me, only against me. Then, too, I believed Chuck's totally absurd story that a wife could not charge her husband with a crime."

Before Linda met strangers, Chuck gave her a standard public appearance briefing.

"Don't ask to go to the john without me... If you've got to go, we'll come back to the room here. I don't want to see you talking to strangers. Don't say nothing to no one. Some clown asks you a question, you don't know shit."

Linda: "I must've come off like the world's dumbest human being. I was allowed to say, "This food tastes nice" or "the weather is nice today" but that was about the extent of my social conversation."

One weekend after the drug trial, Chuck's lawyer Phil Mandina and his plump blonde beautician wife Barbara flew to North Carolina with Chuck and Linda. On the first night, the two men bragged about their hypnotizing abilities. Mandina put Barbara under and told her that she'd wake up thirsty and run to the bathroom for a drink. It worked. Then Chuck put Linda under.

"When you come to, you are going to take off all your clothes," he said. "You will get undressed and you will get turned on when you look at Barbara... You'll make love to Barbara. All she'll have to do is touch you and you'll come."

"When he took me out of hypnosis, I was in a cold sweat. Sometimes I was able to remember everything Chuck said to me when I was under. Some of his suggestions I was powerless to resist, and some I just wouldn't do. He once told me I would have an orgasm during oral sex with a man, and that didn't happen, although it was eventually the entire plot of Deep Throat."

To protect herself from a later thrashing, Linda went partway with Chuck's suggestion but didn't have sex with Barbara. Another night, the two men each went down on their wives to see who'd come first. Phil won easily.To soothe Chuck's anger, Linda put out in the reverse context. She sucked Phil off before Barbara got Chuck off.

On a long drive to Aspen, Chuck invented new games to play with Linda. For instance, he'd insert Red Hots into her vagina and watch her squirm as he drove. Chuck wanted to make a detour to Juarez, Mexico, so Linda could f--- donkeys.

In an arena, hundreds of men sat around a ring making bets on how much donkey cock different women could absorb.

"You're made for this contest," Chuck said to Linda. "You'll clean up. The last chick I brought to Juarez made us three thou and she was nothin'."

Linda hoped Chuck was making it all up, but he knew too many details.

"The chicks go in one at a time. And the crowd cheers, just like when prize fighters come into the ring. Then they strap the chick up on this contraption and bring out their trained donkey and they lead the donkey right into the f---ing cunt.

"He gets a little f---ing help. They've got to point him right. Sometimes the chicks get ripped up - I'm telling you, you haven't lived 'till you've seen one of these donkey dongs. Those suckers are huge!"

"That would kill a woman," said Linda.

"Nah, they got the medicos right there. If the bleeding gets too bad, they unstrap the chicks and give them medical assistance on the spot. Some of the chicks are hemorrhaging."

Linda prayed to God that they'd avoid Juarez, Mexico. One night outside of Little Rock, Arkansas, Chuck's Volkswagen crashed, saving Linda from the donkeys.

Chuck and Linda moved to New York, where the Happy Hooker Xaviera Hollander turned down Linda as a potential employee. Chuck's ex-hooker Brandy moved in with them instead of marrying her high school sweetheart and settling down. Linda noticed that Chuck never beat Brandy or any other woman aside from her.

Brandy and Linda posed together for still photos and later had sex for 8mm loops in a dirty loft on 48th street.

Also in 1969, a struggling actor named Rob Everett picked up Screw magazine and answered an ad looking for sex performers. Over the next few months the unhappily married young man posed nude for several magazines, and eventually received a call from Linda's loop director Ted Snyder, who in 1991 was gunned down on his front lawn in a Mafia-style hit.

"Do you think you can get it up?" Ted asked Rob. The tall blonde actor answered yes and he received directions to a loft on 42nd Street.

Rob arrived to find Ted, the director and cameraman, Chuck Traynor, who couldn't get it up, Brandy, and Rob's partner for his debut porn performance - Linda. She found Rob adorable and their first shoot went smoothly.

"There was no sound [recorded] and no lunch," remembers Rob. "Of course, she had to hold a gun to my head to make me do it!" He laughs.

"Linda was nice. She enjoyed working with me. She loved sex. She and Chuck Traynor seemed like normal folks, laid back. They looked happy together. I never saw Linda with bruises or black eyes. No guns were held to her head to make her perform. She loved what she did.

"Linda is the one person responsible for keeping me in porn because she constantly called me to perform with her," says Rob who later took on the porn name Eric Edwards. He's the only person to perform in four decades of X-rated shoots.

Linda and Eric did about two dozen loops together. Eric made $40 and Linda $50 most times. "I thought that it was unfair that the guy got paid less than the girl seeing that he does all the work. I still think that's unfair.

"After Deep Throat, the business simply passed Linda by. She wasn't particularly attractive nor could she act. If she'd told the truth about her life her book may not have sold as well as making up a story that claims she was forced to do these disgusting things."

Eric lived in an unhappy marriage with Cathy - a woman he met while they both attended the American Academy of the Arts. They were sexually incompatible and had become swingers.

"I was young and not into that sort of thing, but I found that other women were into me. My wife would also have her own experiences. The situation made me feel like a man. I was pleasing women and they enjoyed being with me."

Eric and Cathy later divorced and she died painfully of cancer in her 40s.

Many broke actors do sex films. Sylvester Stallone performed in a 1970 sex flick Italian Stallion - originally titled Party at Kitty and Stud's - where he makes love to several women. The softcore movie doesn't show penetration, however, or Stallone's erection. Sylvester earned $200 for the flick and later said that he only did the movie because he was sick and broke. At other times, Sylvester expressed defiant pride in his dip into blue movies.

Herbert Streicher

Born in 1947, Herbert Streicher says he's the product of a normal Westchester County family. Raised without religion by his secular Jewish parents, Herbert attended college at the University of Pittsburg before dropping out to join the Marine Corp. When he got out, he became an actor.

"I was legitimate and struggling and pushing and doing the dance classes and the voice classes and acting classes. And one Christmas, I needed money. And somebody said, 'I know where you can go.'

"I called this guy up, a seedy-sounding character. He said, 'You got a good hanging thing?' And he hired me over the phone. I went over there and the whole time I'm thinking the cops are following me.

"I went in the door and saw these beautiful young ladies. I immediately got hard, pulled my pants down, and came instantly, totally oblivious to all those people behind the camera... I was so excited about the situation.

"I came instantly inside the girl and that was not kosher. Not only did they not get enough film, they didn't get to see the comeshot. I'd blown the whole scene. They went crazy.

"But by the time they settled down, I was ready to go again.

"I always get off. And I can usually regulate it. When they've got enough film in the can, I can put my head into getting off."

After that first $75 loop, Streicher kept going. "I said, 'My God, I have other gifts I have to buy' and the next day I went to work with some other people on more loops, and features and inserts for distributors who'd buy European softcore and spice it up.

"I did a lot of those documentary doctor-type things where they'd have a doctor talking and then six different couples..." (Sinema, 1974)

During his first two years in the business, Streicher worked on average six days a week.

"There were lots of legal hassles. People were always afraid of busts and locking doors and had guards posted... It was a seedy, raunchy business. The guys were all f---ed up; the girls were all f---ed up. Lots of dope addicts.

"I came into the market when there weren't any real actors; they were dying for people. Not that I'm a great actor, but I can take written words and not make them sound like I'm reading them. I got a lot of notoriety in this business because I could handle lines, understood cameras, and knew what film was all about. I was not there phoning in blow jobs."

Like Eric Edwards, Herbie did numerous mainstream plays, films and theater companies as well as commercials for Wheaties, "a lot of water sports [urine] as well as the usual young husband stuff and athlete stuff before I let the hair go and the moustache and dissipated and debauched myself into some kind of scarecrow."

Herbert combined acting experience with a professional attitude to making porn. "People, especially when they've never made one before, don't know how to handle the situation. I had an ability to relax people, especially new girls coming into the business [such as Linda Boreman Lovelace]. We'd sit and talk; it made people feel comfortable. I brought hundreds of people into the business." (Sinema)

Streicher - who later took on the name Harry Reems - worked behind the camera as well, directing, lighting and shooting.

Eric and Linda

Eric, Cathy and Linda frequently performed together, including in the epic "Piss Movie" for director Bob Wolf - fat, greasy and black-haired. The three swingers did every sex act imaginable before Linda and Eric drank several beers and urinated on Cathy.

With such performances, Eric and Linda rose in the world of porn.

"One day I was making photographs with ketchup smeared on my back," Linda remembers, "and three weeks later I was asked to play the lead in a porno blockbuster."

Linda's costars were Eric Edwards and a "hagged hound" according to historian Jim Holliday. Most persons, including Linda, say it was a German Shepherd.

Eric has anal sex with Linda and then leaves the scene. Unsatisfied, Linda looks around and sees the dog. She snaps her fingers and says "Ooooh."

In came the dog with its owner, a young man in his twenties.

"You sure this baby knows what to do?" Bob Wolf asked.

"Oh, yeah, don't worry about old Norman," said the owner. "We tried him out last night and you don't have to worry about Norm. He knows the score."

"You tried him out last night," Wolf said. "You're sure that was a smart thing to do?"

"This old fellow can go all day and all night. Don't sweat it. Last night was just to remind him what to do. Him and my old lady got it on."

"He got it on with your old lady?" asked Wolf.

"Yeah, and he was fantastic. It's a good thing I'm not the jealous type."

The dog's owner lied. From the ease with which the dog soon mounted Linda from behind and stuck his cock up her ass, it seems that the dog and the owner had been getting it on, instead of the dog and a mythical "old lady."

Linda attacked the dog at the first opportunity, going down on Norman to suck his cock.

"I was floored," says Eric. "After I finished doing Linda, I just sat back and watched. She was really into it. I was in awe. I had never seen a woman with a dog before, but it became the thing to do.

"It was a strange period. There were no real laws then. The business was going any which way it could. There were stud dogs and there were losers. We'd have a strange dog come onto the set to do actress A and he wouldn't like her and he wouldn't get into it. So the actress would try placing a hot dog in her pussy and covering it with mayonnaise.

"But this dog was a stud. He knew what to do. He mounted her from behind and did her doggie style. I don't know why they didn't bring any cute girl dogs for me," laughs Eric. He worked several sets where women had sex with dogs. On the shoot with Linda, the dog's owner earned twice as much as Eric.

After the filming, Wolf said to Chuck Traynor, "It's too bad you couldn't bring that other broad. This f---in' dog is game for more. Look at him - we've got a real winner here. Hey, nice dog. Good dog."

"He could've handled two easy," the dog's owner said.

Linda claims that she was threatened with a gun and told to perform sex on the dog or die.

Porn historian Jim Holliday: "I talked to the five people who made Dogarama. Eric Edwards, Chuck Traynor, the cameraman director [Bob Wolfe], the dog's owner, and the money man. Their story is the same. I'm going to take the word of a woman [Linda Lovelace] with an axe to grind over five persons who were there? Let the public think what they want. I'm telling you, she's full of it. These five guys to conspire and tell a story and remember it for many years, with all the drugs and alcohol and life experiences they've had, that would be a conspiracy that would make me want to have them installed as the directors of the Soviet Union or the CIA.

"Linda Lovelace's story that she was victimized is as ludicrous as those yoyos who think that Neil Armstrong and the boys landed in Arkansas and that the whole moon landing was a hoax. If America doesn't want to believe the truth, I can't help them."

"The owner of the dog says that Linda, a couple of days after, asked if the dog was still available. The owner was gay. If you study the loop, when the dog mounted Linda, he went straight in her butt. He knew what to do. That tells me the owner and the dog had something going on."

Linda gained a reputation for her enthusiasm for f---ing dogs. She reportedly put on bestiality shows for Hugh Hefner and company at his Playboy mansion in West Los Angeles. Frequently, when Linda didn't want to do something, Chuck Traynor brought home a dog as a bribe.

Sex with dogs and other animals remains popular with numerous porn performers.

"Linda was easy to work with," says Eric. "She was friendly and seemed to enjoy what she was doing. I never saw her with black eyes or bruises. I never had any indication that she was unhappy with what she was doing.

"Chuck and her seemed fine. They both seemed normal laid-back people. I didn't see any marital problems. The business was so small then. I didn't think it would go anywhere. It was just private sales to people. Then Deep Throat came out and the business went kaplewee. From that time on they got the bright idea that they could make feature films if they could find people who could act. Few people then could act and perform sexually."

Linda Lovelace appeared in several urination loops, a fist loop and a foot insertion loop, the latter two in Florida.

While Lana Turner was discovered sitting on a soda fountain stool in Hollywood, Linda was discovered by the adult film director Gerard Damiano in one of her 8mm loops.

Lovelace was 22-year old Linda Traynor when she first met Louis "Butchie" Peraino in 1971. At the time, Peraino was partners in a porno film production company with a former Brooklyn hairdresser turned porn director Gerard Damiano. Though the company was called Gerard Damiano Film Productions Inc., Peraino owned two-thirds. Says Linda, "Peraino was putting up the money and Damiano was doing the [production] work."

Linda starred with Harry Reems in an 8mm cheapie SEX USA which was the first movie produced by the Peraino-Damiano partnership.

Gerard used Linda in many of his productions.

Compared to other pornographers, Gerard was classy. Linda enjoyed her good looking costar Harry Reems. That made Chuck jealous.

One day while driving from his apartment to his Manhattan office, Gerard Damiano had an inspiration. Chuck and Linda sat waiting in his office when he arrived.

"We're going to do a whole film about a girl who has her clit in her throat," said Gerard. "Linda will be perfect for it. The most amazing thing about Linda is that she still looks sweet and innocent."

Damiano's partner , Lou Perry [short for Louis "Butchie" Perraino], didn't agree. He wanted a big breasted blonde such as Carol Connors who appears in Deep Throat as Harry Reems's nurse.

Afraid of losing Linda's $1200 salary for the film, Chuck talked Louis Peraino into allowing Linda to blow him. She sucked him off in a couple of minutes and repeated the procedure regularly over the following months but it didn't soothe Lou's wish for a bigger chested star.

Lou bankrolled the movie for $22,000 which Damiano directed.

Linda enjoyed herself on the Miami set of The Doctor Makes a Housecall - later retitled by Damiano as Deep Throat. Everyone treated her with respect.

Chuck sensed himself losing power over Linda and after the first day of shooting, beat her. Her bruises show in the movie despite makeup. During the next 12 days, five of which were shooting days, Damiano used Chuck as his gopher - go for food, go for beer, go for anything to keep him away from the set.

Linda appeared on the Geraldo show in 1988 to talk about her Deep Throat experience. "I was beaten and forced into it, and I had a .45 pointed at me, an M-16 semiautomatic machine gun. I was beaten on a daily basis, the threats - constant threats on the lives of my parentsand my family and friends and my life... I was raped in that movie [Deep Throat]."

Linda told the 1986 Meese Commission: "I learned very quickly with Mr. Trainor to do exactly what I was told to do and do it to the best of my ability and to be convincing, because if I did become emotional, I ended up crying, or, you know, not looking like I was really enjoying myself, and then I suffered a brutal beating, some kind of sexual perversion as punishment, and I would have to do it anyway. So my mother didn't raise me to be a total fool. I realized what I would have to do is be convincing and do it and get it over with. That whole film was done in that way."

In Miami in January, 1972, Gerard Damiano directed four sex loops centered around Linda Lovelace and a doctor played by Harry Reems. Later, Gerard decided to shoot connecting footage with Reems and Carroll Connors and patch the whole thing together as the movie Deep Throat. That's why Linda and Carroll never appear in a scene together and Harry sports different haircuts during the film.

Deep Throat begins with Linda arriving home to find her friend Ellen (Sharp) sitting on a table while a man licks her vagina. Linda and Ellen talk to each other while the man keeps licking. Ellen asks him if "he minds if she smokes while he's eating?"

Later, Ellen and Linda talk by the pool. Linda says she doesn't enjoy sex and has never had a bell-ringing orgasm. Ellen suggests they invite some men over so Linda can experiment and possibly find the excitement she seeks.

When the men arrive, Ellen gives the men numbers so that "everybody gets a little piece of this action." Two men arriving receive numbers eleven and twelve. Ellen and Linda perform cunnilingus and fellatio and have vaginal intercourse with one or two men at a time. Numbers eleven and twelve decline their turns with Linda because they're spent from doing Ellen.

When Ellen and Linda talk about Linda's problem, Ellen says Linda should see a psychiatrist. Linda takes her advice and visits Dr. Young who's played by Harry Reems. After determining that her problem is not caused by some childhood trauma, Dr. Young decides that her problem may be physical. An examination proves him right - Linda's clitoris is in her throat. He tells her that the solution is to relax her muscles and take a penis "all the way down." Linda tries fellatio with Dr. Young, taking the entire length of his penis into her mouth. Linda is so grateful that she offers to marry Dr. Young and be his slave. Dr. Young rejects her offer because his blonde nurse, Carol Connors, wouldn't like it, but he offers Linda a job making house calls as a psycho-therapist. Her duties include fellatio, vaginal intercourse and anal intercourse. One home consultation ends with the patient sipping Coke from a glass dildo in Linda's vagina, while the sountrack plays "I'd Like To Teach the World To Screw," a parody of the famous Coca Cola advertising jingle.

Another man needs Linda to help relieve his pain caused from not having had sex for three years. He wants Linda to come back three times a week - and he says he can afford that because he has "Blue Cross". Even Dr. Young requires Linda's help because he tried to ball two women at once. Dr. Young, his nurse and Linda go at it.

Linda's next case is Wilbert Wayne, who enjoys acting like he's raping women. Linda gets excited by his mask and says she wants to have sex with him. "Okay, but remember, I'm raping you and you have to do everything I say or I'll shoot you," he says. Wilbert asks Linda to marry him, but she turns him down. "The man I marry has to have a nine inch cock," she says and Wilbert falls short by four inches. Linda suggests silicone injections. Dr. Young fixes the length of Wilbert's willy, and when Linda sees the new version, she immediately sucks him. When Wilbert ejaculates in her mouth and on her face, bells ring and fireworks go off. Linda smiles.

Deep Throat

Deep Throat opened to the raincoat crowd in June, 1972, at the New World Theater on 49th Street. Raincoaters are men who, according to the stereotype, arrive at adult theaters wearing raincoats to allow access to their genitals while they fantasize about the women on screen.

Over the next few months, millions of Americans for the first time watched explicit sex. Frank Sinatra, Spiro Agnew, Warren Beatty, Truman Capote, Nora Ephron and Bob Woodward (who used "Deepthroat" as the name for his key Watergate source) took in the film on its first run,

and eventually more persons saw Deep Throat in adult theaters than any other porno flick.

One of the film's most vehement supporters, according to World Theater manager Bob Sumner, born around 1945, was Johnny Carson's sidekick Ed McMahon. "He came with six guys and a case of Budweiser and stood out front afterward, chatting about the movie to passersby for half an hour."

Deep Throat brought hardcore pornography into popular culture and earned at least twice as much money as any other porno in history. It probably ranks among the top ten grossing films of American film history, along with ET, Star Wars, Rocky, etc... Deep Throat played for eight consecutive years at a theater in Hollywood until replaced by Exhausted.

Accurate earnings figures are impossible to come by in pornography for it is not in the interest of distributors to release accurate figures of sales and rentals, even if they known them. Most business is conducted in cash, to avoid taxes in particular and the government eye in general.

Whatever the exact box office, the flick made for $22,000 over six shooting days in Miami became the most profitable film ever and inspired thousands of imitators.

"The porn film scene of 1973 is strikingly reminiscent of of Hollywood during that pioneer era when making any sort of movie was considered disreputable," wrote Playboy movie critic Bruce Williams, "when actors, writers, and directors cranked out primitive two-reelers under assumed names, lest their colleagues in legitimate theater or publishing circles accuse them of prostitution."

Deep Throat and The Devil in Miss Jones ranked among the top ten grossing films of 1973. They stimulated the New York Times to coin the phrase "porno chic" to describe the growing fascination with sex on film.

As Paul Bender, General Counsel to the Presidential Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, said of Potter Stewart's "I know it when I see it" definition of pornography, "If Justice Stewart knows it when he sees it today, he either sees it everywhere or he doesn't see it at all."

Mainstream critics initially ignored, then panned Deep Throat as both film and eroticism but they failed to see it in relation to its genre. Al Goldstein, editor of Screw magazine, understood the significance of Throat, calling it in 1972 "the best porno ever made."

Al Goldstein wrote: "Up and down, up and down, to the very depths of cosmic truth I saw that two-inches-short-of-a-foot-long cock engulfed like some soft vacuum cleaner taking vengeance on man for eons of past suckfulls. Then the climactic moment I was poised and ready for appeared! Hot white cum shot out and Our Lady of the Lips lapped it up. I was never so moved by any theatrical performance since stuttering through my own Bar Mitzvah. "Stupendous" was all I could shout as I stood up and spent my applause on the glory that mine eyes had just seen."

Reviewed by major New York film critics, Deep Throat eventually received unprecedented recognition for a porno movie, attracting "a whole new audience of seemingly regular folks who were willing to pay $5 each to see oral sex performed on a 40 foot screen.

"For acts once considered unspeakable, Linda Lovelace became a national celebrity - deemed suitable for the talk show circuit and slavered after by some Hollywood deal makers." (LA Times)

Director Gerard Damiano admits Throat was a joke. As a movie, it's above average. Why then all the hype from mainstream reviewers? Holliday says the critics cheered for explicit sex far superior to the loops they may have seen on the side. "They went ga-ga over routine filmmaking and opened the door for public acceptability."

Bill Rotsler: "One of the things I liked best about the film was Linda's obvious delight in what she was doing. It was infectious and made the entire film more palatable.

"Right now the language of porno cinema is baby talk - but inevitably some of it will become poetry." A quarter of a century later, many porn mavens believe that such a Messiah has yet to arrive.

Deep Throat arrived after the sexual revolution peaked and fewer real girls were easy. But men frustrated by reality could now turn to X-Rated movies and find flesh for fantasy - vivid images on a silver screen of beautiful women sucking and f---ing.

Sucking was particularly a treat as fewer nice girls gave head in the world before Deep Throat.

"Most people who watch porn fear and mistrust women," says Jim Holliday. "By sheer lack of personality they've become subjugated to the women in their lives.

"If I was going to write a book, a cute title would be "What Porn is all about: Blowjobs and Losers."

"The blow job is the one thing the average American guy wants from his woman, but she won't give it to him. So he seeks release in a porno.

"At the extremes are people who fear and hate women, who will never be able to relate to women in real life. But they are not the threat to go out and do the damage. The Pussycat theaters have a fantastic slogan that I'm surprised the anti-porn forces haven't capitalized on. It's like, "For those who never knew and for those who will never forget." Does that not smack of losers and old guys?"

While Deep Throat did not originate the "money shot" - sperm ejaculated all over a woman, particularly her face - it gave millions their first sight of it - again and again.

The initial purpose for the cum shot was to prove that the sex on film was real.

Pornographer Bill Margold says that the money shot represents vicarious male revenge on women. "Every man has wanted someone he couldn't have. So he harbors revenge. When we come on a woman's face or brutalize her sexually, we're getting even for the man's lost dreams."

Hustler Erotic Video Guide features a regular "Semen Salon" column, subtitled "X-rated skin care." It describes the best facials in recent sexvids. Here's a taste from the February, 1994 edition. "...North provides two of the titanic blasts, scuzzing up Isis Nile is a solid splooge that rains down all over her face and gums up her eye. Shooting from inches away, North pops a lovely cascade of cum.

"He also works up a supreme soaker on the jizz-loving Lana Sands. Sands is a voracious sperm slattern of the highest order, and she revels in another ball bath that she gets from Terry Thomas....T.T. Boy finishes up his furious f--- with Diamond by grabbing his cock and running over to deposit the gooey goods on her face, leaving a solid stream of spunk running down one side of her cheek."

"One of the enduring fantasies is that women have orgasms - or close to it - sucking cock and that they want you to come in their mouths and if you come elsewhere they want to get down and lick up every drop," writes Adam Film World.

"It's a nice fantasy, and while not a truism, women sometimes do like to do these things, not so much for themselves as for you. We like to feel that our precious bodily fluids, the stuff we go through such hell and trouble and stress and anxiety and great effort to expel from our bodies is also precious and desirable and even tasty to others, specifically women.

"Having an orgasm is one of the most intimate, personal and dramatic things we ever do. While most orgasms are self-induced, there is a lot of emotion that goes into an orgasm. In looking at porn films you see men going through what seems to be intense pain, as if they were giving birth to an anvil or shoving a corncob through their penis.

"Some men are gaspers, some are angry, some seem about to expire and pass out. Men have died from the exertion, and even the strongest man can be left semi-helpless, weak and listless. When men are having sex - and this is truer as one progresses toward that moment of orgasm - the surrounding world gets turned off. You narrow in your focus until there is nothing else but you and your genitals and your partner.

"Women can fake orgasms at any time, limited only by their acting ability and inventiveness.

"Erections are fragile things. While they seem strong and hardy they can be wilted with a suspicious thought, a door opening, a telephone, a strange noise, misinterpreting a partner's look or word, or any of a thousand otherwise innocuous events. There does come a time when nothing can cause an erection to disappear and this is quickly followed by something as inevitable as dawn, orgasm. You get to a point where it... is... going... to... happen... no... matter...what.... The... house... is... on... fire? ... f---... it... Keep... moving... I'm ... coming... I'm... coming....

"I get a kick out of the way men announce their orgasms as if this was an event unique in the history of the world. (Of course it is... you never had, no one ever had, that particular orgasm before!) And too, you want to share the moment and the most loving women want to know, to share that experience instead of finding out after the fact.

"One of the educational aspects of watching sex films is seeing how other people do it. I know someone who used to holler when he came and until he started watching porn films he thought he was the only one and was shy and embarrassed about it. Now, when he comes, the neighbors definitely know." (AFW vol. 26, number 8, p. 30-34)

On the premier internet newsgroup devoted to porn, Rec. Arts. Movies. Erotica, Hamidt suggests the following five laws of facials.

"1. The prettier the girl, the greater the volume of spunk that should be deposited on her face. If the girl is blonde and blue-eyed and gets banged by several blacks, this quantity of sperm should be tripled. If the girl is Nici Sterling, her face should be rendered unrecognizable...

"2. A girl should stare straight at the camera and smile, preferably giggle, as she receives her face bath. Cum hogs never flinch from flying jizz and keep their eyes open...

"3. For a satisfying facial, several men should ejaculate one after another, and 95% of all spunk must land on the girl's face. If necessary, the girl's head should be held firmly by the hair so she cannot dodge the flying goo.

"4. For a great facial, most of the thicker spurts should splat between the grinning slut's eyes, the rest landing up her nose, on her forehead, on both cheeks and on her chin and mouth. The girl should blow bubbles with the jizz and lick her lips. There must be a lingering close-up to end the scene.

"5. For a monster facial, all of the above laws must apply, and the girl's eyes and nose must be clogged and oozing with semen. Her mouth should be so full of spunk that she gags. Ideally, just as she has dealt with the first torrent of spunk, she should receive countless more well-aimed jets of cum, more voluminous and forceful than before. As a finale, the men must use their cocks to smear the goo all over the girl's face."

Leonard Borrero suggests that the girl beg for the facial and that the guy cum from her blowjob, not from his own hand. "Drinking cum out of a glass adds a nice touch."

"To deny sex is to deny life," says William Rotsler. "To reject art is to impoverish yourself, rejecting pleasure and growth. To accept sex and art together is to add to oneself, to be positive instead of negative. Erotic cinema... reveals us to ourselves with increasing artistry."

The late psychiatrist Dr. Robert Stoller has a more sober perspective. "Humans are not a very loving species, especially when they makes love... Harm energizes erotics... The desire to harm, cruelty, anger, revenge, and humiliation is the grain of sand around which the pearl of erotic excitement exists."

In 1973 author Gay Talese visited major cities in Europe to see if Continental women, unaffected by

American Puritanism, might be more responsive to mercenary sex and more interested in depictions of male nudity in magazines. He discovered the European women seemed no different from their New York sisters. In London, in Paris, and even in the permissive city of Copenhagen, Talese found no women who patronized massage parlors, and few women who enjoyed live sex shows or hard-core films. During his wanderings at night in European streets, Talese saw what he had seen

in New York: solitary men walking in and out of parlors, men negotiating with prostitutes in doorways,

men staring silently at performing women in topless or bottomless bars. In short, men appreciated women in a detached, impersonal way that women rarely understood. (Thy Neighbor's Wife)

Deep Throat popularized the money shot and many other conventions of adult films. New age nudist Robert Rimmer - the author of numerous sexually utopian novels such as The Harrad Experiment - summarizes them in the X-Rated Videotape Guide:

* Men rarely ejaculate inside the woman, rather they come on her breasts, lips or stomach while she

climaxes. Women love sperm showered on them, it tastes good to the last drop.

* Women love sucking cock and usually initiate it. They can deepthroat a foot of dick for several minutes without gagging.

* Up until 1978 women and men didn't talk much, and certainly didn't say "I love you." Rather, "It was a great f---."

* After a few licks of her vagina, the man usually sticks his dick into her. She's lubricated and on the verge of an earthshattering orgasm because she so enjoyed sucking his cock.

* Afterplay is even rarer than foreplay.

* Emotions are rare, even love, fear and jealousy.

* Most sex vids have one lesbian scene.

* Most males are circumcised - John Holmes is the big exception.

* Most 1970s sexvids begin with a class ambiance and story that equals Hollywood productions, but usually the story gets lost after fifteen minutes.

* Relationships are rare.

* Most females since the early 80s have breast implants which you can tell by their perkiness when the women are standing, lying or being touched.

* Many adult films cater to a male fantasy of having a virgin who learns all she knows from him.

Writer Lynn Snowden adds these conventions: "One. The characters' names are the same as their own noms de porn. One supposes this is done to avoid confusion among particularly dimwitted fans.

"Two. Whenever a character is alone in a room, he or she masturbates. If someone else comes in, the two characters have sex. If another person comes in, they too join in.

"No one ever expresses indignation or surprise - they simply hurry out of their pants, since the action, rather than the plot, must be constantly moving."

No one just delivers flowers, reads the meter or even looks out the window without engaging in intercourse. (Cosmopolitan 5/93)

Writer Susie Bright notes that even the background music has its conventions. "The history of the porn soundtrack has gone from Mantovani rip-offs to aerobic disco to something that sounds like a cheap version of the soundtrack from The Piano. I hate them all, but I can't bring myself to push MUTE because I might miss any yummy groaning and gasping."

That adult movies are riddled with cliches places them in the company of mainstream movies which which are similarly riddled. All movies, even documentaries, are fairy tales, for the camera does not mirror reality. It seeks eye candy - pictures that will stimulate the emotions. Dennis Prager titled an essay he published on TV news "The Lie of the Eye."

An acclaimed mainstream movie about porn, 1996's The People vs. Larry Flynt, reveals the conventions of commercial films through its romantic portrayal of the Hustler publisher. A film without a sympathetic main character is not commercial. Compare The People vs. Larry Flynt to another of Oliver Stone's America-hating films, the bomb Nixon, where the protagonist is a jerk.

In its eighth month in New York, Deep Throat kept drawing in crowds. Variety for January 10, 1973, reported, "Grosses at the World Theater continue in record-breaking proportions as a result of the trial coverage, but the real impact is measured not so much by the spinning turnstiles as by the types of folks being introduced to the theatrical hard-core fare. A visit to the World on Friday revealed the house fully sold out for a mid-afternoon show and a line outside composed of elegant unaccompanied ladies, young couples, middle-aged couples, and at least three silver-haired matrons with shopping bags who looked like refugees from Schrafft's."

Not all critics liked Deep Throat. Ellen Willis wrote in the New York Review of Book that she found Deep Throat "witless, exploitative, and about as erotic as a tonsillectomy. "Everybody" knows that men divorce sex from emotion because they can't afford to face their real emotions about women... Nevertheless, it baffles and angers women that men can get it off on all those bodies methodically humping away, their faces sweatless and passionless, their consummation so automatic that they never get a chance to experience desire."

Nora Ephron wrote in Esquire that the film was "...unpleasant, disturbing... not just anti-female but anti-sex... I came out of the theater a quivering fanatic. Give me the goriest Peckinpah any day."

A legally embattled movie, Deep Throat's first major trial occurred over eleven days in New York near Christmas 1972 and attracted worldwide attention. Expert testimony came to more than one thousand pages of trial transcripts. The opinons varied.

Film historian Arthur Knight: "I found in Deep Throat an attractiveness about the people.... A real attempt to use humor in depicting sex..."

Sociologist Ernest van den Haag: "The presentation of sex, divorced from emotional relationships....as an act of mutual exploitation...which permits the personalities of the participants to be totally disregarded.... They are...bearers of sexual organs and not human beings who are ends in themselves. I not only regard [Deep Throat] as being without redeeming social value; I regard it as highly antisocial."

Professor of Medical Psychology Dr. John Money: "It indicates that women have a right to a sex life of their own, and they are not simply an instrumentality of men's sex life which is the way things used to be... There is a theme in the film which implies that women should get sexual satisfaction and sexual gratification."

Psychiatrist Dr. Max Levin: "There were a couple of other films on the program and I'm not sure where the other films ended and [Deep Throat] began. There was plenty of normal intercourse and I think there was some in this particular film....Was it all one film? It ran more than an hour and fifty five minutes."

Judge Joel E. Tyler decided that the experts had not shown that 51% of the movie had redeeming social value and fined the theater a startling $3 million. He wrote that Deep Throat was "...a feast of carrion and squalor...a Sodom and Gomorrah gone wild before the fire...one throat that deserves to be cut...a nadir of decadence....It does, in fact, demean and pervert the sexual experience, and insults it, shamelessly, without tenderness and without understanding of its roles as a concomitant of the human condition."

Says Tyler, now retired, "If I were to make that decision today, I would be deemed a fool.".

Bob Sumner summed up the ruling on his New World Theater marquee as he immediately booked a new film: JUDGE CUTS THROAT, WORLD MOURNS.

Because the decision has never been appealed, "technically, it's still illegal for a theater to show the X-rated Deep Throat in New York, even though you could rent it at pretty much any video store in Manhattan." (Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz)

As Deep Throat became a hit, Louis Perriano flew Chuck and Linda to New York for interviews with the media. Screw got the first one due to their early promotion of the film. The newspaper printed the first story on the flick - an enthusiastic review by entitled "Gulp."

The contrast between Publisher Jim Buckley and Editor Al Goldstein immediately struck Linda.

"Goldstein was a cheap guy - loud, crude, rude, infantile, obnoxious, and dirty." By contrast, Buckley appeared neat, clean, sensitive and quiet.

Question: "What's the largest cock you've ever sucked? Is it the guy in the film or has there been somebody so large that you couldn't get it in?

Linda: "No, that's never happened. Nobody has ever been too large or too wide or anything."

"Once your throat opens, your esophagus gets large, like a sword-swallower," said Chuck.

Question: "Do you breathe through your nose?"

Linda "You have to breathe through your mouth, so whoever's going in my throat has to work in and out. As they come out, I take a breath.

Question: "Do you come even though your clit isn't being worked on?"

Linda: "Yeah, I have an orgasm every time I get screwed in the throat."

Question: "Do you enjoy the taste of sperm?"

Linda: "I love it. It's caviar to me. I can't understand why other chicks get turned off by it."

When Goldstein asked more questions about blowjobs, Linda gave him a free sample.

"The way Linda practiced oral sex, inhaling any-size erection down to the root, changed the way wives and girlfriends were expected to suck cock. Today, if a porn actress doesn't deepthroat, what good is she?" (AFW)

"I'm an exhibitionist," said Linda in 1972. "I dig doing it. I want everybody to see it. And I make good money.

"I don't have any inhibitions about sex.... I just hope everybody who goes to see the film enjoys it and maybe learns something from it."

Chuck Traynor and Lou Periano discussed a sequel to Deep Throat and Linda returned to her regular task of sucking off Lou. One day in his office, Linda heard Lou talking to his friend Sammy Davis Jr. After a few minutes, Lou cupped his hand over the mouthpiece and asked Linda if she'd f--- a nigger? Linda said no but Chuck later overruled her.

Chuck and Linda and Sammy and his wife Altovise frequently had sex together. Linda says Sammy fell in love with her.

Linda and Chuck flew to Los Angeles where Linda did a Playboy pictorial. They visited Hugh Hefner at his Playboy mansion. Hugh said he loved Deep Throat because it was more than straight sex, but also had comedy and a story. But Hefner was more interested in Linda's dog flick.

"That was terrific," Hefner said. "We tried that several times, tried to get a girl and a dog together, but it never worked out."

"That can be tricky," said Chuck. "The chick's gotta know what she's doing."

Chuck and Hugh spent the next couple of hours talking about sex with animals. At Hugh's regular orgies at the Playboy mansion, Chuck pushed Linda on to Hugh, hoping to develop his friendship with the Playboy publisher. But when Chuck realized that Hugh would never bring him into his world as a partner, he and Linda left.

Linda Lovelace had a great 1973, appearing on the cover of Esquire and in a Playboy photospread. Hefner presents her in soft-focus, gauzy pictures and clever editorial. "She has a shy innocence combined with sexual enthusiasm and an utter absence of inhibitions." Several quotes from Linda follow: "I'm not out to be actress of the year.... Deep Throat is just me, acting naturally." Her sex preferences - "...Depends on my mood...but I'd say now that I like throat, ass, cunt, one, two, three, in that order."

Linda became the best-selling author of Inside Linda Lovelace. Every night for two weeks, she received a list of questions to answer. Chuck told Linda how to answer them and then Linda spoke as told on to a tape recorder. The publisher added nude picture of Linda and created a best seller. Linda says the only truth in her first book is the accidental honesty of its dedication - "To Chuck Traynor - the creator."

The book's message appeared in the opening chapter. "I live for sex, will never get enough of it, and will continue to try every day to tune my physical mechanism to finer perfection."

Masturbation: "Then, at age twelve, and now at age twenty-two, I'm an incorrigible masturbate."

Teenage lesbianism: "I saw her naked body and tried not to show my interest, but you already know about me; I'm not exactly turned off by the female anatomy."

Losing her virginity "to the awesome Chuck Traynor. The fat rocklike muscle tore into me like a battering ram, and I nearly fainted from the shock. I came in seconds."

Linda says the book should've been called "Inside Chuck Traynor" because he came up with the contents - even the sexual incidents - for example, making love to a mother-daughter combination. That happened to Chuck. And the philosophy was pure Chuck: "We should worry more about real issues and less about what a few uptight fogeys think are issues. If this country is free, shouldn't each person live as he wishes?"

Linda felt vindicated by Chuck's statement in a 1976 interview with Leonard Lyons. "I wrote Inside Linda Lovelace with another guy before Linda and I split up. I created all the sex situations in it just as I created Linda Lovelace."

During 1973, Linda filmed a sequel to Deep Throat directed by Joe Sarno and released as softcore. It bombed. Dining at a Malibu restaurant with Playboy movie critic Bruce Williamson before the release of the sequel, Linda said, "Throat II will be a backward step if they take out the hardcore. I don't want to back away. I'm not looking for a big Hollywood career. I'm a porno star. I just want to be Linda Lovelace."

Linda arrival in a Rolls limo created a sensation at the Hollywood premier of Last Tango in Paris. She thought the movie "disgusting. The sex scenes weren't believable. Hollywood should stick to comedies and Westerns and stay away from sexy, romantic stories."

Just before Christmas, 1973, Linda appeared in the '50s farce Pajama Tops at the Locust Theater in Philadelphia but the show bombed.

On January 31, 1974, Linda was arrested in the Dunes Hotel in Las Vegas for illegal possession of cocaine and amphetamines. Tired of Chuck's dominating ways, Linda left him for producer and choreoghrapher David Winters. They decided to write a book. Linda says she looked forward to telling the truth, but when the publisher got the material, he supposedly complained that The Intimate Diary of Linda Lovelace needed more sex and less truth. So David Winters and Mel Mandel invented the material that the publisher wanted. This time Chuck became the villain while the world's greatest love was David Winters.

"With a tremendous thrust, he put that surging, gorgeous cock inside me. A pulsating jackhammer that kept driving, driving, plowing into me, over and over."

Linda says David and Mel invented other things that had nothing to do with her reality such as her supposed love for women and vibrators.

Marciano says she never realized how many lies you have to tell to sell a book. "They invented a sex scene with a father and a son, both supposedly famous Hollywood actors. And another scene between me and a telephone repairman." They got a quote from Hugh Hefner for the book cover: "Linda is the new sex goddess of the 70s!" And they added a centerfold, a bunch of revealing photographs, and shipped it out. Like the first book, this one too remained pro-pornography but Traynor became Chuck the Schmuck.

Linda eventually split from David Winters and married a plasterer. She had her first child in 1976 and another one in 1980. Unable to find mainstream acting work, Linda and her new family lived off welfare until she published Ordeal and in 1986, Out of Bondage.

Today Linda Marciano staunchly opposes pornography and she testified against it before the 1986 Meese Commission. She's a hero to many feminists who hate pornography and love to point to Linda's story as an example of the medium's exploitation of women.

At last word, in the Spring of 1997, Linda lived in Denver.

Just as Deep Throat remains porn's best selling movie, Ordeal remains the best selling book on porn. The movie shows porn to be harmless fun while the book shows porn to be vicious. These two perspective reflect the dominant reactions to porn.

Amidst all Linda's notoriety, it's easy to forget the few qualities that made her famous: "The fresh carnality, the air of thoroughly debauched innocence, the sense of a woman exploring the limits of sexual expression and feeling. Linda Lovelace is the girl next door grown up into a shameless...woman." (Sinema p.148)

In 1974, Linda told Variety: "I'm not going to sit here and say I'll never do another hard-core film because I was forced into this one, that I needed the money... I did it because I loved it. It was something I believed in. And if, when I'm 65 years old, they're making an X-rated movie and they need a little old lady to be in it, I'm gonna say, hey, I'm right here."

Though a one-shot wonder, Linda Lovelace became the most famous porn star by giving American men what they wanted most - blowjobs.

Last Tango in Paris

Immediately following the Deep Throat breakthrough, the cinema world was shaken by the release, in early 1973, of Last Tango in Paris. "This is a breakthrough precisely because it is not a porno filim," says Rotsler, "but does put into graphic visual form an erotic relationship which includes anal rape. It is a milestone film not so much for its eroticism, which is debatable, but because an Oscar-winning major star chose to make it, and make it at a time he was in contention for another Oscar, which he won and rejected."

Though the nudity is minor and we never see Brando nude at all, many found the film highly erotic.

"It's a big production,with vast hoopla attached, a star of the highest magnitude who already had his first Oscar, and yet it is not much different from scores of sexploitation films, except in degree. The older-man-and-the-young-girl theme has almost been worked to death in sex films..." (Rotsler)

Last Tango in Paris is a significant film in the history of erotic cinema because it demonstrates increasing public acceptance of erotic cinema.

"Eventually we will see erotic films about women of all ages, men of all ages, of any age where sex might logically still be of interest. It will be the story that counts, and how well it is acted and photographed and directed, not whether or not there is sex or nudity in it." (Rotsler)

Writing in the New Yorker in October 1972, Pauline Kael hailed Last Tango as "a landmark in movie history comparable to May 29, 1913 - the night Le Sacre du Printemps [Stravinsky] was first performed - in music history.

"This must be the most powerfully erotic movie ever made, and it may turn out to be the most liberating movie ever made, and so it's probably only natural that an audience, anticipating a voluptious feast from the man who made The Conformist, and confronted with this unexpected sexuality and the new realism it requires of the actors, should go into shock. Bertolucci and Brando have altered the face of an art form."

Director Bernardo Bertolucci called Last Tango "a very romantic movie... I would like to deny what is the legend about Last Tango. That it is on the verge of being a porno film. I remember, at the time, in Italy the movie was even banned and I was condemned to two months in prison, with suspension. I felt like a martyr. Anyway, Last Tango was a romantic movie because there was a romantic attempt of a man and a woman to give up their identities, their social identities, their names, their social-sexual identity... Nothing but communication through their bodies which is very romantic."

By Bertollucci's definition of romantic, porn is very romantic. It also strips men and women of their identities in favor of communication through their bodies.

Kitten's Corner

Sex star Kitten Natividad says you don't need to put a gun to a ladies' head to make porn. Sex is no longer a big deal. It's just another natural function for women willing to bare all for drugs or money.

The new approach to finding fresh meat is, "Hey baby, want some coke?"

"And when the tender peach blossoms score some free coke," says Kitten, "the next thing is to enjoy all the wonderful things that go with it. And that especially means sex, as in f--- and suck. I've talked to plenty of girls and listened to them tell me about "the ball" they had at so-and-so's! What they didn't pick up on, though, was that a lot of that "ball" was being filmed. Then, too, once "high," and getting used to being "high," a lot of the girls simply lose all inhibitions anyway."

"I had these two the other night," a producer told Kitten, "and they were sisters. I brought out the coke, and some other goodies, and before you know it, they were ready to get it on."

With him?

"No," he laughed, "with each other. Hon, you should have seen them tongue each other out. Un-f---ing believable. Chomping cunts. Devouring assholes! The works!"

He laughs. "I filmed it."

Kitten: "And he films other such scenes. He's not into features, but he's big in the shorties. He's a millionaire several times over. Guys get as little as $50 and girls get as much as $300 depending on how attractive and versatile they are - can they do another chick, or a guy and chick at the same time, or two guys at once?"

"I was tricked," one hot blooded hypocrite told Kitten.

"You'd recognize her face and fabulous figure in an instant for she f---s and sucks in front of the camera as often as a hay fever sufferer sneezes. Some trick. A porno photographer hires her for a session. Then he invites in a handsome stud so he can shoot boy/girl simulation.

"She takes one look at the guy, her twat starts to itch, she rubs her tits against his dick, it grows to the size of a Louisville Slugger, and from then on she can't keep her mouth off it. You couldn't pry her away with a crowbar. Yet she always screams, "I was tricked."

"A lot of girls also start out in the trade by asking a photographer to take some pictures of them with their boyfriend."

"The next thing you know," says one of the top lensmen in the business, "they want some love shots. And before you know it the guy's cock is stiff, and she's guiding it into her asshole, at the same time f---ing herself with a cucumber." (Cavalier 3/81)

The photographer explains the couple wants a few shots for their private portfolio. He sells the other six rolls. Don't they mind?

"Sometimes. But not because the pictures were published. Mostly because they want money."

Kitten: "Are porno people any stranger than you and I? It depends.

Jamie Gillis, for instance, likes to take his girlfriend Serena out for a walk in public wearing a dog coller. Or, he enjoys bringing home a bunch of Puerto Rican gang bang types he's just met on the street, and asks them to f--- his old lady."

Harry Reems

Linda Lovelace quit porn by 1974, but her Deep Throat co-star Harry Reems worked through the late 1980s.

Reems traveled with Gerry Damiano down to Florida in January, 1972, as key grip and organizer, "trying to slap the whole thing together for them. I'd worked with Gerry in front of the cameras a hundred times, and I said, 'If we get in trouble I'll go in front of the camera for you.' And we couldn't cast that part of the doctor. So we stopped at a barber supply place to get the white coats, and I was learning the lines with Linda in the back seat, improvising, and by the time we got to the place I had the lines memorized."

Harry held leading roles in most of the big pornos out of New York prior to 1975.

"Linda's a sweet, sweet girl," said Reems in 1973. "She's a beautiful person, very together person. She's not super bright; she's not an actress but she's totally open and free sexually. She's got this thing where sex is to be enjoyed and not slandered,and she follows it. She really believes it.

"Linda loves to deepthroat, it's a turn-on for her, that's where she's at. But there's not a lot of contact and warmth and lubrication in that kind of technique. It's 'Look what I can do.' It's nothing special."

After seeing a "Linda Lovelace Blows My Mind" T-Shirt, Harry wanted to make one that read "Harry Reems Sucks My Soul."

"Harry Reems. It's such a stupid name. It's awful. You wonder what kind of guy has the name Harry Reems, but I'm stuck with it.

"I'm promiscious now. I love to ball and f--- anything in skirts. But if I'm like this ten years from now I'll become a sad person, because it's not life, it's not where it's at. You see these guys running around leching and drinking themselves to death and trying to screw everybody, and it's sad to watch them."

Reems felt insulted when regarded as a f--- machine. "I'd say every week in New York a magazine or newspaper article comes out dealing with hard core, and the few times do people pick up on the person - they're always talking about the sex machine.

"This has been a good period in my life. I wouldn't change it. If somebody said, 'Go back five years, and I'll put you in a major motion picture, and your career will flow, will blossom...', I would be a different kind of person than I am now. A sadder person, not as wise, as open, as knowledgeable as I am now. I wouldn't want to change what I've done. I really dig what I've done."

Harry earned thousands of dollars from Deep Throat as a distributor of the flick, but he landed in a Memphis jail charged with conspiracy to distribute an obscene movie.

Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty raise money for his defense. Initially convicted, the decision against Reems was overturned two years later on an appeal led by Alan Dershowitz.

Harry Reems had a mean streak towards women says Jim Holliday, noting Harry's war cry. Most performers have a war cry - some particular combinations of moans, groans or words they utter when they orgasm. "Harry would always say, "Shit, oh shit, shit, shit, shit." It tells you something about his attitude towards women."

Harry f---ed hard. "He loved to knock women around," recalls Veronica Hart.

Reems earned tremendous sums from porn in the '70s, but spent his $30,000 a week paychecks on alcohol and cocaine. He retired from porn in 1976 but returned in 1982 when Reuben Sturman funded his $75,000 salary - the most money ever paid to a person to do a porn film - and the rest of Society Affairs. Reems had to screw twelve women in the flick and the filming went days over schedule because Harry had such difficulty getting his dick up on camera. The times he did achieve erection were frequently at night when he wasted his sperm in private on his girl of the evening.

"Harry Reems was so funny," says Veronica Hart. "He was like a Jamie Gillis. He loved to smash chicks around. We did Society Affairs together. I was with producer Harold Lime at the time. [They had a two year affair.] I blew my brains out for that movie [trying to get Harry hard]."

In between performing, Harry spent the '80s bouncing in and out of detox centers, mental institutions and jail, chased by tax problems, bad debts and outstanding arrest warrants.

Harry fell in love with porn star Brandy Alexander and asked her to marry him but she refused, not wanting to be tied down to a drunk. Harry says he hit bottom in 1985, when he slept behind a grocery store dumpster in Malibu. He had a two-quart-a-day vodka habit. Bill Margold, no friend of Reems, saved his life one night by pulling him out of the gutter on Sunset Boulevard. Bill took him home, called Jim Holliday for advice and acted on it. Bill eventually got Harry into treatment.

"Harry's never forgiven me," says Bill. "Never save someone's life. They'll hate you for it."

After five days in an LA jail in 1989, and another arrest in Park City, Utah, Reems sought help in a 12-step program "I knew if I didn't stop," says Reems, "I'd die."

Seven years earlier in Part City, Reems met Jeane Sterret, a pretty redhead then waittressing for a caterer. After eleven months of sobriety, Reems called her, and on their first date, he proposed. Before she accepted, Sterrett, who's now 43, was shown Deep Throat by friends. It's a movie still banned in Utah - a porn-free state.

"I thought it was hilarious," says Jeanne. "I loved it, but I didn't think it was the Harry I knew."

Harry Reems, 50, is now married, a trustee for his Methodist church and a real estate salesman. Unlike his Deep Throat co-star Linda Lovelace who also found Jesus, Harry won't talk about his porn past. He evidently takes the Eighth of the Ten Commandments - against bearing false witness - more seriously than Linda.

Linda Lovelace

The success of Deep Throat gave Linda Lovelace the glory and attention she'd long desired. In 1973, Pinnacle books published her autobiography Inside Linda Lovelace. "Pornography has come a long way and I'm hopeful we can carry it much further," writes Linda. Her husband Chuck Traynor demanded a wife who totally obeyed him, and with Linda's new found celebrity status, she acted more independently, leading to their divorce in 1974. Pinnacle then published the Intimate Diary of Linda Lovelace which is also pro-porn. In Ordeal, in 1980, and six years later in Out of Bondage, she completely reverses herself. Linda became the butt of jokes because of her conflicting stories about herself.

Director Gerard Damiano says Linda's coming out with a sequel to her most famous book autobiography. It's called Son of Ordeal and it describes how Ordeal's publishers held a gun to her head to force her to write the book.

Porn star Nina Hartley says "the Linda Lovelace story - if you take Ordeal at face value - is a tale of domination and abuse by her mate. It is not the story of pornography. If you read Ordeal closely you'll find that pornography gave her courage to leave Chuck Traynor. It wasn't until she became famous in Deep Throat that she found the courage and support to leave. But as soon as she became known and went to parties and got to meet people, she developed the guts to say, "f--- you."

"That's what angers me about feminists who say "all women who are in pornography are forced or raped." They misread the book."

It wasn't until her media interviews that Linda claimed that a gun was held to her head to force her to do Deep Throat. But common sense suggests that a woman forced to give oral sex can easily take revenge by biting the man's penis.

"The teeth are quicker than the trigger," notes Bill Margold. It's exactly what porn star Alicia Monet did in her last X-rated film in 1989, when Italian stud Rocco Siffredi tried to force his foot long cock down her throat.

"Linda is best on her knees with her mouth full," wrote Bill Margold in a 1974 review of the softcore flick Linda Lovelace For President. "Letting her talk is enough to turn a stud into a eunech."

Actress and stripper Kitten Natividad remembers the time that she was forced at gun point to perform oral sex.

"You think you had a choice?" he grinned, waving the gun.

"He had a point. The gun. Force. Just as he had forced me to eat him, he could have forced me into porn, too. Not many people talk back to a gun. That's similar to what happened to Linda Lovelace. I don't doubt her. Guys like this slob exist. And girls like me - who dance in clubs across the nation, and party a lot - we meet them. There's no way to avoid them. Not in our supercharged lifestyles.

"And who's going to bring charges against them when they force us to do things? Who? Not anyone who wants to avoid a broken kneecap, or a splash of acid in the face."

Why not go to the police? Persons in porn still share Linda's and Kitten's distrust of the police, expecting harassment more than help. They seem to get little protection from courts which routinely dismiss producer suits against distributors as frivolous. The better the female performer, the less likely she is to be respected.

"Whenever I'm interviewing someone who wants to get into porn," says pornographer Bill Margold, "I always ask them, "Do you have anybody that you will hurt by doing this?" It would be ideal if someone had no relationships - disenfranchised human being devoid of any past that would haunt them and any kind of present or future they could destroy. If it's a man, he also better be single because, unless he's married to the most magnanimous of women, it will tear her insides out.

"There's even more of a stigma for a woman. She'll be called a prostitute and a whore and thought of as sleazy, cheap and slutty. What she does now will haunt her for the rest of her life."

An X producer says that "a man getting involved with an ex-porn star will always shove it back in her face."

The mainstream media generally avoid coverage of porn except when it's at its most scandalous and sensational.

"I discourage people from getting into porn," says Bill Margold, "because you have to have a deathwish to succeed at it. Pornography gets into your blood and you can never get away from it."

Though used to hatred, pornographers hunger for outsider's respect. But pornographers tend to treat others with the contempt with which they expect to be treated.

Porn frightens people. It frightens many men because it stimulates their already wild libido. Female performers threaten many ordinary women who work, raise kids and battle marital problems while trying to remain physically attractive. Porn queens by contrast appear gorgeous, sexually available and flooded with attention.

Author Wendy McElroy says pornographers view themselves as a sexual elite and look down on those who lead monogamous lives. They disparage sexy non-explicit films like Sex, Lies and Videotape.

Pornographers remind Wendy of gays in that they'll tell a stranger the most intimate details of their sex lives but then snap back into cold defensiveness if they spot a smidgin of rejection from an outsider.

Both groups are used to being hated by outsiders and hence hate back. Many gays and pornographers appear to believe that their sexuality is superior because it is more natural.

And speaking of homosexuality, the leading filmmaker of gay films in the early 1970s was Wakefield Poole who crafted the popular and profitable Boys in the Sand and Bijou which one critic compared to Steppenwolf.

"I was among the first to give up the traditional cum shots," says Poole. "When we first opened Boys, there were ten cities in the U.S. where you could play gay films. Now [1973] there are twice that many."

Such theaters served as pick-up joints. The doorman at the leading gay show place in Manhattan said, "Most of the action is in the john....I have to use the ladies' room."

Ernest van den Haag

In the 1960s and 1970s, conservative thinker Ernest van den Haag testified for the prosecution of pornographers. "I thought pornography not only offensive but harmful to the social fabric," wrote van den Haag in the National Review, 11/1/83. "Further, the crime stimulating effect of pornography seemed only to exceed any crime-replacing (cathartic) effects. Thus, the harm appeared to outweigh the masturbatory pleasure that vicarious sex may yield, and I favored punishing purveyors. I have changed my mind. I no longer believe the actual harm is great enough to bother."

Ernest van den Haag believes that his past testimony that porn is not protected by the First Amendment guaranteeing free speech is correct, but, "The slippery-slope theory is wrong. Throughout history it is the loss of political freedom which leads to a loss of artistic and literary freedom, never the other way around.

"Providing it is truly private, I now do not think any consensual sexual activity, including discrete prostitution and pornography, should be regulated by the government.

"History demonstrates that, when tolerated, porn and prostitution tend to be contained. Neither seems likely to seriously damage the social fabric. To be sure, pornography fans may think of others as interchangeable and available for impersonal sex, or savor its depiction. (They won't lead happy lives). But they remain rather few. Non-fans occasionally join out of curiosity but seldom stay. For most people porn is no more damaging or habit forming than coffee."