Catch me with Susie Bright
So Susie Bright was planning to visit NYC from the West Coast, and she asked me to come to a recording studio in Chelsea to be interviewed for her show. OMG, thrill! Bright is one of the smartest — and certainly most accessible and entertaining, ergo serious – sex radical feminist writers in the country. She’s my (as Sarah Silverman might say) Black God.
(And another endearing feature: She must have gotten to a certain age, as I did, when she thought, “Everyone else is taking the diminuitive “-ie” ending off their name and changing to the birth certificate version to get…serious. About their career and such. Hmmm. Maybe I should go from Debbie/Susie to Deborah/Debra/Susan/Susannah etc. et cetera and not etcie.” But we didn’t.)
Check out Bright’s blog, stroll through her archives, and hear the two segments she did with me: June 11 and June 18. Please think seriously of subscribing to her Audible.com program, and do pick up her wonderful books.
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So I had one of those New York moments when I was walking into that sound studio — the kind people write about for the Monday cutesy-pie page of the Times, all the funny things that happen to them on the street or the Crosstown bus. This one probably wouldn’t make it to the Metro section, though:
As I approached the studio, on a street normally populated with a few youngish hipsters and some people en route to the nearby Bed Bath & Beyond, I spied a retinue who didn’t fit. The centerpiece was a slightly Vegas-y guy in early but very well-preserved AARP age. He had the unbuttoned shirt look, the Wow! He Still Has His Hair! vibe, the “Gee, didn’t I see him in an old porn flick?” thing.
Sure enough.
Upstairs, Bright told me she’d just interviewed 1970 Columbia U grad Jamey Ira Gurman, aka Jamie Gillis. He is a major star of porn’s classic, “Golden Age” (the pre-VCR 1970s, when films had scripts, were shot in 35mm, and ran in theaters). Much of this material was produced in New York City, where — as opposed to LA and San Francisco — porn had a rep for portraying “ugly girls” but edgy sex.
Update from February 2008: I just got a polite and gracious but obviously annoyed email from Gillis, taking me to task for assuming that the guy I saw was him; he says he does not look “vaguely Vegas-y” and was not “with a retinue” (which I assume means he was by himself, or at least not with whatever a retinue is). He feels I jumped to cliche and false conclusions, parroting popular prejudices about people in the porn industry rather than challenging them. So now I don’t know whether the man I saw was him or not — I don’t have the image in my head anymore to compare with Gillis’ current pictures. I do know I’d seen an old film he starred in, “The Private Afternoons of Pamela Mann,” shortly before meeting with Susie, so maybe I had him in my consciousness. Then, maybe I saw him but went into some kind of hysterical reverie and imagined the Vegas-y details and companions. People are unconsciously infected with sexism, racism…and who knows, probably pornism as well. Gillis gets the benefit of the doubt here. Mea culpa!
Currently I’m in the beginning stages of organizing a retrospective of classic XXX made in NYC. I’m fascinated not just by the “ugly girls” but also the “ugly” streets and interiors shown in these films. It’s all about 1970s New York in fiscal crisis and political-cultural ferment. The porn camera captures social unkemptness: anarchic streets and bohemian rebellion (after all, performers then were hippies, acting students and artists, many of who saw their sexual movie making as transgressive). Not to mention a lot of pubic hair and no breast implants (this is in the days before Pilates; women performers even have touches of cellulite).
I didn’t see these films the first time around. In 1974, a young woman couldn’t just stroll into the Pussycat Theater by herself to watch porn — you had to be with your boyfriend, and he had a different agenda. The whole experience of being shepherded and protected by a man in these places, of being the only woman there, of feeling like the BF was more turned on by the chick on the screen than by you: It was not pleasant, or conducive to critical/sexual thinking.
Now we’re all grown up, we’ve got our own computers, we can watch without chaperones, and we can think that way, too. The porn viewing experience for women is quite different than 30 years ago. That in itself is fascinating.
So I’m making a list of exemplary New York-made films. Drop a line if you have favorites you think would play well at the festival.