My career in porn
I really had one.
Let’s wind the clocks back … forty years. The year was 1984. The place was Manhattan. I had just turned 22. This is the story of my brief, highly educational career in … porn.
It’s kind of amazing to look back on this. Now, I live in Northern California. I’m a writer for law firms, tech companies, and if you’re reading this, you. I have three daughters. I go to bed early, do not drink at all, and have a dog. As I’ve described elsewhere in this Substack, my life is incredibly quiet and boring. But back then, I was rollicking around New York City, trying to maneuver my way into the publishing business.
Following my graduation from Swarthmore in the spring, I had spent the summer at the Radcliffe Publishing Procedures Course in Cambridge, Massachusetts. This was a tony, hyperprivileged summer program for people who planned to move to New York and launch careers in either the magazine or book business. It was held on the leafy, elegant campus of Harvard’s sister school in the summer, when the young ladies who attended it were elsewhere.
We heard lectures in the morning, and had workshops in the afternoon with industry hotshots who had taken the train up from New York. At the end of the afternoon, there was a mandatory event called – not making this up – Sherry Hour.
At Sherry Hour, we had real, live practice in networking and schmoozing, which in those days was an essential skill for the publishing industry. Apparently the field was unkind to alienated loners. We’d gather in the tree-lined courtyard of a building, someone would break out the aforementioned beverage and some hors d’oeuvres, and we’d practice holding a drink and chitchatting. As an example of the kind of person we dealt with, one of our lecturers was David Godine, whose company specialized in expensive, WASPy books like Brotherhood: When West Point Rugby Went to War. Genteel, tasteful, intellectual, privileged. WASP that I am, I felt right at home.
Then summer ended, I moved to New York, and shit got real. I could hold a drink and chat people up, but I had no job. I needed money. I really needed money. Like Madonna, I’d shown up in the Big Apple with nothing but a dream, and I can personally tell you, that approach gets very difficult very fast.
I rented a room on the West Side of Manhattan from a shrink, one Dr. Lubin. I can still remember her voicemail message – “This is Dr. Lubin …” She had the patient, professional, sort of melodious voice psychiatrists use, assuming someone really upset is on the other end of the phone.
I taught myself to type by simply buying a ream of typing paper, opening up a book I liked (Refiner’s Fire, by Mark Helprin) and typing it until I could do sixty words a minute, at which point I was employable. I started temping – I worked at Standard Chartered Bank, on Wall Street. I worked for a tour bus company, holding up the little sign at the airport gate for arrivals. I worked at an investment bank. All the while, I was banging on the doors of the publishing industry, trying to launch my career.
Publishing, either book or magazines, is not a career one goes into for the money. It’s kind of glamorous and creative, and packed with people who really, really want to be in the industry anyway. Many of them, unlike me, don’t need to worry about money. It’s very competitive. Jobs, especially entry-level ones, are hard to find. So, even with my publishing pedigree, getting in the door would take a while, and in the meantime, I needed to eat and pay my rent. So I temped. The money was okay but not great until, one fateful day, I got a call from the temp agency that found me my gigs.
They had an opportunity for me. It was in publishing. It paid, incredibly, a LOT. However, there was one catch.
It was at Penthouse. And there our tale really begins. By the way, I heard much later that upon learning of this new gig, my mother, whose personal motto was something like Respectability Uber Alles, went completely berserk. My father calmed her down, doubtlessly cursing me the entire time.
For those under, say, forty, it may be news to learn that in the old, pre-internet days, those who liked looking at pictures of naked women, and reading about the things one did with those women, had to buy magazines. The Internet was not yet a glint in Tim Berners-Lee’s eye. So, you had to go to a newsstand, or a gas station, or a bookstore, and head for the dirty magazines section. In those days, many of these establishments literally covered up the cover images with cardboard.
There were three heavyweight magazines in that field. Playboy, Mr. Hugh Hefner’s creation, was the top shelf magazine. Founded in the Fifties, it was the very first men’s magazine, and also, for instance, published fiction by people like Saul Bellow and John Updike. It spawned a whole empire of men’s clubs, resorts, on and on and on, and the list of women who at one point were Playboy Playmates – the featured naked woman in each month’s issue – included Marilyn Monroe, Jenny McCarthy and so on. There was even a Playboy Philosophy, which is both hilarious and depressing. Hefner, who was sort of rabbity-looking, was famous for living in a mansion with a bunch of blondes, never getting out of his jammies, and in general, spending his life behaving like a fourteen year-old boy with a lot of money.
The bottom-shelf magazine was Hustler. This was founded by Larry Flynt, who interestingly later was a party in a major First Amendment case that went all the way to the Supreme Court. Flynt looked just plain evil, and as a result of being shot in the back by some angry lunatic, ended up in a wheelchair. However, thanks to the First Amendment thing, he has an interesting, blue-collar kind of integrity. Unlike Playboy, Hustler had no pretense at all of any literary quality, and was all about genitalia, period. If the model was on her back, with her legs spread wide and her mouth open, that was Hustler.
The middle ground was occupied by my new employer, Penthouse. That empire was founded by Bob Guccione, who was very much a gold chains, open shirt, jewelry and tight pants kind of guy. Very smart, very aggressive, with an editorial style that was dirtier than Playboy, but not quite as raunchy as Hustler. The headquarters for the empire was the entire second floor of a building over what was then the Manhattan Tower Records store. For my younger readers, I’ll explain what “records” were another time.
And as I learned when I arrived, my job wasn’t just at Penthouse. It was at the even dirtier, even more profitable Penthouse Variations. I was to be a copy editor and typist, and all-around assistant to the lady editor, who I’ll call “VK”.
This requires some additional explanation. The main magazine, Penthouse, had a section called the Penthouse Forum. In this, readers would write in to describe their personal sexual adventures. In a trailer park, in a five-star hotel, with cheerleaders or mysterious Persian women, the arrangements, number of people, equipment involved and details were as varied as stars in the sky. However, interestingly, almost all of these stories had three common elements:
Large breasts: apparently flat-chested women didn’t have sex.
Surprise: despite arrangements that were sometimes incredibly complicated, everyone always wrote some version of “I couldn’t believe this was happening to me”. Yeah, right.
Defiance: Everyone also always wrote some version of “Other people may think this is weird, but we absolutely love this”.
When I’ve told this story in the past, I’m usually asked if these letters are real. Oh, yes, they were real. Written on page after page of legal paper, or typed, dozens, hundreds, thousands of these stories came in.
Now, in the age of magazines, here’s how the financial end worked: Let’s take a regular old printed magazine, say, Ladies Home Journal. Most of the subscribers got it in the mail. Whatever they paid for their subscription only covered a fraction of what putting the magazine out cost – magazines are EXPENSIVE to produce. Subscriptions are often heavily discounted. The rest of the cost was covered by advertising. Cars, booze, baby food, whatever. They all advertised, paid quite a bit for it, and this powered the entire enterprise. Magazines were financed by advertising sales.
Variations, however, was different. This was a magazine that collected all the dirty letters from the main magazine’s Forum column, and reprinted them, with suitable illustrations, in a little booklet, about the size of the Farmer’s Almanac. Given the subject matter of the magazine, there was no advertising – Jeep does not want to run ads next to a detailed story about tying your secretary to the conference room table and having your way with her.
However – and this is sheer business genius – given the subject matter, they could also charge an astronomical price for this magazine. Since people did not want it arriving in the mail, they had to buy it in person, at the newsstand. And also – this is particularly brilliant – just like Facebook, their content was free. This was social media decades ahead of its time. All those people writing letters did it for nothing. Oh, and it was also evergreen. Sex hasn’t changed in the last ten thousand years, after all. A story from five years ago was just as interesting today, as when it was written. And just as valuable.
Note: while I was working there, Penthouse also published a spread, so to speak, with Vanessa Williams, who at the time was Miss America, very naked and engaged in lesbian sex. This pissed off essentially the entire nation, but it also resulted in endless publicity, and made the main magazine buckets of money. The hate mail arrived in several large sacks, every day. I saw it. Armed guards were installed in the building’s lobby. I saw them, too.
So what this meant in practice was that once the Variations letters arrived, which they did by the bushel, every day, they were assets. They needed editing, part of which was my job, but once the grammar, spelling, punctuation and so on were fixed, you had what we now call content. First they ran the story in the main magazine. Then they’d run it again, suitably illustrated, in Variations. You can edit, lay out, and have ready years’ worth of issues, all ready to go, because sex in a hot air balloon is sex in a hot air balloon. Part of how I now make my living is as a content strategy, which is what this was.
Given that it sold several hundred thousand copies every month, Variations had a small, if very real, editorial staff. The head cheese, the edatrix, if you will, was my boss, VK. And here it gets really interesting. I haven’t thought of her in forty years. So I Googled her.
VK is now pushing eighty, I would guess. Then, and now, she favored wearing to work what could only be described as Victorian schoolmarm outfits. High collars, long sleeves, boots with long laces and a million eyelets and heels. Tall, serious, red-haired and articulate, she was genuinely imposing. Since there were no ad sales, which is usually handled by a publisher, she had a LOT of power and independence. Simply being a woman executive in the adult industry is amazing to begin with.
One of the many fascinating things about the editorial end of this operation, which spoke directly to my job, was the style sheet. Style sheets are guidelines for grammatical edge cases. In English, that means that if there’s a term or rule that has some room for interpretation – think of Oxford commas -- the organization determines how they’re going to handle it, and writes it out as a rule for everyone to follow. For example, here’s an email I got from a big law firm yesterday that’s an illustration:
Big style guide change at FIRM: Beginning today, we’re reversing our approach to the Oxford comma (for years, we have not used it in marketing communications, and we will be using it going forward).
I’ve attached our updated style guide for reference, and the change is also reflected in our custom style guide hosted on AP Stylebook Online. If you have not yet received a login for that platform, you can reach out to me to request one.
This creates an interesting situation when you’re running a porn magazine, because you need to standardize terms that are, ah, unusual. For instance, in the millions of copies you send out every year, what is the agreed-upon spelling of “gangbang”? One word or two? Hyphen? And so on. Think of every dirty word you know. It was in the Variations style sheet. The thing was several pages long. I wish I still had a copy.
And so, I looked up my old boss. Who has become … a theologian. A serious religious scholar, at one of the country’s most prestigious seminaries. The woman who once oversaw the production of stories about orgies now has written, and published, numerous articles about Paul's Charge to Syntyche & Euodia in Phil. 4:2-7 in a slightly different publication – Eastern Orthodox Perspectives.
Which, given my experience at Variations, makes complete sense.
It is tempting, common and regrettable that in what Trumpers call the mainstream media, you have to adopt the godlike, condescending perspective that pornography is silly, and people who consume it are sort of losers. Heh, heh, heh – look at those grubby, needy little people and their clichéd, dirty magazine.
They could not be more wrong. I learned a lot working for VK. I realize a lot of what Variations was about was pure titillation. Got it. It was porn, after all. But there was another dimension.
First, VK was remarkably thoughtful and kind. And brilliant. When I arrived at her doorstep, I was beyond green. I still had straw in my hair. Nobody is tougher or more hardass than a magazine publisher, especially in New York, and especially in the adult industry. VK could not have been more gentle, more helpful, more careful. She could have eaten me for breakfast, and she didn’t. Looking back, I’m reminded of stories of indigenous tribes in Africa taking great care of confused white people who wander into their encampment, obviously completely helpless. That was me.
More profoundly, I spent all day, every day, typing and editing stories about every kind of sex you can imagine, for weeks, months, years. The job paid well. But more importantly, perhaps, it also gave me a unique window straight into the needs, feelings and deepest longings of thousands of people. Because they were anonymous, they were honest. Why not? As Laurie Colwin, the novelist, put it in one of her books, “Sex, she knew, was something that could not be lied about.” She was right.
Beneath the whole porny veneer, in these endless, amateurly written narratives, misspellings and all, was a deep, endless, rich vein of humanity. These were people who were needy, or funny, or angry, or hurt. They were incredibly creative. They were brave, some of them. Some of them were stupid, or cruel, or just a mess. A lot of them weren’t particularly smart. But day after day, week after week, temp agency timecard after timecard, I was exposed to the whole human catastrophe through a unique, bracing perspective. People were literally revealing themselves to me, and to the world. They had a feeling or perspective they urgently needed to share. They couldn’t tell anyone, so they told me.
And I learned not to judge them. I learned how vulnerable a lot of them were, how much shame and fear they lived with, how they struggled. Some of them were crazy, or cruel, admittedly. But many of them were just trying to deal with their lives, their traumas and needs. If, as a culture, we’ve been trying to learn not to judge someone who comes out as gay, I learned not to judge some middle-aged guy in Seattle who never got over how his mother treated him.
After several months, I moved on. I bagged a job at Conde Nast, perhaps the most elite magazine publishing company in the world. I’ve written about it elsewhere. I went from editing pieces about whores to pieces about debutantes. But the whores phase of my career gave me an incredible education in a side of human nature almost nobody gets to see, let alone get paid for. Like every great job, it taught me something.
Thank you, VK, and I hope when your time comes, flights of angels sing you to your rest.
No words, just👍🏻.