You’ve been in the adult entertainment industry for (ahem) quite a bit of time — especially gay entertainment. How did you first get involved
How did I get started in porn?
How I got started is somewhat of a long story so I will shorten it up a bit. In 1966, I left New York and started traveling, working my way around the country. (My initial goal was to see Marlene Dietrich up at Expo). In the summer of 1968, I stopped in Chicago. I only meant to stay for a few weeks, but I wound up getting a job managing the Aardvark Theater in Piper’s Alley in Old Town, the Greenwich Village of Chicago.
The Aardvark showed avant-garde, experimental, and documentary films and, when it could afford them, classic films like The Red Balloon, Bicycle Thief, etc. All of the shows were little-known films that produced only a modest return. Many of the films also played at college film festivals and art houses; for example, Titicut Follies, a story about life inside a Massachusetts institution for mentally ill criminals. Gay-themed films included Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising, The Queen (about a drag queen contest), Bob Dylan’s documentary called Don’t Look Back, and films that portrayed nudity. Nudity did extremely well at the box office.
In1969, I played Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures, which was a gay-themed film with nudity. The City of Chicago didn’t like Flaming Creatures and consequently, it became my first obscenity bust. Then in 1970, right before the beginning of the hardcore X-rated film era, I became a partner in the group I had previously been working for. At that point, I expanded from one theater into three theaters. When the opportunity presented itself to show I Am Curious Yellow, a well-known commercial film with a dubious reputation and legal history, I jumped at the opportunity without a second thought. As it turned out, Curious Yellow was my second obscenity arrest, this one taking place at the Festival Theater in Indianapolis.
I don’t stand on a soap box speaking about first amendment issues, but I do quietly practice what I believe in. I felt the arrest for showing Flaming Creatures was absurd. It didn’t hurt or cause harm to anyone, so why was the film a problem? My customers had to be over the age of eighteen to see the film and they also had the choice of whether to see it or not. I was annoyed. I didn’t like the fact that the government and other people were dictating their views and their ideas of right and wrong on me. Censorship is inherently evil and will destroy a democracy when people in power have a need to control ideas, thoughts, dissent, expression, sexual expression, and morality with punishment.
My feeling is simple – people who have a need to control the thoughts, ideas and expressions of others when they find them objectionable are the enemies of a democracy. Neither the government nor any individual should have the right or power to control any form of speech. No one should have the ability to punish others for expressing something just because they don’t like it or because they oppose, object to, or feel threatened by it.
So far, I have been arrested twice for obscenity and, yes, I knew the legal consequences of my actions. Since I wasn’t afraid of being arrested, I made a decision that led to my full-time involvement in the Adult Industry. It was in 1970 that the first commercial, hardcore, XXX-rated, pornographic sex film became available, and that was the year I began showing adult films, both straight and gay. My first adult film was Alex DeRenzy’s Pornography in Denmark: A New Approach (aka Censorship in Denmark, aka Denmark Without Censorship IMDB) in Chicago and Indianapolis. At the time, this film was also playing in New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.
Can you share any interesting tales that took place with you or Bijou or with another one of your businesses?
I always remember with fondness my first gay pride parade. It was in 1974 – I think it was the 3rd or 4th Gay Pride parade in Chicago – it was a much smaller parade then than it is today and covered half the distance. One of my businesses at the time was a bathhouse called “Gay Broadway,” so I entered a float in the parade. My float was a one-and-a-half yard garbage dumpster and it was positioned at the very end of the parade. I put a sign on the dumpster that read, “Get Down and Dirty, Be Trashy at Gay Broadway.” There were eight of us pulling and pushing that dumpster while people along the parade route were throwing their trash into it. In turn, we were throwing the trash back at the crowd. For about three hours, we had our own party going on with about 100 people hanging around the dumpster. It was truly a wonderful parade/party that, for us, lasted all through the night.
How has the Internet Age changed business at the Bijou Theater and Bijou Video?
Bijou Theater
At the moment, it is more than the Internet that has changed the adult industry and my businesses; it’s also the recession. The Bijou theater and sex club is a brick and mortar business. I can’t complain, but for 37 years business was very good, then about 4 years ago (2007) it started to slow down. There are many reasons for the slow down: There is less tourism and less convention business in Chicago; higher gas prices means fewer gay men are traveling from the suburbs to Chicago and fewer men are traveling on the weekends to party in the big city; the recession has changed people’s spending habits; and then there is AIDS which took away almost two generations of men during the 1980’s and 1990’s.
To compound the decrease in theater business, my operating expenses have significantly increased, not only salaries, but also utilities, insurance, real-estate taxes, city and state taxes, etc. Along with the decrease in revenue, this has made life very tough.
To my brick-and-mortar situation, let’s now add Internet porn, including match sites, webcam, reality voyeur sex, VOD, free porn tube sites, etc. All of this adds up to a lot of mental masturbation. Technology has altered people’s cruising habits and it has created a new world of non-face-to-face sex, which seems to have become the norm. The Internet seems to have caused people to lose the art of real-life social and sexual interaction.
Both the current financial climate and the Internet have also affected the gay bar social scene. Many of Chicago’s bar owners are experiencing the same drop in customers, for the same reasons. In fact, bars are asking their customers to please put away their cell phones while in the bar in an effort to get people to interact with each other.
Overall, the Bijou is still in business after 41 years because there are still some men who want to go out and meet other men so they can have real spontaneous sex.
Bijou Classic films and Bijouworld.com
The Internet has reshaped the world of porn; it has changed the way people communicate, how they find each other, and how they satisfy their sexual needs. For 30 years, there was a high demand for porn (video, magazines) but limited distribution and outlets. Over the last decade, the Internet has given pornographers the ability to deliver an extraordinary amount of sexual entertainment to a world-wide audience. The Internet has drastically altered the sex industry’s philosophy from physical distribution to individual stores, to mass distribution from a single web site with the ability to change and provide fresh content daily that will reach a world-wide audience of millions at minimal cost.
The Internet has helped Bijou reach a larger audience, and it has helped propel Bijou’s product/brand to areas of the world I never would have reached before. But it has also has made it easier for anyone to bring sexual content to the market place. The ease of creating and distributing sexual content has created massive amounts of it being offered to the general public. So distinguishing my name and brand to the world-wide viewing and buying public is a great challenge.
When did the niche of Classic come about, and what is a Classic film?
Before 2000, there wasn’t a category called “classics.” What we call classics today were called “catalog” before 2000. The word classic was sometimes used in the straight world (VCA’s, Caballero’s Debbie Does Dallas, etc.) to signify that the company had been in business for a while and always had good quality catalog. But the term classic was never used in the gay film/video world except for Bijou.
I fought hard to create the gay classic genre because I own most of the better films of the 1970′s and 1980′s. Because I stopped making/producing new films in 1996, I wasn’t about to sell my films for catalog prices of $2-$4. I never sold cheap films; I always kept value in my product and I promoted that value. That is why I sell large quantities of films that have been on the market for 20 to 30 years. Since I dealt mostly in the world of gay stores, mail order companies and my own retail customer base, I knew people who understood the value and saleability of my films. Outside of this world, it was a tough fight.
To promote the gay classics genre to a larger audience outside of my small narrow world required VOD sites like Naked Sword and AEBN, along with larger retailing sites like HisXpress and TLA Video. These businesses helped me create the genre by putting the classics category on their web sites for me. It also took me about five years of fighting with distributors and stores outside of my network to pay a better price for what they called “catalog.”
Before long, other companies realized the value in this new genre and started putting out films they called “classics,” “lost classics,” “classic bare-backing,” and “pre-condom.” Most of these companies called anything classic just to make an extra buck, but most of what they put out is garbage. There are several companies today that do have true classic films from the 1970′s and 1980′s and they are very good.
Up until 1994, I knew all of the gay porn films that were made because I produced an annual 2000-page catalog called the Bijou Video Catalog (first published in 1984) also known as “the Bible of Gay Video.” My catalog reviewed all gay films except for compilations, so I know who is lying about their so-called classic films. I know who is putting out the 1980′s garbage compilations and calling them classics, who has changed the names of their films, and who is calling films from the 1990′s a classic.
Most companies who do have classic films have not spent much time or effort restoring them because, for them, it is all about keeping costs minimal. The quality of my film restoration process at Bijou depends on the condition of the original source material. My restoration process can take a week (40 hours ) to seven weeks (280 hours) for a single film.
What is the time period that constitutes the gay classic film era? I consider films from the 1970′s to 1988 as classic films in general. The 1970′s were the Golden age when movies were shot on 16mm film, they had a story line, and models had a certain look, a natural look. The 1980′s brought the video era which tried to capture the 1970′s look, but the films were more sexually oriented and slicker in appearance. The styles from both the 1970’s and 1980’s will never be made again. Some of the better filmmakers and stars from that time are: The Gage Brothers Trilogy, Hand in Hand films, Steve Scott (director), J.Brian (director), Tom DeSimone (director), Al Parker (actor/director), Jack Wrangler (actor), Richard Locke (actor), William Higgins (director), and Matt Sterling (director). Some of the 8mm film companies are: Brentwood, Falcon, Colt, Oddessy, and Magnum Griffin.
Have you seen a resurgence of interest in classic porn? Yes or no – why do you think that is?
Since I worked hard to convince people that there is a market for this niche/category of classic films, I’ve seen growth and increased sales of my films every year. I have also experienced growth of customer interest in the filmmakers, stars, and of that era in general. From all of my conversation with customers young and old, I believe the growth is due to many reasons. For younger viewers, it’s often sexual camp that is erotic, a very different style of sexual filmmaking, and more natural looking men.
Older customers remember the films from NOVA, Brentwood, Hand In Hand, Al Parker, and Jack Wrangler. They know these classics offer a different sexual experience than today’s porn. The older films are not slick; they are not as super-up-close dick-in-the-ass clinical; they don’t have the clone look; and they’re not narcissistic porn. What you get with classic porn is the combination of close-up shots, but you also get to be a voyeur – you get to see people’s reactions. A good example is the film The Bigger the Better (1984). By anyone’s standards, this is a great film. Matt Ramsey fucking Rick Donovan over the school desk is an all-time great scene (as well as the bathroom scene at the end). Every time someone has written an all-time best porn list, The Bigger the Better is always in the top ten on a list of 50 or 100 films. For the last 30 years, it has never ceased to amaze me how many copies I continue to sell, year after year, of Screenplay, A Few Good Men, Wanted, Inches, The Bigger the Better, Below the Belt, Getting it, Drive, Blacklode and countless others – and my market continues to grow.
Gay classic films offer a different sexual feel which many men today have not experienced, so the audience will continue to grow as long as the customer doesn’t feel cheated by what other companies are offering as “classics.”
How do you feel about barebacking?
My rules for sex are very simple – you can do anything you want, which means no limitations, from eating shit, to extreme bondage, to fucking your entire family, to watching paint dry on a wall, as long as there is mutual consent with your partner or partners. But there are three simple restrictions: No underage children, no permanent harm and, regarding animals, you can’t fuck the animal but the animal can fuck you. Barebacking violates permanent harm.
Barebacking is all about money, strictly money with no thought or consideration about the health and well-being of the performers who are injecting their cum into someone else’s body and potentially infecting that person for the first time or mixing HIV strains. For some companies, the emphasis is on someone being a cum-dump (during better times, there is nothing wrong with cum dumping) which multiplies the mixing of strains. Later on, when that cum-dump performer is having unprotected sex off the set with others, he is spreading a particularly dangerous form of HIV. Most barebacking films emphasize clinical close-up shots to dramatize the fact that performers are not using condoms; the concept of good sex is immaterial.
The tragedy I see in barebacking is that the filmmakers have no thought about being responsible to the performers or to the viewing public. As a constant stream of barebacking films has entered the market place, the viewing public, the gay community, began to interpret that HIV/AIDS is no longer a serious issue. The makers of barebacking films justify them with the most absurd reasoning, one justification being the talents’ freedom of choice. But as long as the viewing public wants these films, there are distributors, VOD sites, and retailers who will demand and provide the product.
I was there at the beginning of the AIDS crises and lived through the worst of an era that decimated the gay film industry as well as the gay community at large during the 1980′s and 1990′s. I dealt with the AIDS crises in San Francisco with my sex club, Savages, and in Chicago at the Bijou, along with bathhouses, adult bookstores with peepshow booths, and gay bars with back rooms. I’ve also had to deal with many of my employees who became infected with HIV and many who died of AIDS. So to answer your question, I don’t like barebacking – it is irresponsible and harmful filmmaking.
Let me give you a little background on how barebacking films came about. There were two men who wanted to make adult films, but the competition for new people/companies to break into the industry, to get noticed by distributors and the buying public, was very difficult. So to get immediate attention in the gay film industry from distributors, retailers, Internet consumers, the buying public and the gay press, these two men decided to violate the unwritten policy of respecting the health and well-being of the performers. This golden rule was simple – do not put the talent in harm’s way by risking the spread of HIV, and do not deceive the gay community through the visual illusion that HIV/AIDS is not a problem anymore.
These two men got the publicity/notoriety they wanted by breaking the unwritten policy, the self-regulated golden rule of sex performers using condoms while making films. Their attitude of “Why should I give a fuck what happens to the talent? It’s their choice whether or not to be in my film,” has spread throughout the industry and it has become very entrenched in today’s barebacking philosophy – it’s all about the money and nothing else.
Bijou’s barebacking policy is that I do not sell barebacking films in any of my companies, and I do not exhibit barebacking films on the screen at the Bijou
Theater. I’ve had an anti-barebacking statement on my website since 2004, which I also sent out to the press in 2005. Barebacking does not include pre-condom films which are called “pre-condom,” “classic” or “vintage” films. I’m not being hypocritical. In the 1970′s, HIV/AIDS was not an issue. When HIV/AIDS became an issue during the 1980’s and when it was finally understood, around 1991, that’s when the golden rule, the policy of using condoms went into effect throughout the industry. But you can’t just throw away, you don’t destroy your history just because the world has changed.
Of note, one of the owners of the company that first came out with barebacking films, who also coined the phrase “barebacking” starting in 1999 with their first film – he died with AIDS in 2010, although the immediate cause of his death was cancer.
Have you noticed any particular difference between the gay adult entertainment world and the other communities you’ve been part of — especially in regards to freedom of expression and sexuality?
I live and work in the vast world of sexuality. One aspect of my world is that I have a sex club that is open 24/7, so I live in the real time world of sexual desire and sexual spontaneity. For 26 years, another part of my world was making and producing sex films. These two worlds are very different.
A sex film records a prepared moment of time between people on viewable media. For the most part, sex films are not random recordings of spontaneous lust between people involved in sexual acts so they don’t record people’s spontaneous, unscripted responses to those sexual acts. The sex in a sex film starts off as a prepared performance – the filmmaker hopes that the performers will lose all of their inhibitions and become immersed in what they’re doing, that their performance will be enhanced by the excitement of exhibitionism, so he can capture genuinely spontaneous, lustful sex performances, but it rarely happens. The sex and lust that occur in a sex club are spontaneous so they’re more exciting for the voyeur.
Regarding freedom of expression and sexuality in the real, everyday world, Chicago is unique. Over the last 20 years, Chicago has been the sexual mecca of the U.S, even though you wouldn’t think that to be the case. In San Francisco, Dr. Silverman, Director of the S.F. Health Department, closed down the bathhouses, bookstore peepshows, and the Gloryhole Palaces in 1984. (Savages a sex theater/sex club that I owned at 220 Jones Street was also closed down at that time.) Today, there are a only few places in San Francisco that still exist for sexual encounters, like Blow Buddies and the Knob Hill Theater. In New York, mayor Giuliani also closed down most of the sexual places. However, in Chicago, each and every mayor has left the gay bars and sex businesses alone – extraordinary isn’t it! Today, Chicago has bathhouses, over 40 gay bars, sex shops, lesbian sex shops, the Bijou Theater and sex club, four S/M clubs with dungeons both straight and gay, spanking clubs, and Hellfire club, the oldest gay S/M club in the world.
The Chicago area also offers Hell Fire Club’s yearly S/M Inferno run. This year will be Inferno’s 40th run – if you’re into S/M, it is the ultimate fantasy come to life. Men from around the world come together to participate in a week of S/M held in the privacy of a closed-off motel resort, where a multitude of dungeons, equipment-filled tents, and all forms of equipment are set up throughout the open grounds to offer experiences beyond your wildest sexual S/M imagination. Let me also say that Inferno attracts the big boys, the best and heaviest players.
Chicago is also the home of the Leather Archives which has worldwide support. As far as sexual lifestyle events, Chicago is home to The Great Lakes Bear Pride, International Mr. Rubber, and International Mr. Leather events. (I sound as if I’m working for the Chicago Chamber of sexual commerce.)
Regarding freedom of expression and sexuality in the overall adult industry today, the industry as a whole offers a more extensive array of sexual fantasies, experiences and products than ever before in the history of its existence. The Internet has brought about webcams, reality sexual voyeurism, match sites, VOD, free sex tube sites, sale of every sex toy imaginable, films, escorts, and the procurement of prostitutes on a worldwide basis. As far as films are concerned, there is more sex than ever before including every imaginable and unimaginable position with as many dicks as can get into a hole. There is pissing, fisting, S/M, enemas, gangbanging, cum-eating, cum pouring out of assholes, ad infinitum – more kink of every variety than was ever made or available in the past. So in my opinion, I don’t think there is a problem with freedom of expression and sexuality in today’s world. What more could you possibly want?
The queer community — let alone the adult entertainment side of it — has gone through a lot. Do you see things as getting better or have things simply remained the same but different?
I need to think about this one for a moment. Let me go back in time to better answer your question. When I first became acquainted with Chicago’s gay community, there was an organization called Mattachine that was quietly advocating for the civil rights of gay men and women; the gay community has come a long way since the days of Mattachine. Today, many young gay men and women in their teens and early 20′s think the world they live in has always been as they now experience it – open in the discussion of homosexuality. Look at all the out entertainers, talk show hosts, and politicians, along with T.V. shows and movies that have gay characters or gay themes.
Today, for the most part, the gay community has achieved a great deal of acceptance in society. No, the world isn’t perfect, but the situation is definitely better than during the 1950′s, 60′s, 70′s, or 80′s. The radicalism of the early years is over. Today, the gay community is very conservative and has an established place in society. The community knows how much power it brings to the table as far as economic and voting strength. Today, legalizing gay marriage is the issue. There is no need for Act-Up or Queer Nation anymore. Today, the need is for more anti-defamation groups to monitor society, to identify and stop discrimination and hatred of gay men and women wherever it raises its ugly head. When gay marriage becomes the norm and it becomes constitutionally protected in every state, America will be the only country on earth to guarantee the freedom and protect the rights of all people regardless of race, culture, religion or sexual orientation.
Going back in time to the 1970’s and 1980’s and the start of the adult industry, there were a lot of legal problems in those decades, both federal and local. There were also zoning problems, politicians who used porn and/or morality to get elected, as well as preachers wanting to expand their congregation or get publicity and notoriety, always looking to enrich themselves by asking for money to combat the evils of pornography, especially gay porn. By 1995, the porn issue started to settle down and legal problems have nearly vanished since 2000. The adult industry has President Bush and the Republicans to thank for the lack of legal problems during the first decade of the new century. By creating two wars and destroying the economy, the adult industry, sex and porn, were not high priorities.
Today, there are only a few legal threats that come up; the threats that do exist are mostly related to zoning for adult brick and mortar businesses. But overall, more people are making whatever type of porn strikes their fancy than ever before. Very few people feel threatened; making money is their only priority. So life in the adult industry has become very conservative.
Life today in both the gay community and the adult industry are very different than yesterday. Both worlds have evolved to a better place, but they are not nearly as unpredictable, exciting, dangerous and adventurous as they were in the past.
Since you’ve been through so many changes in the adult entertainment world, where do you see it going in the future — and do you see the industry coming to grips with these changes?
I assume you’re not talking legal issues, but about running a porn business. So to have this discussion, we need to talk about content and technology. For the most part from 1970 to 1998, content was king for films, magazines, J/O books, phone sex, etc. There was a large demand and limited distribution as I said before. It was in 1978 that a major new technology propelled the adult industry into mega dollars – the video, video player, and your neighborhood video store. The second great change in technology arrived in 1996 with the Internet and AOL chat rooms. Then around the year 2000, the Internet started to take on a monster personality, which created a major upheaval in the adult industry – technology was becoming king.
The new technology people weren’t pornographers and they knew nothing about adult content, so they needed content. Some wanted brand names to bring in customers and to sell their delivery systems. Others wanted as much cheap porn as they could get, while the buying public was falling all over itself to get any kind of sex, in any and all varieties. It was during these years that the new technology was able to create so much excitement that we could have sold milk to a cow. It was a golden age for technology companies. The Internet spawned new businesses to support and promote these new tech porn sites, the buying and selling of traffic, SEO, web designers, content brokers, networking, etc. For film companies, the Internet monster needed to be fed.
The need for content brought in a massive number of new wannabees from the conventional world looking to make their mark in adult entertainment. Like rabbits, they produced massive amounts of porn for every fantasy, and most of it was, and still is god-awful crap. Still, the established porn companies and filmmakers were seeing growth that they hadn’t seen in a long time. But in 2008, the recession hit the adult industry and the gold rush slowed way down, with content people and brick and mortar businesses seeing the biggest hit.
So how do I see the future? Content people need to work on branding within their markets, in other words, name recognition associated with a certain level of quality within a certain niche. They need to not just follow trends, but to be innovative, sexually innovative. Content people need to merge, promote, and deliver their content using technology before they farm their content out to others since VOD and tubes have the Walmart mentality. Content people cannot stay stagnant with technology; they need to always be looking to improve; they need to use social networking. It’s a fast-moving world and there are new methods being developed daily for delivering content to customers. I believe that one of the next developments in the adult industry will be someone developing a company to use existing software, currently in use by Google, Facebook, etc., to compile information on people’s sexual viewing, buying and social habits. They will set up the software inside the websites to monitor people all through their user experience, and thereby greatly improve the targeting and promotion of products and services to a more specific audience instead of the scatter-gun approach we use today.
So as it stands, I know where I came from, I know where I’m at, but I don’t have a fuckin’ clue where I’m going. In truth, I don’t have the slightest fuckin’ idea about the future. All I know is that the world is in financial chaos, which has wreaked havoc on small companies like mine, and that there is plenty of free porn everywhere.
Do you have any advice to adult entertainment providers for the future?
First, my philosophy is vastly different than most people in the adult industry. So before I offer any advice, I want to say that as far as I know, no one has come into the adult industry with a college degree in porn – I certainly do not have one. So what advice would I give to those involved in any aspect of the adult industry? Be proud of what you do; do it well, to the best of your ability; continue to learn; and most importantly, have integrity. Also very important for anyone wanting to do business with Bijou, all orders are COD or credit card and all VOD is to be paid in the month that payment is due. And good luck to you all.
Have you seen any movement in the changing of obscenity laws in this country? What can the Adult Industry do to get out from under the oppressive federal obscenity laws that now exist?
I can see this is going to be a long answer. The adult industry is the only “legal” industry governed solely by criminal laws. At the moment, with the Supreme Court being what it is, with a majority of five unyielding conservatives, I don’t foresee anyone challenging the obscenity law in order to produce a change in the law for the better. At the moment, challenging the obscenity law would not be wise or prudent politics. I believe the current Supreme Court would go out of its way to create a harsher law. But I’m not saying that the laws shouldn’t be challenged when a more favorable group of judges are sitting on the high bench.
An example of a recent high court ruling:
In 2005, the California legislation passed a law banning the sale or rental of violent video games to children. The law was challenged in courts by the video game industry and the ACLU, and the case eventually went up to the Supreme Court. The following decision came down from the high court on June 27, 2011 (note the reference to sex).
Judge Scalia wrote the majority opinion; the decision went 7-2 with Justices Breyer and Thomas dissenting.
The Supreme Court, on 6.27.2011, refused to let California regulate the sale or rental of violent video games to children, saying that governments do not have the power to “restrict the ideas to which children may be exposed” despite complaints about graphic violence.
The California Act covers games “in which the range of options available to a player includes killing, maiming, dismembering, or sexually assaulting an image of a human being.”
Justice Scalia noted that “Justice Alito has done considerable independent research on video games in which “the violence is astounding,” (post, at 14). “Victims are dismembered, decapitated, disemboweled, set on fire, and chopped into little pieces. . . . Blood gushes, splatters, and pools.” Justice Alito recounts all these disgusting video games in order to disgust us—but disgust is not a valid basis for restricting expression.
Justice Scalia wrote ” Unlike depictions of sexual conduct, there is no tradition in the United States of restricting children’s access to depictions of violence, pointing out the violence in the original depiction of many popular children’s fairy tales like Hansel and Gretel, Cinderella and Snow White. Hansel and Gretel kill their captor by baking her in an oven, Cinderella’s evil stepsisters have their eyes pecked out by doves and the evil queen in Snow White is forced to wear red hot slippers and dance until she is dead.
Justice Scalia wrote “Speech about violence is not obscene.” “Obscenity is not protected expression.”
Obscenity cases were referenced throughout Judge Scalia’s opinion, including Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (Fanny Hill), Roth, and Miller, Mishkin.
As Scalia pointed out, children in our society are exposed to violence from an early age. So maybe that has something to do with the violence found in our society? Now, correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe that without sex we can’t produce children (excluding test tube babies), so if I assume correctly, sex has been around longer than violence. I also believe that most adults are not violent, but they do have sex in one form or another. Not only is sex universal and hard-wired into our make-up in order for our species to regenerate itself, it also produces very pleasurable, wonderful feelings. I don’t believe that having sex produces violent tendencies resulting in sex partners killing or maiming each other or innocent bystanders. So why is sex or pornography such an evil thing? Sex isn’t about violence, but it is a control issue – I’ll get to that a little later.
Although I don’t like violence and I greatly disapprove of the Court’s attitude toward pornography, I happen to be in favor of the ruling that found a law censoring video games to be unconstitutional, a violation of the freedom of expression. But to say that playing violent games in which someone (a child) actively creates graphic mayhem, murder, and destruction is far better than adults watching sex, I must disagree. That line of thinking is absurd, but unfortunately, it is how the current Court thinks. So I believe that trying to challenge the law at this time would produce an adverse affect.
Understanding sexual laws – Religion and Morality
To understand the sexual laws, you need to understand the needs of religion and government to maintain their power by controlling society. This need for power and control goes back thousands of years. Most world religions have sought to address moral issues and to dictate people’s sexual interactions according to the religion’s particular moral viewpoint. Because sexual instinct, sexual desire, is embedded in the genetic code of every human being that ever lived, it is an easy target for condemning and controlling the masses. So each major religion developed a moral code to, among other things, cover the issues of sexuality and procreation. Although many of these moral codes do not explicitly mention sex or sexuality, they seek to regulate situations that might ignite sexual desire as well as any of the behaviors and practices surrounding sexual interactions.
So how do you gain control over the masses, over those good people who would never even think about violating criminal laws? You need to come up with a set of rules (moral code) that is contrary to basic human nature, along with some form of punishment when the moral code is broken. Since the punishment has to deter such a strong instinct, it usually involves creating an equally strong fear of something such as burning for eternity in hell. Throughout history, religions, governments and societies have also defined venereal disease, insanity, depression, plague, and many other diseases as a divine punishment for sexual activity. Since virtually everyone is guilty of engaging in some sort of sexual activity or at least having sexual thoughts, almost anything bad that happens to a person can be connected to sex as proof that they need to comply with the governing moral code.
Fortunately, despite the pretenses of a moral code, societies developed a rich imagination associated with sexual pleasure and they purposely created sexual stimulation in literature and drawings – thus, the advent of Pornography.
Abbreviated History of Modern Pornography
(from: http://www.pornographyhistory.com/)
The Kama Sutra, written in India during the third century B.C., was not considered obscene until it was brought to Europe and translated.
Michelangelo’s painting on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel (1508-1512) portrayed both male and female nudes.
In 1524, during the Italian Renaissance, Marcantonio Raimondi published sixteen sexually explicit engravings designed by Giulio Romano and collectively titled the “I Modi.” The I Modi visually depicted figures, from Greco-Roman mythology to Classical antiquity, enjoying the pleasures of copulation. In response to this scandal, Pope Clement VIII placed Raimondi in prison, where he remained for almost a year until he gained his release with the help of Pietro Aretino.
Pietro Aretino (1492-1556), known as the founder of modern pornography, was an Italian author, polemicist and satirist who wrote two pornographic masterpieces: Sonetti lussuriosi (1527) and Ragionamenti (1534-36).
The Marquis De Sade (1740-1814) wrote about violent sexuality: Justine (or the Misfortunes of Virtue), Juliette, The 120 days of Sodom, and others.
Very Abbreviated History of Obscenity
The King v. Sir Charles Sedley (1663): The first obscenity trial on record. He was convicted because he bared himself and shouted out obscene statements while urinating in public. This was the basis of Anglo-American obscenity laws to come.
Queen v. Hicklin (1868): This case produced the first definition of obscenity. The Confessional Unmasked was deemed obscene because it had the tendency to deprave and corrupt the minds of those who read it, meaning lower class women and children.
Back to today:
Among established companies in the adult industry, there have been very few obscenity prosecutions for hard media, Internet sales, or transmission of sexual content over the past decade. The one big bust/trial that comes to mind is Max Hardcore, who actually had two trials, one in L.A and one in Florida. He was convicted in Florida and received a 46-month prison sentence. Then there was the Extreme Associates bust – they plea bargained and filmmaker John Stagliano’s case was dismissed in July of 2010. Still, Department of Justice statistics show prosecutors charged 361 defendants with obscenity violations during President George W. Bush’s years in office, nearly twice as many as under President Bill Clinton (Law Blog).
Zoning is another issue of concern for adult brick and mortar businesses, and it will always be an issue for strip clubs and porn shops, as it is for liquor stores, strip malls, etc. Today the fight for sexual expression in the adult industry is almost non-existent, but that doesn’t mean the fight won’t come back tomorrow. The laws are still in place for a person like Michele Bachmann to use if someone like her ascends to a position of power or authority.
As I see it, the fight is for the adult industry to get those laws changed under better legal and political circumstances. For this to happen, the industry will need to form an influential lobbying organization like other industries, such as the oil industry, the video game industry, and the tobacco industry. Changing the law can only be achieved by a national organization of adult business owners with chapters in every state. Every type adult business, from strip clubs to film companies, should be represented in this organization.
Can the adult industry actually form such an organization? Well, it hasn’t done so during my 42 years in the industry. One of the reasons for the lack of a strong organization is that the adult industry has, by far, the strangest collection of characters of any industry. Since the adult industry is easy to enter, more than half of the business owners are in it for the short term, which makes their interests vastly different from those who are working to establish solid companies.
Even many of the long-term people don’t see the adult industry as a legitimate, or even an acceptable or respectable business. Because of this view, most adult business owners are only concerned about their own business and not the welfare of the industry as a whole. But I believe this attitude will change over time as a new generation establishes itself, and with it will come a determined minority that will have the desire to bring stability and some form of legitimacy to this industry. Of course, this can only happen when the economic climate has improved and the Supreme Court has added an intelligent liberal fifth jurist to its ranks. But with this vision in mind, I put together an outline for a national adult business owners’ association a few years ago – now I’m just waiting for the world to change.
Bio: Steven Toushin
Steven Toushin was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., in 1946. In 1966, at the age of 18, he left New York on his bicycle and traveled to Montreal to see Marlene Dietrich at Expo. During the next two years, he traveled and worked at odd jobs, digging graves, short order cook, picking potatoes, and cutting pulp wood throughout New England. Steven left New England in the summer of 1968, ending up in Chicago, where he got a job managing the Aardvark Theater which showed underground experimental art films. This was the beginning of his unusual career.
With over 42 years of experience owning a broad range of adult businesses, Toushin has managed to survive and flourish longer than anyone else in the adult industry, despite 35 arrests, 200 busts to his businesses, five Federal trials, three Federal appeals (winning two), and numerous state and local trials. His first obscenity arrest in 1969 was for Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures, which turned out to be the first of 21 obscenity arrests and trials (others included the films I am Curious Yellow and Deep Throat).
Toushin has successfully defended numerous civil and criminal lawsuits in building courts, along with zoning problems and local licensing problems that have led up to the Federal court system. He has been a defendant in the legal system continuously from 1970 to the present, and has had the opportunity to change a few repressive local laws. His last obscenity bust was in 1991; his last police raid was in 1996; and his last Federal trial was in 1998. Toushin has been incarcerated twice, spending three years in Federal prison for being in his chosen profession.
Since 1970, Toushin has been the owner of Bijou Theater, the oldest gay theater and sex club in the U.S., and since 1978, he has owned Bijou Video, a gay adult mail order company. His businesses have also included other theaters, sex clubs, gay bathhouses, massage parlors (prostitution), and adult bookstores in Chicago, San Francisco, Indianapolis, and East Chicago. Toushin made and produced both gay and straight adult films from 1971 to 1996, as well as S/M films in the 1970’s, and Slave & Master films in the early 1980’s.
In 1987, several of Toushin’s Slave and Master films were indicted on Federal obscenity charges in Tennessee, Utah and Nebraska as a result of Attorney General Meese’s Commission on Pornography. This bust resulted in an extraordinary S/M trial that included many well-known people from the Leather community. Steven’s book, The Destruction of the Moral Fabric of America, is centered on this trial.
Toushin published The Bijou Video Catalog, the “bible of gay video,” from 1980 to 1995. In 1987, he made a censorship commercial that was seen on 80% of all sex tapes from 1987 until 1993. He has written for several weekly gay magazines, and has authored four books: The Puppy Papers, Puppy’s Tales, The Destruction of the Moral Fabric of America, and the Bijou Cock Coloring Book. His websites are: www.bijouworld.com and www.steventoushin.com.
Toushin has been the subject of numerous newspaper articles and television news stories. He has been on the board of the Free Speech Coalition and has continuously fought for First Amendment rights from his first arrest in 1969 until the present day.
In 1989, at the Adult Video Awards show in Las Vegas, Toushin received (while he was in prison) the Reuben Sturman Award “For Legal Battles on Behalf of the Adult Industry.” In 2007, at the GayVN award show in San Francisco, Toushin was awarded the “Lifetime Achievement Award” from the Gay Adult Industry. He was the 3rd person to ever receive this honor. In the June 2008 AVN (Adult Video News) magazine’s 25th anniversary edition, Toushin was acknowledged as one of the 25 pioneers who developed the Gay/Bi Adult Film Industry. In January of 2009, at the AVN award show in Los Vegas, Toushin was inducted into the prestigious Founders Branch. This award recognized Toushin’s contribution (starting in 1969) as a major player in developing the modern Adult Industry.
In December of 2007, Mr. Toushin was elected to the board of the Free Speech Coalition (FSC), an organization representing the Adult Industry. In January of 2009, Mr. Toushin holds the distinction of being the first person to be voted off the Board of the FSC for expressing his freedom of speech. Toushin felt the FSC did not represent the needs and interests of the current Adult Industry, so he created an outline for establishing an organization for adult business owners and sent out the proposal to select members of the Adult Industry. His proposal included a code of ethics, mission, vision, and philosophy for establishing an organization that would best represent the interests of the modern adult industry in the U.S. Expressing these ideas did not sit well with the FSC.