Scenes From My Life in Porn

The event began on a set decorated with paper palm trees and tiki lamps. Perhaps 100 men showed. They were authentic amateurs, a cross section of humanity that might have been culled from an unemployment line: old, young, fat, bald, skinny. They wore tennis shoes and work boots, but no pants or underwear, as they were herded into groups of five along lines taped onto the concrete floor. A half-dozen fluffers knelt by the taped lines and prepared the men for their encounter with Jasmin. She lay on a low stage and could barely be glimpsed through the clutches of hairy asses flexing around her. Jasmin’s hands grasped at erections as the men circled her, copulating with her mouth, vagina and ass. The teams of gangbangers were given five or 10 minutes with Jasmin. They wore condoms when they penetrated her. They removed their condoms to ejaculate on her stomach, thighs, breasts, face, or in her thick, wavy brown hair. When the men finished, they sat in bleachers at the edge of the sound stage or milled around and lamely jacked off, trying to nurse fresh hard-ons for another go.

I experienced a sense of numbness on Jasmin‘s set -- as I would on many others -- that I can only compare to accounts I have read of combat. It was the sense of being in a group of people deliberately and methodically engaged in acts of insanity. Unlike in combat, I was not overwhelmed by the horror of it, but by the grand-scale stupidity, which crystallized that day as I stood by the craft-services cart. Boiled hot dogs on cold, white buns were being dispensed. A man next to me politely passed the mustard. The bottle was sticky with K-Y Jelly. I never attempted to eat on a porn shoot again.

It was during Jasmin’s bid for the title of world‘s biggest gangbang queen that she acquired her reputation as a bitch. One of the men I spoke to, 40-ish, with the tan and physique of a lifelong desk worker, summed up his experience as a star-fucker. “Jasmin is cold,” he said, then compared her to Annabel Chong, whom he’d met a year earlier when he‘d participated in her World’s Biggest Gang-Bang. “She‘s not friendly like Annabel was.”

I asked him what constituted “cold” or “friendly” in a five-minute encounter with a woman, shared with a half-dozen other men, all circling to pleasure themselves on tiny pieces of her body. His voice had a childlike plaintiveness when he answered. “Annabel said, ’Hi.‘ She looked at me in the eyes. Jasmin just said, ’Don‘t come in my hair.’ She wasn‘t nice at all.”

Hustler’s Barely Legal was a magazine I associate-edited under the name “Serena Dallwether.” It was subtitled “A Celebration of Sexual Debutantes,” and the premise was that all the girls in the photographs were between the ages of 18 and 20, and that all their stories were true. In reality, the girls were porn models, and I supplied them with names and brief biographies, or “girl copy.” Though Barely Legal was sold almost exclusively in XXX shops and liquor stores, its monthly U.S. circulation pushed 250,000. The English-language edition also sold well internationally. On a trip through Italy, I saw it prominently displayed at a news kiosk near the Vatican beside photos of Pope John Paul II.

A reasonable person might assume that porn magazines serve but one lowly purpose: to provide “readers” with what we called, in the trade, jack-off fodder. But readers of Barely Legal were moved to send in dozens of letters each week. Predictably, many contained simple requests: “Please print photos of young girls having fun at the doctor‘s office, spread out on an examination table.” At least half bore return addresses of corrections facilities. The most surprising were those that contained outpourings of emotion from lonely men seeking to connect with our nudie models. By the time I left LFP, I had collected nearly 2,000 of the most desperate letters from lonely hearts.

Readers sent Christmas cards to the models. Photographs arrived: John, from NYC, sent a glamour shot of himself, replete with halo lighting effects on his poofy ’80s metal-rocker hairdo. Kelly, a scruffy middle-aged man, grinned beside a pumpkin he‘d evidently just carved. A man claiming to be “vraiment a poet from the ’Sixties” sent a letter in French and English, typed and handwritten in beautiful calligraphy, to a model named “Vivienne: Sex Student.” In the bio I‘d written for her, she described herself as a Philosophy of Film major who was turned on by Kierkegaard and anal sex. Her fan included a bio of his own in which he purported to have been published in the Paris Review and to have taught at Stanford. Expressing the most delicate feelings for Vivienne and shamelessly begging her to write to him, the lovelorn poet closed his letter with a stern lecture about Kierkegaard and Heidegger, stating, “I repudiate Heidegger’s fascistic early politics.”

“Problem,” a young man from a suburb of Philadelphia wrote to Girl Talk, the advice column I edited, “I am a 21 year old male who has never had a girlfriend in his life and is quite sadden by this fact. I do have Tourette‘s syndrome, and when you are considered as a ’f**king retard‘ in high school, you don’t get real far.”