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We look back To help us figure out Where we want to go. by Howie Gordon,
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FOREWORD I have lived across the street from Howie for about twenty-five years. We have been friends for even longer. He told me he was hesitant about asking me to write a foreword because he wasn't sure that I was comfortable having people know that we are friends. Now, I found out early on who Howie was and told him that I had his Playgirl centerfold on my wall for a long time before I met him and told him that both my mom and I were fans of that picture, I did have a hard time looking Mr. November in the eye, but I got over that. I was there when the kids were born, he was there when I became a grandmother early. He's been thru my breakups and hookups. He has been part of my family way before anyone cared about Whoopi Goldberg. ...which brings me back to the idea that he was trying to protect me from the public knowing our family bond. I'm proud that we are connected. (He's taken out ninety-nine percent of any reference to me in this book so don't bother looking...I already looked.) Truth is I don't think I knew Richard Pacheco the way I know Howie Gordon. There was no reason really and I don't want to freak you out, reader, wondering if I had ever seen any of his films. The answer is, yes, I have. And I've been to the Adult Awards ceremonies, too.
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Howie and Whoopi at the X-Rated "Oscars." |
We as a nation pay a lot of money to see what we profess to find dirty. Think of it like this, if everyone really felt like that, who's keeping the adult industry alive and well? Someone is buying. I know a lot of folk feel that its destructive to young women and all the other things people speak about, and it may be true, but as you read this book, remember, it was a different time. It was the time of story telling with an X Rating, and there's no one better to tell this story than my friend Howie Gordon. So, sit back and prepare to laugh and gasp and if you get moved to say, make yourself even happier, well go for it. |
Whoopi Goldberg |
THE PRELEWD |
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Am I a defender of porn? Well, that's a tough question. Sure I am, but sometimes the domination of male rage in the industry just gets to me. It comes off as so nasty and mean-spirited that it's like a sex without humanity. Who but a werewolf could defend that? Yes, men are entitled to their anger and so are women, too, for that matter, but sex is so much bigger than that narrow band of human experience. We deserve better than just the forbidden fruit of the dark side. Amazing. Am I a defender of pornography? Sure I am. To say that sex is not worthy of the public discussion, or is not worthy of artistic interpretation is a madness, a stupidity and often a hypocrisy of the highest order. And if I've learned anything of import at all while walking on this path, it's this: |
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SCANDAL’S MESSIAH? “Pornography...” wrote film critic James Wolcott, “won’t tap into our deepest feelings (rage, jealousy, obsessive desire) until it’s made by artists, but until then it can splash happily in the shallows.” “...Porno may be crude and misogynistic; it may be filled with gynecological close-ups and with dialogue as monotonously coarse as the chattering of a parrot taught to swear; but it doesn’t have to be. Pornography needs an emotional rescue, and a recent film entitled Talk Dirty To Me suggests new paths, new possibilities...” As a filmmaker, Sam Weston was a storyteller first. An actor turned director, he became a pornographer only as a means of last resort to feed his family while trying to make it in the cinematic jungles of Hollywood. The “new paths” or “new possibilities” alluded to by the film critic Wolcott were largely the efforts of Sam and a few other adult directors to “scoop” the Hollywood studios by making “real” movies that just happened to have full-bodied sex in them. The X-Rated industry of that era, the Seventies and early Eighties, is now being touted as “The Golden Age of Pornography” mostly for that very reason. Of course, this all happened at what seemed to have been the very climax of the sexual revolution before the plague of A.I.D.S. had people of common sense everywhere zipping it all back up and running for cover. To borrow from baseball, we were like the Negro Leagues of show business. We labored with certainly no less passion (and even occasionally no less skill) making movies at a tiny fraction of what our uptown, mega-financed, Hollywood counterparts had to spend, but we were doomed to wear the scarlet letter. Despite the mainstream doors that have closed in my face, I still count myself as one of the lucky ones who have been involved with pornography. To begin with, I got out with my life. Beyond that, the word “pornography” itself, now used to embrace virtually all sexual media, is derogatory. I think it reflects our own sexual self-hatred, our great spiritual and psychological difficulty of trying to cope with our bodies’ capacity for giving and receiving pleasure. In other times, in other places, I might have been burned at the stake, pilloried, or made to rot in a dungeon. Like I said, I count myself lucky. I have a wife and children and am able to walk God’s green earth freely. Though I may have had to muzzle myself at a PTA meeting, I have never felt the handcuffs or been dragged into the jails and courts as so many others have. We owe those folks a debt of gratitude. It’s funny how the world works. Few have ever become “sex workers” for any reason vaguely resembling something noble, though that term itself is newish and bespeaks a certain political activism and sophistication. The old saw is that men got involved in “the business” for the sex and the women for the money. My experience confirmed that to be largely true. Scratch any centerfold and more often than not you’ll hear a tale of too fat, too thin, too short, too tall, my tits were on backward, or the devil made me do it. You dig into the background of strippers and sex stars, especially the ones willing to reveal themselves, so to speak, in public, and you may hear stories of dysfunctional families, drugs, child abuse, alcohol, poverty, low self-esteem, sexual repression, parental neglect, or religious madness. That out of this gallery of the broken, the curious, the rogues and the desperate may be born defenders of freedom and sexual pioneers is truly the unfathomable sense of humor of our Creator at work. But on occasion, lust, chaos, and greed have alchemically mingled to produce both beauty and nobility, in addition to all the stereotypical and wretched excesses that one would also expect. |
- Gordon Archive
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I foolishly expected the heirs to the Sixties sexual revolution to be there en masse. They weren’t. And it remained sadly unconscionable that the sexual media for the entire culture of that time was largely relegated to an underclass of amateurs and criminals who mostly created a pornographic world of sexual looting and moral midgetry. I thought sex far too important for such an ignominious fate. Could be that I’ll get to the Pearly Gates one day and St. Peter will say, “Yo, Doofus, what were you thinking?” But I don’t think so.
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“If you’re going to read only one book about pornography - Benjamin Franklin, |
AN INTERVIEW Q. What's the difference between a porn star and a whore? Q. That's getting a little harsh, isn't it? Q. Does the world need another book about pornography? Q. So how did you get to be Richard Pacheco? Q. Yes, but why? Why did you do it? Q. Are you interviewing yourself? Q. Why? Q. Do I need to write this book? |
“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” |
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“Here world, I pass thee like an orange to a child.
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- Gordon Archive |
“If there be any great pleasure in life without a woman |