Las Vegas Weekly

Email chatting with Susie Bright about her book, ‘The Erotic Screen,’ and more

The gilded age: Susie Bright writes of the days when porn was still in theaters.

Dave Pickoff, AP

When Susie Bright was hired by Penthouse Forum in 1986 to write a monthly column about X-rated movies, she had a secret that she didn’t dare tell her editor: She’d never actually watched an adult film.

Bright was no sexual novice. She spent her days selling vibrators at San Francisco’s legendary sex toy store, Good Vibrations. By night, she was creating lesbian erotica with friends in an office space above a Chinese restaurant in the Castro. While she might have been naive about the conventions of mainstream porn—at least initially—she knew quite a bit about how to shoot and stage female orgasms and seductions. And perhaps more importantly, she knew how to write about sex.

Bright’s new e-book, The Erotic Screen Volume 1: The Golden Hardcore & the Shimmering Dyke-Core, is a collection of her Penthouse Forum columns from 1986 to 1989. In it, you’ll find vestiges of a bygone era, when adult movies were still shown in public theaters, and the women’s market for pornography was in its infancy.

According to film scholar Constance Penley, who teaches a course on the history of pornography at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Bright’s Erotic Screen is an “astonishingly original archive of this period.”

“It’s a firsthand account of a writer with such an insightful, quirky voice,” Penley says. “It’s also an account of the beginnings of the adult industry and of adult film criticism.”

In an email exchange, I asked Bright, the author and editor of more than 30 books about sex and erotica, to reflect on a period of time when so much about the adult industry seemed so different.

Like any good journalist, writing about porn meant you followed the action, which invariably brought you to Las Vegas for the annual adult entertainment trade show. What was that scene like in the mid-to-late ’80s?

It was as surreal as you can imagine. The “porn” part of the CES show was sequestered at the Sahara Hotel, and not officially acknowledged in the CES literature. It was truly a ghetto, a glittering, glorious slum. Porn director Bobby Hollander came up to me in a silk shirt, unbuttoned to reveal copious chest-fur and gold chains, and put his hand between my trouser legs: “So do you want to be in the movies, sweetheart?”

“No, I’m here to write about you, Bobby.”

Actor Ron Jeremy proposed, but I said the diamond wasn’t big enough. I hung out in the ladies john at the Sahara and gave out copies of [lesbian magazine] On Our Backs to all the porn stars who came in to powder their nose. Of course, these women were overwhelmingly dykes in their private lives.

And there was a lot of powder going on, too.

I also met the brand new “amateur” folks, like Homegrown Video, and others, people who never shot on film, who were as invested in the Internet underground as I was.

The world of porn has changed quite a bit since 1986. What are some of the biggest changes you’ve seen?

The end of film, the end of theaters, the end of the big budgets for individual films, for the actors, directors, writers and crew. In many ways, it was a coda to the Easy Rider/Raging Bull era.

The rise of the counter-culture was the bright spot—everyone who’d been told they couldn’t be part of sexual enterprise, everyone who had an erotic innovation, grabbed ahold of the new technology and blasted off.

The Erotic Screen offers a glimpse into an era of adult film that predates the Internet. In looking back, what are some of your personal highlights from this period?

The friends I made, many of whom I dearly miss. There were too many early casualties from AIDS, bad street drugs, alcohol, suicide, fast cars.

Everyone is so defensive about the sex part of sex movies that I feel like blurting out the unspeakable: Writing sex scenes, shooting sex scenes, and acting in them—and then f*cking around off-camera afterward—is a total gas when you are in the company of people who are uninhibited, witty, streetwise, intellectual and endlessly creative outlaws.

Bright wrote about pornographic films for Penthouse Forum in a time when movies like Behind the Green Door were able to be viewed in theaters.

Also, the camaraderie among the best artists in the business was sublime. It was incredible to have that kind of creative spark and sex with other people outside the context of marriage, romance novels and the “square life.”

You were creating lesbian porn for On Our Backs magazine and writing for Penthouse Forum during the height of the culture wars of the 1980s. What was the political climate like then, and how, if at all, has it changed today?

The Santorums of today were just as awful then. There was a terrible cloud of prejudice toward women speaking up for their sexual self-interest, toward the gay community for speaking up at all. Reaganism dominated the political mainstream. The mainstream feminist movement allied itself with fundamentalists against porn.

AIDS wiped out literally half our numbers, among the outliers. It really is true; the best people died first. And these were folks you didn’t see in front of the camera; they were behind it.

Nowadays, you have the pleasure of people knowing what “clitoris” means, or to share a joke about the essential love you have for your Magic Wand vibrator. We enjoy a widespread sense of humor about porn and sexual imagination, which is a sign of “ah yes, human after all; might as well enjoy it and study it.”

On the other hand, like rock ’n’ roll, the bulk of porn and the sex “biz” have been co-opted, pasteurized, dumbed-down, made into so much treacle for such stupid reasons ... it’s like elevator music now. Elevator music meets the Kardashians.

I don’t blame sex or cameras; it’s the nature of entertainment in our culture, and you could tell a similarly jaded tale of mainstream Hollywood in the gilded age. The part I enjoy now, as usual, is the edgy artists, the little-known bloggers and the rule-breaking innocents. You can just imagine who they remind me of.

Susie Bright must-reads:

Big Sex Little Death: A Memoir

Seal Press, 2011

How to Write a Dirty Story

Simon & Schuster, 2002

Susie Sexpert's Lesbian Sex World, Second Edition

Cleis Press, 1998

The Sexual State of the Union

Simon & Schuster, 1997

Jason Ganwich /

Susie Bright's Journal

susiebright.com

Lynn Comella is a Women’s Studies professor at UNLV.