Robert Rosen

The following is the first e-mail I sent to a former editor who worked with me at Swank publications and also worked at High Society. He now holds a prestigious position in academia. That’s why I’ve given him a pseudonym and in future e-mails will disguise any details that could be used to identify him. I’m running this correspondence to contrast my perspective with the academic perspective and to give a sense of what an author goes through as he prepares to publish a book and searches for anybody who might be willing to give him a useful blurb.

Hi Jack,

As promised, attached are the (very) uncorrected (and long awaited) Beaver Street galleys minus the real cover and pictures. I’ve been sending this to a limited number of people, mainly a few “characters” in the book, and a few friends and journalists who I know are interested. Printed galleys with pix and cover are still a few weeks away. But I am interested in any feedback, possibly to use as promo copy.

Thanks.

Bob

Click here to read Jack’s response.

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Another look into the diversity of subject matter found between the covers of Beaver Street: A History of Modern Pornography.

Hinckley, John 25, 30
Hitler, Adolph, 58, 65, 69, 71
Hogan’s Heroes 200
Holmes, John 30, 62, 167, 199, 201, 203, 204

The Erotic Review has liberated Jamie Maclean's Beaver Street review and made it available for all to read. Pretty good blurb, too, plugging it on their home page: "Rosen's hilarious and autobiographical account of the 1980s NY Pornmeisters, their tumescence and, for some, their detumescence. It's filthy work if you can get it…" Read More 

I’d like to say a few more things about Jamie Maclean’s review of Beaver Street in the Erotic Review. For one thing, I love the way he tied together the critique with references to odor in my book—my description of the fetid smell of the Hellfire club, the Henry Miller quote I used at the beginning, and his description of the way the book “captures the aroma of pornography.” I remember coming upon the Miller quote—“Sex is not romantic, particularly when it is commercialized, but it does create an aroma, pungent and nostalgic”—and knowing immediately that it belonged in Beaver Street, though I hadn’t connected it with the Hellfire scene. It was unconscious, as these things often are.

I can already see the term papers: “Odor Imagery in Beaver Street.” Which raises the question: Can odor be an image? I’m not sure. It doesn’t necessarily create a picture in my brain. But it does create a smell.

I also think I should take Maclean’s advice: Bottle the aroma and sell it like perfume. I’ve got a great advertising slogan: Beaver Street, for that unmistakable stench of pornography. Read More 

Normally, you’re lucky to get one decent pull quote out of a review. But Jamie Maclean’s review of Beaver Street that ran in the May issue of the Erotic Review, and that I posted in its entirety yesterday, contains a wealth of pull quotes, any one of which would look good on the cover of a future edition of Beaver Street. Below, I’ve selected five, and I ask you, my readers, to vote for the one you like best by leaving a comment. Come on, guys. I don’t often ask for reader participation. Let’s show a little enthusiasm!

1. “Enormously entertaining.”
2. “Fast-paced, ironic style, underwritten by a wealth of hilarious experience, insider knowledge and serious research.”
3. “A revealing examination of North America’s bafflingly schizoid sexual psyche.”
4. “No exposé of sleazy pop culture has ever got this up-close and personal or received such intelligent, funny treatment.”
5. “Beaver Street captures the aroma of pornography, bottles it, and gives it so much class you could put it up there with Dior or Chanel.” Read More 

The following review appears in the May issue of the “posh” British sex journal Erotic Review. I’ve posted it here in its entirety, as the issue is only available by subscription. Text © Erotic Review.

By Jamie Maclean

Why did Robert Rosen throw up a promising journalistic career at the age of 30 to spend the next sixteen years of his life as a porn magazine editor, even taking part in a shoot (for reasons of journalistic integrity and in the name of transgressive art) called The Five Dollar Blow Job? ‘In many ways,’ he writes, ‘my professional pornographic odyssey is an ordinary tale of economic survival in New York.’

As someone who has spent roughly this length of time in ‘adult’ publishing, I could identify with the author of an enormously entertaining book about working behind the triple x-rated scenes of magazines such as High Society, Stag and D-Cup. I could also relate when Rosen had ‘not only become unmoored from all sense of conventional sexual mores (…) but I’d ceased to think rationally about sex itself.’ Or the times when the whiff of ‘fetid air, thick with the smell of urine and underlying stench of decay, made me stick to my stomach.’ In fact, here Rosen is describing a visit to Hellfire, an S&M club in NY’s meatpacking district, yet the experience works well as a metaphor for his equivocal reactions to having to occasionally ‘tread the fine line between arousing and sickening.’

The title of Robert Rosen’s Beaver Street, A History of Modern Pornography is a clue to the book’s fast-paced, ironic style, underwritten by a wealth of hilarious experience, insider knowledge and serious research. Yes, it is a history, and an important one at that, but it’s also an engaging slice of autobiography, a revealing examination of North America’s bafflingly schizoid sexual psyche and a tour d’horizon of some of the monoliths that dotted the late 20th century US porno landscape.

Among these were the kings of the stroke mag world, the aptly named Carl Ruderman (the ‘Father of Phone Sex’), ‘Chip’ Goodman, Larry Flynt and Screw’s Al Goldstein. And what often surprised these pornmeisters were the technological leaps that made some very rich indeed but which also, occasionally, bankrupted them. Rosen ably covers the Lockhart Commission on pornography, conceived by a desperate Lyndon Johnson beset by Vietnam War unpopularity and brought forth by the foul-mouthed Nixon and his sleazy, morally bankrupt cronies. He reserves his big guns for its successor, the Iran-Contra-linked, anti-porn, Meese Commission. Finally the author excoriates the staggeringly treacherous behaviour of Traci Lords, the weaselly, mendacious little madam who nearly brought the porn industry to its knees.

A billion dollar industry usually touches everything and everyone, and porn is no exception to the rule: US politics, international trade, Adolf Hitler, Jack Nicholson – even Spiderman and The Godfather. However Rosen is wisely selective when he revisits his deeply unlikeable former employers and the enjoyable, but complex (almost everyone is called Goodman, but don’t worry, the footnotes are excellent), warren of US porn-mag publishing of the early 1980s.

Surely no exposé of sleazy pop culture has ever got this up-close and personal or received such intelligent, funny treatment. As Rosen shrewdly quotes from Henry Miller’s Quiet Days in Clichy at the beginning of the book: ‘Sex is not romantic, particularly when it is commercialised, but it does create an aroma, pungent and nostalgic.’ Beaver Street captures the aroma of pornography, bottles it, and gives it so much class you could put it up there with Dior or Chanel.

Beaver Street: A History of Modern Pornography by Robert Rosen; Headpress; ISBN 978-1-90048-676-7; £11.99 from Headpress

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The late David Foster Wallace was no stranger to the porn industry. Writing as Willem R. deGroot and Matt Rundlet for the September 1998 issue of Premiere, Wallace’s satiric takedown of the Adult Video News awards, “Neither Adult nor Entertainment,” was laced, as was most of his work, with hilarious footnotes. Wallace pushed the use of annotation to the limits of comic absurdity in a way I’d never seen, and by so doing, he paved the way for me to do the same thing in Beaver Street.

My footnotes, I think, add a new dimension to the book. As an example, I'll quote from the footnote on page 156, which describes the people on fringes of the adult industry who magazine editors could no longer work with in the aftermath of the Traci Lords scandal:

“These ‘marginal’ photographers and models were the people who made porno interesting, gave it what passed for a soul, and delivered the true grit and unvarnished reality of American sexuality—like the plumbers from St. Louis who sent in sleazy Polaroids of their naked girlfriends splayed pink on rusting lawn chairs in junk-strewn backyards; the garbage men from Detroit who submitted strangely erotic images of tattooed dancers with oversized clits posing on grungy toilets; and the postal workers from Pittsburgh who shot exhibitionist housewives shaving their pudenda for cheap thrills and a taste of ‘trailer-park celebrity.’” Read More 

Last month I found an enthusiastic Beaver Street thread in an online forum called AVMANIACS . So, I registered for the forum and told its members that I was available to discuss the book. A good portion of discussion, thus far, has focused on Traci Lords, whose story is at the heart of Beaver Street.

Interestingly, a number of posters appear to be about the same age as Lords, who was born in 1968, and many of their questions have to do with how Lords was able to acquire fraudulent ID. One poster said, for example, “I was a teenager in the same era as Traci Lords (and I think I’m a little smarter than your average porn actress), and you should have seen MY pathetic attempts to procure a fake ID. I find it hard to believe a fifteen year old ON HER OWN c. 1984 could get a fake birth certificate, a fake US passport, etc.”

First of all, Traci Lords was not your average porn actress. As I say in Beaver Street, she was the world’s greatest anti-porn star. And this poster has not taken into consideration her level of desperation. Lords didn’t want phony ID to buy beer. She needed the ID to survive. (I wonder if the poster made a serious effort to acquire a phony birth certificate, as Lords did.) As the porn industry found out too late: Never underestimate the capabilities of a ruthless and ambitious 15-year-old woman. Read More 

In the fifth and final part of my conversation with Kate Copstick and Jamie Maclean of the Erotic Review, we discuss the interplay of the personal and historical in Beaver Street, and how the book looks at the late 20th and early 21st centuries through a pornographic lens. Click here to watch all five parts of the interview.

Click here to buy Beaver Street on Amazon UK.

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The previous name, Advertisements for Myself, an allusion to Norman Mailer, served me well in the lead-up to the publication of Beaver Street. But now that the book’s out in the UK, and I’m posting daily on all matters relating to it, it was time for a more accurate name. So, with apologies to Canada, where the beaver is the national symbol; Oregon, the Beaver State; New York, where the beaver is the state animal; and my alma mater, the City College of New York, where the beaver is the school mascot, I bring you the first installment of The Daily Beaver. Read More 

No, I’ve not yet given my mother a copy of Beaver Street, though I intend to give her one when she’s in town later this month. She is, after all, referenced in the book, though she doesn’t know that yet. (I don’t think she reads this blog.) And she is aware that her name is in the acknowledgements. “Do you want your name in the acknowledgements?” I asked her as I was compiling the list.

She said yes.

“Are you sure? You know it’s a dirty book.”

She said yes.

“You realize it’s going to be like being Henry Miller’s mother.” It was the best example I could think of on the spur of the moment.

“I’d like to be Henry Miller’s mother,” she said.

Well, happy Mother’s Day, mom. Hope you still like being Robert Rosen's mother.

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The author of Beaver Street categorically denies any connection between his book and the film The Beaver, starring Jodie Foster and Mel Gibson. There is, however, an interesting story in Beaver Street about how John Hinckley wrote letters to High Society magazine urging them to run more nude photos of Jodie Foster.

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If I’m reading the following tweet correctly, yesterday Beaver Street hit #3 on Amazon Japan:

otona_amazon 洋書/ #3: Beaver Street: A History of Modern Pornography.

That’s amazing news, and I can only wonder what’s going to happen when the book’s translated into Japanese. So, thank you Japan!

Also, Beaver Street was mentioned in Galley Cat, which is cool, because the site, part of Media Bistro, is about as mainstream as it gets. So, thank you Galley Cat! Appreciate the attention.

And don’t worry, dear readers, I’ve not forgotten about Senator Orrin Hatch, who continues to make headlines with his demand for more vigorous porn prosecutions. We’ll get back to him soon enough.

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In part four of my conversation with Kate Copstick and Jamie Maclean of the Erotic Review, we talk about how anybody with a video camera, a girlfriend, and an Internet connection can become an instant porn star.

Beaver Street is going fast on Amazon UK. But you can always order it directly from Headpress.

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Beaver Street is a dirty book that’s as much about politics and economics as it is about pornography, and much of what I wrote continues to be relevant to the latest breaking news. Senator Orrin Hatch’s call for the vigorous prosecution of pornographers is, of course, one example. Osama bin Laden is another. Though the book doesn’t mention him by name, it does reference his deeds in an effort to illuminate the government’s hypocritical and insane response to the “pornographic menace” at a time of genuine national crisis.

In the chapter titled “So You Want to Talk About Traci Lords?” I describe 2002 as “a fearful, repressive moment in American history, filled with echoes of McCarthyism and worse.” I then explain how “amidst the wars, death, terrorism, and threats of annihilation from ‘weapons of mass destruction,’” Congress takes the time to unanimously pass a resolution condemning a book, Harmful to Minors—a well-reasoned indictment of abstinence-only sex education, by Judith Levine, published by the University of Minnesota Press—as a work that promotes child pornography.

So, it’s taken the government ten years and how many billions of dollars to kill bin Laden? Is anything going to change now that he’s dead? Just asking, as they say.

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A few more amusing juxtapositions from the Beaver Street index:

Bernstein, Carl 138
Best of D-Cup 170

Canyon, Christy 90, 125, 147, 190
Capote, Truman 138

Graham, Rev. Billy 134, 135
Grand Matriarch, the (brothel) 47, 48, 53, 60

To be continued...

More than any other part of Beaver Street, I enjoy looking through the obsessively comprehensive index--because it takes every little thing I wrote about and arranges it in a random way that makes the book seem fresh. What the hell did I write about Marlon Brando (pg. 77) and Mel Brooks (pg. 97)? Oh... right... of course. How could I forget?

I'm especially amused by the absurd and occasionally illuminating juxtapositioning of certain names. For example, having once employed the porn star Missy Manners, this is probably not the first index that has Orrin Hatch (pg. 142) on top of Annette Haven (pg. 139). But I suspect that it is the first index to have the porn star Eric Edwards (pgs. 60, 108) in the middle of a Thomas Edison (pgs. 131, 164, 197)/Albert Einstein (pg. 115) sandwich.

To check out more of the index, or any other part of Beaver Street, get your copy now directly from Headpress. Support independent publishing! Read More 

Today we shall contrast an anti-porn statement of Spiro Agnew, Richard Nixon's bribe-taking vice president, with another pearl of wisdom from the Honorable Orrin Hatch, senior senator from Utah.

"As long as Richard Nixon is president, Main Street is not going to turn into Smut Alley." --Spiro Agnew

"Obscenity is toxic. Like other forms of toxic waste, obscenity harms everyone it touches." --Orrin Hatch

Read about it in Beaver Street, now back in stock on Amazon UK.

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...and talk about where to buy Beaver Street.

When Headpress released Beaver Street: A History of Modern Pornography in the UK last week, it immediately sold out on Amazon, and many people who ordered the book are still waiting for delivery. The good news is that more copies are on the way, and you should be receiving your Beaver soon. In the meantime, you can order the book online directly from Headpress, Blackwell's, and Langton.

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Why am I going off here every day about Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah and his call for more vigorous prosecution of pornographers? Well, aside from the fact that he once employed a woman who became a porn star, his call for the vigorous prosecution of pornographers is a classic sign of deep-seeded political corruption. It’s like a cry for help or a symptom of a terminal disease.

“Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel,” Samuel Johnson said over 200 years ago. Today, prosecuting pornography is the last refuge of the doomed politician. Just ask Richard Nixon, Spiro Agnew, Edwin Meese, Charles Keating, and Alberto Gonzales. Or read all about it in Beaver Street.

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Orrin Hatch of Utah is one of the leaders of the pack of senators calling for vigorous pornography prosecutions. I mentioned him in Beaver Street because his former aide Elisa Florez is “Missy Manners,” who starred in the Mitchell Brothers' XXX film Behind the Green Door: The Sequel (1986). Check out her photo here. Read More 

On the 25th anniversary of the Meese Commission and the Traci Lords scandal, 42 senators are demanding the Justice Department vigorously prosecute pornographers. This is one of the stories at the heart of Beaver Street. Every time conservatives come to power, they do the same thing, and it plays out the same way: The anti-porn warriors are exposed as criminals, and resign in disgrace.  Read More 

In the third part of my chat with Kate Copstick and Jamie Maclean of the Erotic Review, we discuss the collapse of pornography as a viable business. And as we continue to wait for the online booksellers to replenish their stocks, please order Beaver Street directly from Headpress. Read More 

Here's the second part of my chat with Kate Copstick and Jamie Maclean, in which I discuss working on both sides of the camera in the adult entertainment industry. You can order Beaver Street directly from Headpress as we await the online booksellers to replenish their stocks. Read More 

Beaver Street, my first book in 11 years, has been published today in the UK and already it's sold out on Amazon. But copies are still available directly from Headpress. Click here to order. And check out this very British interview with Kate Copstick and Jamie Maclean of the Erotic Review. Read More 

Beaver Street is being published tomorrow in the UK. It's my first book in 11 years and who knows how long it's going to be till the next one. I've launched a Beaver Street page on Facebook. You know how it works. Click here and show a little Beaver love. Read More 

Check out a Headpress slideshow of images and outtakes from the Beaver Street photo section, as well a couple of shots we considered "too hot" to publish in a mainstream book.

I've returned from a month of promoting Beaver Street and Nowhere Man in England and Italy. Click here to watch part one of my interview with Kate Copstick and Jamie Maclean of the Erotic Review.

Paul Slimak and Agnes Herrmann have graciously shot another Beaver Street promo video. Paul is a character in the book; I call him Henry Dorfman. He's a professional actor who specializes in playing Nazis. Agnes is also a professional actor and voice-over specialist. She's appeared in such films as The Road. Thank you Paul and Agnes!

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Sean Moncrieff, host of Moncrieff! on Newstalk Radio Ireland, was quite taken with the names of some of the porn stars I mention in Beaver Street. “They’re like superheroes,” he said of Deena Duo, Pandora Peaks, and Busty Dusty. But his favorite porn star was Auntie Climax, so christened by Izzy Singer, editor of For Adults Only magazine.

Singer was tickled pink to hear that a name he’d dreamed up decades ago was being discussed on an Irish radio show. “I was standing in the middle of Eighth Avenue, crossing the street, when it popped into my head,” he said.

“You never know when the Muse will speak,” I told him.

“Yes, lad,” he replied in an Irish brogue, “but she wouldn’ta given me such a lastin’ jewel had I not been supplicatin’ meself at her door for seven days and seven nights!” Read More