Robert Rosen

 

More than a dozen academic books have cited Beaver Street: A History of Modern Pornography as a source of information. They have titles like Desire and Consent in Representations of Adolescent Sexuality With Adults; Digital Gender Sexual Violations; and Revenge Pornography: Gender, Sexuality and Motivations. Unless you've taken a college-level porn studies course, I doubt you've heard of any of them, and even if you've come across such a book, it's unlikely you've read it. They're filled with academic jargon and are almost unreadable.

 

Historian Jane Kamensky, a former Harvard professor, recently published a book about the porn industry that, unlike its academic predecessors, is written for a mainstream audience and has been getting some high-profile media attention. Candida Royalle and the Sexual Revolution: A History from Below cites Beaver Street four times.

 

Royalle (real name Candice Vadala), who died in 2015 at the age of 64, was a porn star who became a producer of X-rated videos that explored women's fantasies.

 

I was curious what information Kamensky had gleaned from my book. So I checked out Candida Royalle's extensive notes, practically a book in itself, and was impressed with the enormous amount of research Kamensky did.

 

Though Beaver Street doesn't mention Royalle—I never dealt with her during my tenure as an editor of "adult" magazines—I did write extensively about other people and topics Kamensky explores: the late Gloria Leonard, who was the figurehead publisher of High Society magazine and a member of Royalle's porn star support group; Traci Lords, the underage sex superstar who disrupted the porn industry; male and female porn stars in general; and the nitty-gritty of porn technology and economics. One of Kamensky's Beaver Street notes has to do with Lords and another concerns porn technology and economics.

 

The Leonard note calls for closer examination. In Beaver Street I wrote that High Society's circulation was 400,000. This is accurate information based on what I learned during my time working at the magazine with Leonard in 1983 and '84. In Candida Royalle, Kamensky quotes Leonard as saying that circulation was four million. This is absurd—she added a zero to the true number. If it were true, it would have meant High Society sold more copies than Hustler and was running close behind Penthouse and Playboy. The whole time I was there, the real publisher, Carl Ruderman, was obsessed with catching up to Hustler, his personal white whale that would brand him "Asshole of the Month" in November 1983. In her note Kamensky writes, "Rosen disputes Leonard's figures."

 

This is correct. I here and now dispute with great vigor Leonard's fantasyland PR hype that nobody with any sense ever believed.

 

The most interesting footnote is for a quote Kamensky uses in Chapter 22, "Pornography of the People." Izzy Singer (real name Neil Wexler) is one of the main characters in Beaver Street. He's an intellectual pornographer and my porn industry mentor. Kamensky writes: "For male performers, orgasmic reliability was the gold standard, and could insure a lifetime of work for those with the homeliest faces. But for women, ripeness was all, and in the heat of the triple-X theater, ripeness quickly sugared into rot. The publisher of For Adults Only magazine put it bluntly: 'The sad fact is that porn stars age in dog years.'" In footnote 53, Kamensky identifies the source of this wisdom as "Izzy Smith."

 

The dog years quote comes from Beaver Street, page 91, and Kamensky got it almost right—it's "sad part" not "sad fact." And she got the pseudonym, Izzy Singer, half right. (Wexler was the editor, not the publisher, of For Adults Only.) But she must be given credit for recognizing Wexler's profound insight, one that in my non-academic opinion deserves a place of pride in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations.

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May Pang's relationship with John Lennon began in 1973 after he separated from Yoko Ono. Eighteen months later, in early 1975, Lennon returned to Ono. Pang's 2023 documentary, The Lost Weekend: A Love Story, covers the same ground as her book Loving John, published in 1983. It's not surprising that it took Pang almost 50 years to get the movie version of her story into theatres and onto streaming services. As I've discussed in my book Nowhere Man, in The Village Voice, and elsewhere on this blog, Ono, now 91, uses the threat of legal action to try to control what other people say about Lennon. And she's often successful at repressing stories that go against the official narrative of Lennon as a happy househusband and secular saint. (Michael "Mike Tree" Medeiros's unpublished book, In Lennon's Garden, is an especially egregious example.) What Pang went through to make and release The Lost Weekend must be quite a story in itself. That the film exists is a tribute to her tenacity.

 

If you know the story of Pang and Lennon, The Lost Weekend, set in LA and New York, will seem familiar. It's a diary-like collection of still photos of the two of them, some iconic, some taken by Pang; video of Lennon and Ono; video of Pang on various talk shows; recent video of Pang with Lennon's son Julian; and a bit of animation to fill in the gaps. Pang provides the narration and does a nice job of it. The entire film is well done and has garnered a wide array of mostly positive reviews, like the one in Variety.

 

What I found most interesting about The Lost Weekend is that Pang confirms virtually everything I wrote about her relationship with Lennon in Nowhere Man, a book that grew out of my access to diaries the former Beatle kept during the final six years of his life. Lennon's diaries begin in 1975, when he's living with Pang in her apartment on the east side of Manhattan and enjoying himself very much. The diaries confirm that he had deep feelings for Pang and carried a torch for her the rest of his life. They were in love, she says in the film.

 

"John was torn between May and Yoko," I write in Nowhere Man. "He wanted both of them but that was out of the question. May was fun, and pure sexual passion." But Yoko "was survival." May, with some hesitation, talks about their active sex life and mentions that the last time she spoke to John was when he called her from Cape Town, South Africa, a "directional" journey he took in April 1980. This is all detailed in Nowhere Man.

 

One thing May didn't know was that Lennon had learned to program dreams and many of the dreams he programmed were about making love to May. It was often the only way he could be with her after he returned to Yoko.

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Aida Vílchez and Martín León Soto rehearse "If I Fell," by the Beatles, for their Nowhere Band show at La Tregua in Sevilla, Spain.

 

The Nowhere Man event I did in Sevilla,* in January, was the second reading and Q&A I've done in Spain. The first was in 2018, in Madrid. And what I witnessed both times was a passion for the Beatles that's different from anything I've seen in the United States in the last 50 years. There's an innocence and purity to it that I can't quite explain. You can feel it in Aida Vílchez and Martín León Soto's rehearsal of the Beatles' "If I Fell." And you can hear it in the crowd's response when they performed the song at La Tregua. ("If I Fell" begins at 01:30:50 in the video below.)

 

 

I originally thought this innocense and purity had to do with Francisco Franco, the (still dead) fascist generalissimo who led Spain from 1938 to 1973. He repressed foreign rock music though allowed the Beatles to perform there twice to show the world that Spain was a "normal" country. But once Franco was out of power and Spain became a democracy, British and American rock exploded there. So I was under the impression that the Spanish were making up for lost time with their passionate embrace of the Beatles. But that's not what happened with the people who invited me to Spain. Franco was their parents' generation. I now think it's more a case that they were born too late and they're trying to re-create and recapture the energy of this fantastic thing they missed. They do it by playing Beatles music live and listening to stories about them, especially from people who had a connection to it. Which is true in the US, too, but it's so much more commercialized here, which diminishes that feeling of purity and innocense.

 

The Spanish passion for the Beatles reminds me of the way I felt about the Brooklyn Dodgers, who left town when I was four. I was just old enough to understand who they were and what I'd missed. But there was no way to re-create the magic of 1955, the only time Brooklyn won the World Series.

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*Forgive me for saying Sevilla rather than Seville. But Seville no longer sounds right to my ear. Two weeks with Aida and Martín and I feel like a Sevillano.

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When I was on her payroll there was lots of free time between encounters, and I wanted to make the most of it. So I tried an experiment. Every morning, as soon as I got up, I sat down in front of the typewriter, rolled in a blank sheet of paper, and filled it with words. I just banged away on the keys and whatever came out came out. No editing. Pure stream of consciousness, and I did it for 100 consecutive days, pasting each sheet of paper into the diary I was keeping. Now, all these years later, I'm trying it again on my blog. I don't know what I'm going to say, but I'm going to say something. And no, I'm not going to keep it up for 100 days. But I'm going to do it today, until I don't feel like doing it anymore. And for you aspiring writers who might be reading this, if you're blocked, do what I'm doing now: Sit down in front of your computer and write anything, throw words on the screen until the right words begin to flow. And yes, I might go back and edit this a little—for clarity. The difference between this and what I did 40 years ago with a typewriter is that I'm posting this here and probably on FB, too, and people will be reading it. I don't want to waste their time (or your time). I want them (or you) to get something out of this. Don't ask me what. So let's call this an experiment in blogging. Do people blog anymore? Or is everything that matters on TikTok and Instagram? What can I say? The past few weeks I've been into diaries, not the famous ones you may have read about in one of my books, but my own diaries, which I wrote about last week and here I go again. What is it that keeps me writing in those notebooks? Well there's fear—fear that if I stop, the writing gears will rust as they did back in the 70s before I began keeping diaries. And there's compulsion, the compulsion to write everything down in notebooks just... because. Though I'm not as compulsive as I was when I started doing this in 1977. In those days, when I carried a pocket-size memo book, if somebody said something interesting, I'd take it out and write down what they said. "What are you doing?" they'd ask. "Writing down what you just said." Drove people nuts. It was like if you were with me, everything was on the record. I don't do that anymore. If you say something interesting I'll write it down when I get home, though my memory isn't what it used to be.

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All my books are available on Amazon, all other online bookstores, and at your local brick-and-mortar bookstore.

 

I invite you to join me on Facebook or follow me on X or my eternally embryonic Instagram or my recently launched Threads.