by Susie Bright
I told him my favorite film of his was Up!, which includes a lengthy scene of Adolf Hitler being debased beyond recognition.
“All my movies are about the war,” he said.
The Mitchell Brothers, Artie and Jim, who created Behind the Green Door, reminded me of Russ, too — if at opposite sides of the political spectrum. Meyer would defend Reagan and Bush to the end. He defended their wars and their cocksmanship. He defended their mistresses.
Jimmie and Artie were the antiwar crusaders, the muckraking Left, but with just as much spirit as the Allies. They were the kind of people you could call in the middle of the night and say, “Let’s do something and get those bastards,” and they’d be right on it, a regular font of creative subversion. Underground comix? Fucking with Walt Disney? Lesbian radicals? AIDS? The Catholic Church? They were game.
One time they called me at an hour when I couldn’t make out the clock in the dark. “Come on down,” they said. “Everyone’s here.” That might mean everyone from Ron Turner at Last Gasp to Hunter Thompson to poet Danielle Willis. “We’re going to publish a new paper and stop this fucking war in Iraq.”
“And of course you can’t do it without me?” I asked, rubbing the sand out of my eyes.
“Are you kidding?” Artie roared. He made his trademark caw like a crow, blasting through my receiver. Clearly, the White House was doomed.
It’s no mistake that Jim and Art, along with Russ, were the most vociferous porn directors about establishing and protecting their American copyright. The reason you see a little blurb on your DVD that says “Back off, motherfucker, this is protected” is because of their decades-long fight in court to protect their work.
Jim and Art were the ones who said, “Just because you don’t respect what we do doesn't mean you can violate our copyright. It doesn’t matter if it’s horseshit; it’s our horseshit, not yours.”
Not the Mob’s, not the government’s. A radical thing to insist in their era.
The pornographic minority — and really, I can count these people on my fingers — were a few bohemians from porn’s peep-show origins, the Signal Corps stalwarts, and, most influentially, the queer intelligentsia, epitomized by John Preston, John Rowberry, David Hurles, Boyd McDonald, Michael Constant, Jack Fritscher. They were On Our Backs daddies, our Oscar Wildes, our Genets, with address books of printers and video duplicators who wouldn’t discriminate against us.
To a fault, they were aesthetically deep. When I was pregnant and considering the pros and cons of circumcision — if I had a boy — John Rowberry would summon his foreskin arguments with quotations from the French. Then he’d make me the most incredible buerre blanc. Jack Fritscher went to seminary school with disgraced Cardinal Bernard Law. These men were educated, like my father. They would have found each other great company.
My gay comrades from magazines like Drummer were very much seminarians, whereas the Mitchell family and Russ’s one-man army were the autodidactic infantry.
The queer Jesuits of porn had expansive ideas about beauty, sex, death, transformation. They had zero interest in trying to convince or uplift anyone who didn’t already get it. They didn’t want to reach out to “mainstream couples,” or convince “Cosmo readers,” or testify in Congress. Their battles were private cuts, not debates on the tabloid pages.
The men’s gay publishing and film world was designed as vertically as the rest of the porn empires … they ran and owned their own show from top to bottom. Their audience was devoted, much more discriminating than the straight world, and dedicated to furthering their glory within their own parallel universe. I was green with envy.
Debi, Nan, and I wouldn’t have been able to secure the practical means for producing our magazine and videos if our “daddies” hadn’t helped us. I was always curious why they made an exception for us, why they loved On Our Backs. They had zero interest in us sexually and no possible way of making a dime off their generosity. Nor would their good works ever be advertised.
I think it was a case of mutual inspiration. We needed gods, and they needed a few goddesses. I was a True Believer in the gospel of sexual sacrifice. The eighties were a period of homosexual incandescence that was dying under the brutality of AIDS, “being normal,” getting married, joining the army, and being Just Like Everyone Else. The AIDS death march came like thunder, and then everything else were insults that could barely be perceived at the time.
I think the daddies’ crazy “Harry” loved our unorthodox “Sally.” We both cared about beautiful photography and poetry and brutal sexual honesty. We were the last of the bohemians, in a nation dying of erotic illiteracy.
I published a few of John Preston’s stories at the end of his life, when he was dying from complications of AIDS. He was expiring in his apartment in Boston; I was in San Francisco in the back of my kitchen, my toddler Aretha drawing furiously on the floor as I typed at my desk to line up all my author contributors. It was 1994, the second year I published my first bestseller: The Best American Erotica short-story series.
My stomach churned as I moved to dial John’s number. I spent most of the AIDS onslaught like a bowl of Jell-O, “This isn’t happening, this isn't happening.”
Everybody I looked up to was vanishing, and I could only keep repeating, like a child, “But I don’t want you to die.”
John had always signed and mailed his contracts to me in good order; it was unprecedented for him to be late.
I let his phone ring five times — no machine picked up. Then a dying man lifted the receiver. I could hear things falling to the floor. His death rattle cursed into the speaker: “Fuck it!”
“John, it’s me. It’s Susie.”
“I know,” he croaked. I could hear him sigh and sink down.
“This is awful,” I said. “I'm just putting BAE to bed, and I know you want to be in it, but I don’t have your contract. This is ridiculous! — shall I hang up?” I didn’t want to cry while on the phone with him. He must be so sick of people crying. “I love you, John. This is isn’t why I want to be calling you. …” I couldn’t stop blithering.
He didn’t interrupt me. His breathing was labored. All I could hear was his breath.
“Are you there, John, is anyone with you?” I started to think of who lived close to him and had the presence of mind to batter down the door.
“No, no, M’s coming later, it’s okay.” He hacked a bit. “I don’t want to wait, though. I want to fax the contract to you, but … if you saw all the tubes in me, and these cords — it just takes some time.”
I could hear him try to get up again. Everything was a bump or a small crash.
“John, stop it — this is messed up; it doesn’t matter. I’m not going to be the person who offed you getting your signature. I’ll forge it, we’ll do something; just forget it!”
John stopped his snail’s pace demolition and regained some of his deep voice. “No, this is the only thing that does matter, the only fucking thing.”
I heard his fax machine whirring on the other end. The one-page agreement was coming through my end. His signature — he had such beautiful handwriting, remember? — was half of a scrawl.
“Is it alright?” he asked. “Is it alright?”
“It’s perfect,” I said. “Your story is perfect; everyone is going to be blown away. You’re going to make grown straight men cry.”
You know, like Russ Meyer.
I have Preston’s contracts in my drawers and all his beautiful books on my shelves. His Flesh and the Word collections were my inspirations for Best American Erotica. The truth was, gay writers, every year through the nineties, wrote “the best” erotic fiction in America, and everyone else was only struggling in the back of the heat.
Why were they better? Because their audience was not sitting around wondering whether it was okay to be sexual, to be a man, to have a sexual literate mind. They demanded it.
Women, our intended audience, were just crawling out of their eggs. Was it okay to be a matur
e woman? Was a whore’s integrity something to cherish? Did our education, our power, add up to something that wasn’t only maternal?
Straight men, or “ostensibly straight men,” as John would have said … they were so guilty. Drowning in the muck of it. Loathing themselves, hiding, unable to see the beauty in themselves or any other man.
Most of the businessmen I met in the sex trade were like that … not okay about sex. Deluded with the material payoff. As sexist as … Archie Bunker. Their question to me was the same question as square America’s: What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?
In the late eighties, I made a movie show-and-tell called All Girl Action: The History of Lesbian Eroticism in Hollywood. I put all of my most thought-provoking film clips inside it. Russ let me have a print of Vixen, the first American feature to include a lesbian sex scene — and perhaps the most amusing one produced to this day.
We premiered my show at the art deco Castro Theater in San Francisco at the annual gay film festival. One of the festival veterans, Bob Hawke, was instrumental in making sure I could show each clip in its original medium: 16 mm, 35 mm, Betamax, whatever. We had four different projectors set up for every movie format.
After the festival, I wanted to settle in with Bob for a long pot-filled evening of queer film gossip, but I couldn't find him. His number was disconnected. A volunteer at the festival interrupted my search, grim-faced — “Bob’s gone, Susie,” she said. “He said he just couldn't live anymore.”
What was this treachery? I didn’t know anything about his personal life. What happened? I couldn’t process the losses anymore.
In 1999, I was invited to speak at a Los Angeles film conference. I walked into our panel’s auditorium and directly into the black-polo-shirt-covered chest of Bob Hawke. I was all made up for the cameras, but it was for naught — my mascara streamed down my cheeks in tears.
“I thought you were dead!” I cried — the first time I’ve ever greeted anyone with those words. I hit his chest with my fists.
Bob held me tight but struggled with an explanation: “No, no,” he said. “I just … I just dropped out for a while. I should have told you — a lot of people — I should have …”
He asked me if I had seen a new movie he’d produced, Chasing Amy.
One of the event producers passed me a handful of Kleenex. “Uh-uh, I haven’t,” I said. “It’s supposed about lesbians, right? When did you start producing movies?”
This was the opposite of suicide, right?
Bob got a strange look on his face. “Well, lesbians, not really. It’s more about … you!” Then he flinched, as if I might punch him again. “Actually, you should see it. You really should.”
I came home, and wondered why Chasing Amy was about me. I had not been chased lately. Why had no one said anything to me? Were all my friends too snobby to see a Hollywood film about lesbians? Probably. I rented the video.
Chasing Amy turned out to be a story about a slacker who falls for a bisexual dyke. She’s blond, femme, tough. He’s a square guy — not a dyke daddy — and not at all sure if it’s okay to be with someone as “open” as Amy.
Every word that comes out of the heroine’s mouth blows the young man’s puritanical mind. But he likes it. There’s a scene where Amy’s on a swing at a playground, and she starts talking to him about sex:
ALYSSA
“Fucking” is not limited to penetration ...
HOLDEN
Well where’s the penetration in lesbian sex?
She holds up her hand.
HOLDEN (CON’T)
A finger? Come on. I’ve had my finger in my ass but I wouldn’t say I’ve had anal sex.
ALYSSA
Did I hold up a finger?
She waves her hand.
HOLDEN
(A beat; then he gets it)
You’re kidding?!?!
She nods.
HOLDEN (CON’T)
How ... ?!?
ALYSSA
Our bodies are built to pass a child, for Christ’s sake.
It was so strange to hear a conversation of mine coming out of her mouth on my television set.
The two characters proceed to have an affair. The boy rejects Alyssa not for being a dyke, but for having fucked around too much … she has been the high school “slut.” Ah, that was familiar, too.
I wrote to Bob that I had published a new book, a little further afield than Amy. It was called Nothing But the Girl, a book of lesbian erotic photography. The book had a dedication, which I copied for him:
This book is dedicated to all the lesbian artists who would not, could not, and cannot imagine being in this collection:
because you fear for your job
because you fear abandonment
because your lover is a closet case
because your family is ashamed of you
because someone threatened to take your kids away
because the academy didn’t like it
because the gallery disdained it
because your estate does not wish to cooperate
because it’s politically incorrect
because it’s politically inopportune
because you don’t approve of the word “lesbian”
because you don’t approve of the word “dyke”
because you don’t approve of “porn”
because you think sex should really be private
because it was different when you grew up
because you don’t see the point in bringing this out into the open
because you don’t feel like living anymore
because you didn’t mean it that way
because you’re locked up
because you’re doped up
because what did lesbians ever do for you, anyway
because it hurts to be criticized and cut down
because people are cruel
because you’re not a hero
because
the first cut
thank you
is the deepest
Motherhood
You can house their bodies but not their thoughts.
They have their own thoughts.
You can house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls live in a place called tomorrow,
Which you can’t visit, not even in your dreams.
— Kahlil Gibran
I got pregnant in 1989, when I was thirty-two, the same age as my mother when she had me. I was due in early June, which inspired a flood of Gemini good wishes from my On Our Backs readers, who were as surprised and curious as everyone else.
“Did you inseminate or did you party?” asked Marika at our Christmas party. I laughed so hard, she said, “Oh! You partied.”
I did party. But I also was falling in love. And then out of it. My bisexual heart was in a bit of torment.
It was the eve of a baby boom — I didn’t know any other women my age who were taking the plunge. They’d all done it a lot earlier, or had foresworn the whole racket — that would’ve included me.
My daughter-to-be, Aretha Elizabeth Bright, surprised me in every way — including her late-June Cancerian arrival. She had eyes like dark moons, and when the midwife put her in my arms, she looked into me like no one has ever looked at me before.
When Aretha was six months old, a neighbor of mine saw us walking home from the grocery store, baby tucked into her stroller, a loaf of bread sticking out between her curly head and the diaper bag.
“Look at you!” he exclaimed, as if a figure of the Madonna and Child had sprung to life. Well, I didn’t mind if he wanted to make a fuss. The oxytocin was flowing through my veins.
This old codger, Mr. Hera, had always taken a dim view of what he knew about me from the newspapers — he’d make a chauvinist what’s-the-world-coming-to? remark whenever we ran into each other on garbage night.
He leaned over to admire Aretha’s little face, then looked up at me with a smile: “Now,
isn’t this the very best thing you’ve ever done with your life?”
I covered my eyes with my hands and laughed. “On no, Mr. Hera, please, don’t ruin it.” Then I straightened up and touched his shoulder. I'm a few inches taller than him. “You know, Mr. Hera, you’re right, you’re right — more than you even know.”
My pregnancy and my daughter’s life worked on me like True North. I had to Protect the Baby, but I ended up Protecting Me. My maternal certainty was a tonic. I knew whom I had to defend. Malingerers, fakers, and self-destructive impulses were red-tagged and booted. I had a magnet in me for doing the right thing.
How could someone like me, who got pregnant by accident, unpartnered, uncertain of her future, find motherhood so gifted? Is there really a time to every purpose under heaven?
When I was pregnant and staring at my enormous navel, I wondered if this was my comeuppance. All the time I spent as a child fuming, crying, hiding, swearing I would never put another human being through such cruelties as were visited upon me … Would I now be humbled?
I did get pregnant unexpectedly. I spent the first thirty-one years of my life being either a lesbian or a complete martinet about birth control and all of sudden … I got sloppy. It was out of character. So was my pregnancy test … I burst into tears when I got a (false) negative. “It can’t be true; it can’t be true!” I sobbed in the car next to my friend who drove me home from my doctor’s appointment. She was bewildered at my rage and tears. “But you never wanted to have children!” she said.
That was true. I could convince anyone about zero population growth; I would rant about the narcissism of parental conceits. I’d written articles on why a woman’s worth is not the sum of her womb. I’d write them all over again, too.
