Prior to finding my blog post on the Daily Dish last Friday, the only things I knew about Andrew Sullivan were that he regularly appears, on the Chris Matthews Show, is out as an HIV+ gay man, calls himself a conservative, and has written some really waggish and scathing things about the current administration on his blog. Count me intrigued.
Now as it happens, it turns out my (gay) uncle already has Sullivan’s new book The Conservative Soul: How we lost it. How we can get it back, and he’s going to lend it to me when he’s done, but in the meanwhile, I spent some time this weekend puttering around the internet to find out more about Sullivan. Yesterday I came across an omission in his blog The Daily Dish that I think is illuminating. In acknowledging a readers critique of his view of Ronald Reagan, Sullivan writes:
“Reagan did indeed presage some of the worst aspects of today’s degenerate Republicanism. His deficit spending, his subversion of constitutionalism in Iran-Contra, his coded appeal to Southern bigotry when beginning his campaign, and his dithering on the HIV epidemic are all fore-runners of later abuse.”
Notably absent from this list (or at least notably absent to me) is The Meese Commission, which I think is a good symbol for the rise to power of religious fundamentalism inside the Republican party during the Reagan years. In fact, I’d go as far as saying that The Meese Commission itself was the dowery delivered to evangelicals, who really had, and still have, no other reason to wed themselves to what was and still is the party of business.
The Meese Commission and the empowerment of fundamentalists it represents, had a devastating effect on the economic viability of erotic art. The Reagan years saw the rise of “community standards” based obscenity prosecutions, which allowed a district attorney to in any jurisdiction to bring charges against producers in other states, on the theory that a magazine produced and printed in (let’s say) New York had violated the community standards in (let’s say) Macon, GA, and that was a crime.
Sometimes these prosecutions were successful, sometimes they weren’t, but they were always costly to defend. So producers did one of two things: the tailored they work to what they thought (hoped) was within the standard of the most conservative communities, or they refused to distribute to what they regarded as potentially dangerous communities. (This is practice is still commonplace today. Head over to MichaelLucas.com, or Blowfish.com, or anywhere else that sells sex merchandise and check out their “will not ship to” lists.)
But a far more devastating than the obscenity prosecutions was the great Advertiser Pussy Panic.
Throughout the seventies, Penthouse repeatedly challenged Playboy’s status as the premiere nudie magazine with a game of pussy one-upmanship. Flush with cash from mainstream advertisers, Bob Guccioni produced a magazine that was every bit as lush as Playboy, but always went a little bit further. Hef had always been about tits; Bob made Hef show bush. When Hef started showing bush, Bob went pink. If you pick up a copy of Penthouse magazine from the seventies, you’ll see a magazine that looks and feels like any other mainstream magazine (real paper, real photography, and most importantly, real advertisers) except in Penthouse, there were lushly produced photo lay-outs of women with their legs spread wide (or my favorite, a luscious rump offered in that “mount me” sort of way, with a come hither look thrown over her shoulder for good measure).
(For more pining over depictions of sex in the seventies, read Richard Corliss’s Whatever Happened to Movie Sex?)
But the rising tide of fundamentalist in the Reagan years brought that to a halt. Our country was introduced to Jerry Falwell and the strangely name Moral Majority, a cadre of folks with a deep concern for other people’s personal lives, especially other people’s sex lives. Chief among their concerns were:
- Outlawing abortion
- Opposition to state recognition and acceptance of homosexuality
- Enforcement of its vision of family life
- Censorship of media outlets that promote what it labeled as an ‘anti-family’ agenda
Suddenly their were pickets outside 7/11 demanding the removal of “obscene material”, and they weren’t just talking about Playboy and Penthouse, they wanted Cosmo and Redbook and any magazine that talked about sex in a way they didn’t approve of off the shelves (And they still do.)
In some places they were successful, and Playboy and Penthouse were pulled off the shelves. But the real damage came because advertisers abandoned Playboy and Penthouse (the only two girlie magazine that have ever been advertising supported).
It was mainstream advertising dollars that supported the lushly produced 1970s editions of Playboy and Penthouse. Without those dollars, mere circulation wasn’t nearly enough to maintain the same level of quality. Penthouse responded by becoming raunchier, until virtually the only advertising it had left was for phone sex.
But without the ad money to make a quality magazine, it was thrown into competition with Hustler and dozens of other titles that, even if they couldn’t afford as well crafted photography, could always out-raunch Bob.
Penthouse entered a death spiral of declining circulation, declining revenues, and declining quality. Without the audience that mainstream advertising revenue fueled edit could provide, Penthouse went belly up. The brand was bought buy investors a few years ago, but it’s a shadow of it’s former self, propelled mostly on the fumes of what the magazine was 30 years ago.
Playboy lives on, but only because it pulled back wildly on what it would and wouldn’t show in the magazine. It’s got (some of) it’s mainstream advertising back, but its circulation (and therefore its ad rate) is nothing like it was 30 years ago.
(In the late nineties, a friend of mine and Maxim staff writer, told me about the magazine’s self-impose “no nipple” policy. The clever folks at Maxim had seen what happened to Playboy and Penthouse, and learned the lesson: young men might like to see naked women, but advertisers don’t. So show just enough to keep the men happy, but not enough to scare away your advertisers and you’ll make a lot of money. I don’t know how the magazine is doing these days, but at the time their page rate was $250,000. That’s right, running a one page ad one time in Maxim cost more than almost any porn movie ever made.)
That’s why those old issues of Playboy and Penthouse, with their ads for top-shelf liquor and other high-life consumer products look so lush; they had mainstream ad dollars that allowed them to produce a mainstream quality product. And that’s why today, completely cut off from any mainstream level of returns, porn today looks so shitty.
Of course it wasn’t just Ed Messe and the moral majority. Technology changed (the VCR) and exciting new diseases came along (herpes, and then HIV), and those changed the way we think about what a sexually explicit film can and should be. But it’s the rise of fundamentalism that I think did the most damage to the genre, and to our country as well.
Yesterday I listened to Sullivan on NPR’s Talk of the Nation and he offered “In some parts of the country “Christian” is becoming synonymous with intolerance.”
Becoming? I don’t know if it’s because he’s a christian himself, or because he’s spent most of his time in this country in places like DC, or New York, or Cambridge; but whatever it is, Sullivan’s behind the curve on this one.
It was during the Reagan years (first term in fact) that I learned to hate Christians; hate them because of what they said about my uncle, hate them because of what they said about HIV, hate them because their Jesus-jugend youth groups lorded over my high school exuding smug, self-righteous superiority, the kind that comes from people who are certain they’re going to heaven and you’re not.
(I’m happy to say that in the early nineties I learned that my hate was misplaced. I met and worked with some very nice people, who as it happens were devote Christians. From that experience I learned I didn’t hate Christians after all. I hate bigots, and I hate people who trade on fear and ignorance to gain power. Ten years later, when (so-called) Christians blamed homosexuals for 9/11, I was angry, but not surprised. That’s what those kind of people do.)
Since he didn’t mention it, I wonder if Sullivan even knows about the Meese Commission. If he does, I wonder if he sees the connection between my right to make and distribute my films, free from fear of being jailed, and his right to fuck, or even marry whomever might have him. Would he agree that a threat to either is a threat to both? Writes Sullivan to introduce my (anonymous) text in his Friday post:
“First, they came for the homos, then the near-dead, then the pregnant women. But you know who their ultimate target will be…”
But there’s something missing from Sullivan’s list, isn’t there? Before the homos, or the near dead or the pregnant women, they came for those of us who would dare make an image of a naked body and offer it with the intent (hope!) to arouse our audience. With the full backing of the Reagan White House, the theocons came after the smut-mongers, and got their first taste of blood. And the Republican party and Sullivan’s (so-called?) conservatism took their first lurching step to the degeneracy we see today.
At the end of Sullivan’s Friday post he writes:
“I’m glad more and more heterosexuals are waking up to the theocon agenda.”
I’m (pretty) sure he didn’t mean it in a condescending way. He doesn’t know me, he doesn’t I “woke up” to the theocon agenda in 1982, he doesn’t know I’ve been fighting (in my own strange way) the rise of fundamentalism and intolerance in this country for more than 20 years.
