Sex Collectors: The Secret World of Consumers, Connoisseurs, Curators, Creators, Dealers, Bibliographers, and Accumulators of "Erotica"

1 AN INTRODUCTION The usual throat clearing, my father's gnomic wisdom, anal retention, less than full disclosure, living with and without a sex collection. I once had dinner in New York with Linda Lovelace. This is not a boast. It was some time ago, well before I'd thought of writing a book on sex and collecting, though I was certainly already interested in both subjects. The year was 2000 and Linda, who was then in her early fifties, was trying to make a modest comeback. My girlfriend, Dian, was the editor of a men's magazine calledLeg Show,and Linda was in town to do a photo shoot for her. Linda wasn't prepared to take her clothes off for the shoot, or more precisely she wasn't prepared to take her clothes off for the sort of moneyLeg Showwas willing to pay. Therefore Dian had arranged for her to be seen in a corset, high heels, shiny tights, and so on. This, I suppose, might have allowed Linda to square an appearance in a men's mag with her continuing professed antipornography stance, but my guess is she didn't need to square anything. She was a woman who could live with contradictions. Linda Lovelace, real name Linda Boreman, was, as everyone of a certain generation will need no telling, the star ofDeep Throat,a preposterously lame porn movie, made in 1972, about a woman whose clitoris is located a long way down her throat and who can therefore get satisfaction only from "deep-throating" men. There have been crasser premises for movies but not many, not even in porn. Yet the moment found the movie. American society was ready and eager to embrace hard-core pornography, andDeep Throatstruck lucky. It became a hit, a must-see, a couples movie, even a date movie. I don't think you can pretend that Linda Lovelace was the only or even the main reason for the success ofDeep Throat,but she did what was asked of her, and it's apparent that the camera liked her a lot back then. On-screen and in still photographs from that period, her face had a lopsided, quizzical, hippieish laxity about it that was very much of its time, but still remains appealing today. In the early days she had a shaggy, let-your-freak-flag-fly kind of perm, trading it in for a then-more-fashionable yet somehow more staid feather cut. She always looked as if she was enjoying herself in front of the camera. She denied this fervently in person and in print. She said she was hating every minute of it, but was acting as if she was enjoying it because her manager and husband, Chuck Traynor, had threatened to kill her if she showed any reluctance. If this is true, then Linda Lovelace was an infinitely better actress than anyone I've ever seen in a porn film. In England, where I lived at the time, we never sawDeep Throat,but we certainly knew about it and we knew who Linda Lovelace was. We'd read the articles, the interviews, seen the film stills, read or at least heard about the so-called autobiographyInside Linda Lovelace,which wasn't written by her but was prosecuted in England for obscenity. The prosecution failed, and after that England pretty well gave up fretting about the printed sexual word. Some of us thought that was a good thing. TheLeg Showphoto shoot, indeed Linda's entire comeback, was being facilitated by a man called Eric Danville, a writer who had worked forPenthouse, Forum,andScrew,a man who would admit to having had previous obsessions for certain female stars including Debbie Harry and Madonna. The name Joan Jett was -- and I imagine still is -- tattooed on his forearm. Joan had autographed his arm at a New York gig, and after some hesitation he'd had a tattooist ink in the signature before it faded. It looked as good as you'd imagine. Eric is a very competent researcher, known for his determination to track down anything and everything on a subject. About six years earGeoff Nicholson is the author of 'Sex Collectors: The Secret World of Consumers, Connoisseurs, Curators, Creators, Dealers, Bibliographers, and Accumulators of "Erotica"', published 2006 under ISBN 9780743265874 and ISBN 0743265874.