When Susie Bright was hired by Penthouse Forum in 1986 to write a monthly column about X-rated movies, she had a secret that she didn’t dare tell her editor: She’d never actually watched an adult film.
an excerpt from The Gilded Age,
a story and interview with Susie Bright by Lynn Comella
Bright’s new e-book, The Erotic Screen Volume 1: The Golden Hardcore & the Shimmering Dyke-Core, is a collection of her Penthouse Forum columns from 1986 to 1989. In it, you’ll find vestiges of a bygone era, when adult movies were still shown in public theaters, and the women’s market for pornography was in its infancy.
According to film scholar Constance Penley, Bright’s Erotic Screen is an “astonishingly original archive of this period.”
“It’s a firsthand account of a writer with such an insightful, quirky voice,” Penley says. “It’s also an account of the beginnings of the adult industry and of adult film criticism.”
LC: Writing about porn meant you followed the action, which brought you to Las Vegas for the annual adult entertainment trade show. What was that scene like in the ’80s?
SB: It was as surreal as you can imagine. The “porn” part of the CES show was sequestered at the Sahara Hotel, and not officially acknowledged in the CES literature. It was truly a ghetto, a glittering, glorious slum.
Porn director Bobby Hollander came up to me in a silk shirt, unbuttoned to reveal copious chest-fur and gold chains, and put his hand between my trouser legs: “So do you want to be in the movies, sweetheart?”
“No, I’m here to write about you, Bobby.”
Actor Ron Jeremy proposed marriage, but I said the diamond wasn’t big enough. I hung out in the ladies' john at the Sahara and gave out copies of [lesbian magazine] On Our Backs to all the porn stars who came in to powder their nose. Of course, these women were overwhelmingly dykes in their private lives.
And there was a lot of powder going on, too.
I also met the brand new “amateur” folks, like Homegrown Video, and others, people who never shot on film, who were as invested in the Internet underground as I was...
Read the rest of the story here.
And if you have an interest in vintage erotic film, golden age porn, or the last of the great indie movies, do check out The Erotic Screen!
Lynn Comella is a Women’s Studies professor at UNLV who writes a regular column on sexuality for the Las Vegas Weekly.
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