Beaver Street

After spending 16 years working behind the x-rated scenes of porn magazines High Society, Stag and D-Cup, Robert Rosen's controversial commentary lifts the lid on two lucrative decades of mainstream pornography, from the conception of free phone sex and glossy erotica to the economic devastation wrought by the growith of the internet. Rosen points fingers, names names and offers sophisticated analysis alongside his vivd and fascinating personal recollections. Beaver Street is funny and dark, salacious and insightful and never less than completely compelling.

Robert Rosen is the author of Nowhere Man: The Final Days of John Lennon, a critically acclaimed international bestseller. His work has appeared in publications all over the world, including Uncut, Mother Jones, The Soho Weekly News, La Repubblica, and Proceso.

Chapter 1:How I Became a Pornographer.Even now, thirty -five years later, I cansee myself sitting in the Mini Cinema, on Forty-Ninth Street and Seventh Avenue,just off Times Square. I was a twenty-one-year-old college senior-a veritableinnocent-transfixed by grainy images on a movie screen. I was watchinga chubby, though not unattractive, young woman, a "Danish farm girl,” as she'dbeen described, being fucked by her dog, a collie named Lassie. It was only mythird porn flick, but it was definitely the most interesting one yet. Unlike DeepThroat, which I'd seen a few months earlier and found shocking and bizarre,though hardly erotic, or It Happened in Hollywood, which featured a sex scenewith Al Goldstein, the obese, barely functioning publisher of Screw magazine,Animal Lover was real and intimate… too real. The dog and the woman werehot for each other, familiar lovers, fucking with passion, as if there were no camera present. The woman would go on to make love, somewhat less successfully,to her pig and her horse.An alternative City College newspaper called Observation Post, or OP, hadsent me to the Mini Cinema to review Animal Lover; the editors felt that thefilm was a work of artistic transgression worthy of critical attention. And basedupon the merits of the dogfuck alone-"the most erotic scene in any of theporn movies I've seen”-my critique was positive. Reading it today, however,I'm struck only by my naïveté and the fact that I didn't even come close to capturingthe deranged essence of what was really happening in the film. But thatdidn't matter at the time.Soon after my Animal Lover review was published in OP, the staff anointedme editor-in-chief-because they believed, in those waning days of the VietnamWar and Richard Nixon, that, based on this callow bit of critical writing,I was well qualified to carry out the paper's newest mission. Though OP wasfounded in 1947 by World War II veterans and evolved in the sixties into aradical journal of antiwar politics-the voice of the SDS and Weather Underground-by the time I enrolled at City College, the paper had mutated into ablunt instrument primarily used to test the limits of the First Amendment. OPhad become a student-funded incubator for an emerging punk sensibility soonto burst into full flower; it was an anarchist commune whose members performedimprovisational experiments with potent images and symbol