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An Interview with the Legendary Susie Bright: Looking Back at the Changing Face of Porn

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What started your interest in porn? How did that change over time?

I was hired by Jack Heidenry in 1986 to write for Penthouse Forum, a pocketbook-size sex journal that porn mogul Bob Guccione published during his heyday. I had no idea that Jack?s plan was rather experimental. All I knew, was that I?d never been paid professionally to write before, though I?d worked tirelessly on newspapers and underground magazines since I was a teenager. A volunteer. I?d also never watched an X-rated movie. Typical for most women I know!

I didn?t tell Jack either of my secrets.

Heidenry found me because he admired my writing and editorship of a two-year old anti-establishment lesbian sex magazine called On Our Backs. I was shocked he?d even heard of us. Our tiny posse in San Francisco didn?t publish our manifesto with men in mind. We were single-minded about making lesbian-centric erotica and radical sex manifestos. Jack asked me to write a monthly column, ?The Erotic Screen,? to review and report on the latest in erotic cinema. A year later, he added an advice column so I could respond to erotic film questions.

I was the first independed erotic cinema critic, i.e., I wasn?t paid by advertisers to write PR copy, I wrote ?real? reviews and reported on the erotic film business as if it were any other part of Hollywood. That was unprecedented. Nowadays we?re accustomed to daily papers and TV covering the porn biz, but that was UNHEARD of when I started. The SF Chron dubbed me ?The Pauline Kael of Porn.?

I was a complete lamb when I started; I didn?t know a thing, but I caught on fast. It really was the ?Arab Spring? of porn when I started, the climax of the Golden Age, the changing of the guard. Video was beginning. The inmates were taking over the asylum, and there were some mad talents. Some of the original ?Silent Generation? guys who innovated erotic film were also soon to become legends.

When you started writing porn reviews for Penthouse Forum, how did people respond? And how did that influence the industry?

It was amazing. Remember, this is the days of snail mail, and I got hundreds of letters. I was so surprised to see how many women read Forum, and how intelligent they were. Sure, I got the occasional, ?Me So Horny? type letter, but that was the tiny minority. There was a genuine interest in sexuality and movies, and people wanted to be treated like adults, not weirdos with black bars across their faces.

?The Industry? was pretty shocked by my arrival. Who WAS this little girl? Was it some kind of joke? The major distributors were very conservative, their basic line to me was, ?Dont? you have a husband at home to take care of?? (direct quote)

I started carrying my favorite videos at Good Vibrations, with long notes and reviews, and they sold like hotcakes. That, plus the reviews, was leverage. You had people like Candida Royalle, Annie Sprinkle, and Nina Hartley speaking out, doing their own videos. There was a punk invasion. Gay people in the industry, both in front of and behidn the camera, started coming out , en masse. When you see the variety and energy bouncing off the walls in my clips show, you?ll see what I?m talking about. Erotic filmmakers were ambitious and rebellious; they were taking on the world.

http://magazine.goodvibes.com/2011/0...-face-of-porn/

Good read! :thumbsup

I love Susie Bright. :)

Read this too (I read it years ago):

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Quote:

REVIEW BY DAVID TALBOT

America's sexual parade is a sorry spectacle, a brassy band of snickering talk show hosts and their compulsive guests, sexperts hawking 10 Ways to Achieve Total Body Ecstasy, advertisers bent on sharing their kiddy-porn fixations and a legion of militant prudes marching grimly against lust, led by men who are all too prone to falling flagrantly into its honeyed traps.

Set against this pathetic panorama, Susie Bright seems a starburst of sanity and health. For more than a decade, Bright has written and lectured and performed on behalf of sexual pleasure and in opposition to its twin goblins -- censorship and the cheap, dishonest American habit of titillation. Much of Bright's message boils down to this simple question: What is our problem? Sex is a gift from the gods, it creates life and it makes life worth living. Why must we keep afflicting it with a crown of thorns?

"Sex is such an urgent message from our body that sometimes we call it our soul," writes Bright in her new manifesto, "Susie Bright's Sexual State of the Union" (Simon & Schuster). "Lust carries risks, sexual intimacy has consequences; it IS nature, not a gadget with a warranty. Nobody would go through it if the rewards were not so magnificent: the knowledge of one's body, the basic connection with another person ... Of course it's worth it, and what's more, what the puritans and their gong shows don't seem to realize is that it's inevitable. Their prudery is killing people, both metaphorically and literally, but they cannot mandate their vision of purity because it is, at its very core, an affront to our survival."

Bright's own sexual banquet has been a multi-course affair. After shaking off the chains of Catholic school indoctrination, Bright ended up in San Francisco in the early '80s, where she fell into the sex toy business and the world of avant-garde lesbian erotica and journalism. In 1984, Bright became the chief editor of On Our Backs, the pioneering magazine "for the adventurous lesbian." She later became a porn critic for Penthouse's Forum magazine and the editor of the annual "Best American Erotica" book series, as well as a "sex consultant" and collaborator on such films as "Erotique" and "Bound." In 1995, Bright moved to Santa Cruz, Calif., where she teaches "The Politics of Sexual Representation" -- or "Porn 101," as she calls it -- at the University of California campus there. Bright, who is 39, lives with her 6-year-old daughter, Aretha, and her long-time companion, whom many are surprised to discover is a man, Jon Bailiff.

Salon caught up with Bright in Boston, where she launched her "Sexual State of the Union" book tour last week.

Are we really "erased below the waist," as you write in your book? It seems to many people that American culture is awash in sexuality, from MTV to Calvin Klein to TV talk shows. Do we really need a champion of sexual freedom like Susie Bright in the current overstimulated climate?

I know what people mean by that, because I often have a sense of being burned out and bored. But when I take a closer look at what's getting on my nerves, it's not refreshing, frank sexual disclosure, it's just massive amounts of titillation that purports to be about something, but really isn't. You mention TV talk shows -- they're supposed to be scandalous and shocking, but there's nothing truthful about sex on those shows. It's just bread and circuses.

Are there any sexual icons or programs in mainstream American culture that you do find inspiring?

I'm a big fan of the Dennis Rodman phenomenon. When I read that a fingernail polish company was doing a special line of colors for men with names that would appeal to guys -- like the black color was "Gigolo" -- when I read that story, I said, "Thank you, Dennis Rodman." Yes, this is just a little trend, it's not earth-shaking, and he's not a revolutionary leader, he's not the Che Guevara of cross-dressing -- but I love the notion that a man can be a very powerful athlete and that his athleticism and masculinity are not diminished in the least by his sexual deviancy. He's deviant and he loves something about femininity. It makes him feel confident and beautiful and he wants to show that. I love that, that he can be both those personas at the same time.

Some people would say the same about you -- that you like to play with sexual ambiguity.

(Laughs) Yes, I've been playing in little girls' dresses for way too long.

What I mean is that throughout your career you've been publicly identified as a lesbian, and yet those who know something about your life know that you've been lovers with a man for a long time. So what the hell are you?

(Laughs) You know, Dolly the sheep and I are having a fling right now. I'm into cloning big-time.

That's a new sexual frontier!

The reason I was so associated with the lesbian magazine On Our Backs was because way back when, when I was the only little vibrator clerk at [the feminist sex shop] Good Vibrations in San Francisco, there were all these women who were interested in creating contemporary women's erotic culture -- writing and performance. And most of those women happened to be lesbians, or bisexuals. Those were the kind of women who were willing to go out and buy a Macintosh and start cranking out something exciting of their own. It's an interesting question to me that the erotic renaissance has not been embraced by a lot of heterosexual women. They're certainly consumers of it, but they're not in the forefront of making it.

Like every year when I edit my "Best American Erotica" books, the only famous straight woman I've found is Anne Rice. And of course her favorite thing is writing about gay men. There's a hesitancy on the part of women to be forward about what they're interested in sexually. Lesbians as a whole are not wild bohemians either, but there are certainly enough of them to do a few magazines and movies.

So your sexual orientation was shaped by the fact that the creative action was in the lesbian scene?

Well, I was bisexual to begin with. And then my political and cultural interests in the '80s were totally shaped by the queer community in San Francisco. So yes, that's where the action was. And there were plenty of people who weren't four-square homosexual who were involved in this movement. People who might say, "Well, I'm really more into the leather scene, I don't really care who ties me up -- as long as it's nice and tight." Or you might have people who just loved erotica and wanted to be around the most exciting artists. I was involved with Honey Lee Cottrell at the time so it was click, click, click. But anyone who got to know On Our Backs, or read us carefully, knew we didn't have a dress code at the office about what it meant to be a lesbian. Some of us were bisexual, and some of us were getting sex changes, and some of us didn't know what we were going to do -- or with whom -- when we woke up the next day.

(cont'd)

ADG

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Quote:

(cont'd)

Do you think there is less party-line rigidity about sexual identification nowadays? Do lesbians still give you grief about being with a man?

They do, but I get a lot less than I did in the '70s. Because I think a lot of the rigidity about what kind of lesbian you are is related to how closeted you are. Gay men always had a lot more confidence about their sexuality and they were also ahead of the game in terms of coming out. When a gay man typically hears that one of his friends has gone straight, there's this great sense of, like, "Oh yeah right. Well, he'll be on his knees begging for a blow job next week." You know, there's this confident attitude that he'll never be able to stop enjoying men.

Whereas with lesbians, there's this inferiority complex of women saying, "Oh no, I heard she's with a man. That's it, the ship's going down! There's only five lesbians left!"

Because lesbians felt the dominant hetero culture was so much stronger than their own?

Yes, yes. And male privilege and that penis just couldn't be competed with. There was no confidence that if you're hot for women, it's something that can't be just shaken off, that it was something more enduring and more primal. But a lot of the work in On Our Backs had that sensibility, that there was a lot to know and get excited about in terms of loving women. And no one can take that away from you.

Your personal life has changed a lot in recent years. You're a mom. You have a 6-year-old girl. Do you ever feel nowadays, well, I've performed my mission in life as a sex crusader, I've been doing it for 10 years or more. I'm a mom now, I'm not a kid anymore. Maybe it's time for someone younger to pick up the banner?

Well, sometimes, but where's the retirement program for sex crusaders? (Laughs) I'm proud of the fact that I've got godmother status now or that I'm top of the hill. But other times I feel lonely, like I would enjoy some competition. I think it's appalling that other people aren't popularizing the ideas that are in my book "Sexual State of the Union." As I've written, I did the book because no one else had the balls to.

What do you think of the state of pornography now?

In books, we have this unprecedented freedom nowadays. There's nothing you can't say in a book any longer. Because text is so harmless. It's pictures that are the problem. As long as it's words on a printed page -- not on the Internet -- as long as it's old-fashioned ink, you can see for miles and miles. The feeling is that only elite people read books, so no one gets threatened by it.

Do you think that's led to a rise in the quality of erotic literature?

Yes, good grief yes. That's why I'm on such a campaign to decriminalize the sexual content in films. Because you can see how much better the literature is when people aren't hedging and changing words and making absurd plot turns to avoid some kind of legal problem. If we had that kind of freedom in film, look out!

What happens when filmmakers can't have that freedom is they get very demoralized about pursuing sexual themes. Look at what happened with "Bound," the Jennifer Tilly-Gina Gershon movie I worked on, which I think was groundbreaking in many ways, and yet the American release of the film had some very beautiful seconds cut out of the lovemaking because it was considered to go too far. And it only went too far in the sense that those dinosaurs on the Jurassic ratings board feel uncomfortable with lesbianism. There was no beaver shot that had to be pulled. (Laughs) It was just their sense of anxiety about how exciting and arousing the scene was that had to be tranquilized by cutting some crucial moments.

And while the filmmakers are very proud of their movie and what they ended up with, they'll never forget the humiliation and the irrationality of that kind of censorship. After an experience like that, many filmmakers end up feeling, "You know, I think I'll make a tornado film next time. Who needs this?"

You can do the same old tired titty shots, but anytime you try anything more innovative or authentic or less generic, you're going to be faced with these roadblocks. Unless you choose to ignore the ratings board and financially structure your film entirely differently. Luckily, some people are doing that.

Click HERE to read Susie Bright's Journal

ADG

wow really cool stuff,thanks for sharing! ADG you know her?

Quote:

Originally Posted by xanadu (Post 18410480)

wow really cool stuff, thanks for sharing! ADG you know her?

http://www.mediabistro.com/galleycat...ht-reading.jpg

I don't know Susie personally, but I've heard her speak at events, and we've chatted socially a few times at various gatherings.

It's no secret that I enjoy people who are considered "characters" (slightly eccentric), and who tell good stories, and Susie is simply one of the best, which is why I'm attracted to her writing.

One thing I love about the Bay Area is that it is literally filled with artistic creative types (although I must admit that there are plenty of pretentious peeps here too, lol).

ADG