Harry Reems aka Herbert Streicher

photo: Kenneth Turan

In a recent Times obit “Harry Reems,Star of ‘Deep Throat’ Film, Dies at 65," Margalit Fox describes Reems’ odyssey from Jewish born porn star alcoholic to converted Christian 12 step program adherent and successful business man. Fox quotes from a 2005 interview in the Ottawa Citizen where Reems equates his present and past careers. “I’m still selling dirt,” Reems pithily remarks. There are many myths surrounding sexuality and the one that Jews are not well-endowed was belied by both Reems ( renamed by the porn director Gerard Damiano, after being born Herbert Streicher, according to Fox) and Ron Jeremy, another major porn star. Actually the cultural significance of Reems and Jeremy was fusing the borscht belt sense of humor (both loved to ham and mug for the camera) with the sexual technique and equipment of famous stallions like Man ‘O War. Fox’s obit is instructive since it exhumes earlier Reems efforts like Erecter Set, Mondo Porno and The Altar of Lust, which you don’t hear much about today. Still in all there is something very American about Reems’ career. It’s a new version of the Horatio Alger story, with a little bit of Saint Augustine and the Apostle Paul thrown in. On his road to Damascus, Reems finds his higher power who turns out to be Jesus and finds his calling which happens to be selling real estate. Future biographers of Reems might want to look into his attitude towards sub-prime mortgages. “Deep Throat” would of course go on to have even greater significance as the pseudonym for Mark Felt, the FBI associate director, who blew the whistle on the Watergate conspirators.

Talk Dirty to Me

John Leslie, the porn star and director who some considered to be a successor to the legendary John Holmes, died last week. He became famous for his work on Talk Dirty to Me I and II, and he belonged to an era when plot was still an integral to pornography. Behind the Green Door, Deep Throat and Debbie Does Dallas exemplify the era of ‘70s and ‘80s porn, in which ever-more explicit sexuality was presented in the context of a script. Many of these films played in seedy inner-city theaters into which desperately lonely men wandered at all hours of the night, blasted out of their minds and seeking the companionship of prostitutes, who often worked the aisles. The use of plot was significant in the way it established artifice and the notion of delayed gratification, even for those whose ultimate aim was to get their rocks off. Porn has changed a great deal since the heyday of John Holmes and John Leslie. Firstly, the old triple-X theaters are gone, with pornography turned from a communal into a totally private experience to be indulged via the Internet. In addition, scripts have given way to scenes that get right to the point. There is no longer any magic, mystique or denouement when you go on a site like Red Tube or Naked On the Streets, and the videos no longer have exotic names like Emmanuelle or Midnight Plowboy. What you see is what you get, and the so-called loops go by names like MILF Likes It Hard, Facial, or Gang Bang, and when they refer to Deep Throat, they are not creating a medical fantasy about a girl with a clitoris in her larynx, but simply the shot of a man or woman with the talent and capacity to introduce the penis into the esophageal canal.