Starf*cker: a Meme-oir (28 page)

“Mr. Rittenmond,” he would say, “are you happy with the July issue’s cover? Do you think it will sell?”

I suspected he probably already knew the sales figures since the issue had been out a while, so would have to guess whether it would look worse to bad-mouth the decision of the art department (and my own contributions) after the fact, or give it a vote of confidence and then be told it had been the worst-selling thing he’d ever published.

When I first started working at Mavety Media, Mr. Mavety was obsessed with print publishing and everything about it. The slick gentleman, who looked like an 1800s editorial cartoon of a Wall Street fat cat, would Brylcreem his pants when he figured out creative ways to move copies at the newsstand, outsmart a rival, thwart
Playboy
in its endless lawsuit against him for naming a magazine
Playguy
, or surprise his readers with some kind of jaw-dropping exclusive, such as a comeback naked spread of Linda Lovelace, who in January of 2001 posed in a bustier and lingerie for
Leg Show
in spite of having renounced her previous porn career as an extended episode of rape.

But over time, Mr. Mavety mentally withdrew from publishing. The availability of porn on the Internet was playing a dangerous game of autoerotic asphyxiation with his business, but that’s not what drove him away—he told me he didn’t believe online porn was a threat because, “Men don’t want to have to work a computer while they’re masturbating.” Reading that back is like watching a scene from a 1940s movie in which the European characters glibly assert that another World War would simply
never
happen.

He became far more interested in cultural events, charities, real estate deals, and leisure-time activities like tennis. Sadly, he dropped dead after playing a match at his estate in Sparta. Even though he’d been estranged from his wife for many years, it’s my understanding that she got most of the money and that he didn’t provide well for his mistresses, including one to whom he’d previously given a lifestyle magazine to edit. His henchwoman was unceremoniously duck-walked out the front door, never to be seen or heard from again around the office. Who knows what she got away with, but I think she was even more shocked than we were that he hadn’t set her up as his successor.

I just felt really bad for all of his families…who found out about each other’s existence at his funeral.

One thing I
loved
about my job in porn was that we had to un-spice up the mags with what was called “socially redeeming” articles. This could be anything non-sexual, but for some odd reason was usually a totally out of place slice of Hollywoodiana, like a provenance-free, decades-old interview with Barbara Stanwyck that hadn’t been taped, or a salute to a movie that hadn’t been in general release since before any of us were born. I was trying my best to impress, so I contributed the endless Q&A I’d conducted with Cyndi Lauper while I was at Reuters.

Cyndi Lauper was the first of my teen idols I’d ever met. She was in a career downswing, releasing a greatest hits package fronted by a questionable reggae remake of “Girls Just Want To Have Fun”. I showed up at her publicist’s office armed with six pages (!) of elaborate questions, as well as a stack of items for her to sign, too professional and too unprofessional at once. She looked beautiful, with Big Bird-yellow hair and eyes that got wide when I asked her things she didn’t expect—“What do you mean do I identify as an ‘other’? Define ‘other.’”—and also when I’d dare to bring up things no other journalist (and only a true fanboy) would want to know. “That one was good,” she said of the
Vibes
theme song “Hole in My Heart (All the Way to China),” as opposed to “The Goonies ‘R’ Good Enough”, a song she at that point was saying she’d never sing again. (She reconsidered, and the world is a better place for it.)

But my absolute favorite socially-redeeming piece I ever contributed was an interview with a beefcake photographer from the 1950s, the great Alonzo Hanagan, a.k.a. Lon of New York. Lon’s work had just been published in a Janssen Verlag coffee-table book I’d been sent to review for
Torso
, and I figured due to his professional name he was probably local. I submitted an interview request, never dreaming he’d agree…but he did.

I bought a tape recorder and prepared my questions, scared to death. I was at once cowed by his greatness as a photographer, one clearly inspired by Greek art and Renaissance paintings; by his fearlessness as a shooter of what was the kind of “art” for which one could and did get arrested in his heyday; and probably also intimidated by his age—just like I had been as a kid when visiting that rest home. Youth is afraid of age because it instinctively knows it’s staring in a progressive mirror; when you’re young, whether you’re conscious of it or not, there is probably a part of you that dreads interacting with your elders because they could at any time turn to you and point out that you are heading in the same direction they are. If they did that more often, we might treat them with the respect they deserve.

But I was also, as a square working in porn, pretty blown away by the concept of any man who had managed to start sucking dick in the ‘30s—it had seemed almost insurmountably scary 50 years later, let alone between the wars.

Lon had just moved from Mae West’s old pad. I was let in by Lon’s caretaker, who pointed out some of the original woodwork inside his apartment. I examined the carving, furtively looked for streaky semen stains on the walls from the endless supply of bodybuilders I imagined had performed there, but saw only a shabby dwelling that had once been fantastic. Like Mae herself in the 1970s, or Lon in the 1990s…and probably like I will be in the let’s go with 2050s on the assumption my Mormon-esque lifestyle will Dick Clark me.

Lon greeted me weakly, leaning on a walker. He was in a too-short cotton robe that didn’t hide every part of him in spite of the thin blue boxers he had on underneath, but he struck me as past the point of caring about such niceties. He seemed remarkably enfeebled, a dramatic contrast to the images of physical strength that had secured his legacy. I magically forgot about any concern that I would get this old, too, eventually and focused on Lon’s own situation, wanting to give him the star treatment he deserved.

When I asked him what got him into appreciating beefcake as an art form, Lon’s eyes lit up. It was like turning your computer on.

“I was very impressed with Tony Sansone,” he recalled. Sansone had been a stunning bodybuilder who posed for racy images as a teen muscleman as early as the ‘20s. He was never a competitive, titled bodybuilder, instead developing his body just for the sheer art of it, and to his own satisfaction. Sansone (it rhymed with another delicious Italian thing, the calzone) packaged himself in revealing photos targeted at gay men, self-publishing entire books devoted to his own physical perfection. You would, too, if you looked like he did. Little Alonzo, living a sheltered life in his family home in Massachusetts, was so smitten he would write to Tony in New York for autographs, which the raging hetero with a soft spot for his gays would humbly inscribe, “To A.J. Hanagan, a devotee of the beautiful.”

Oh, girl.

After Lon bought up everything Tony had to sell, Tony daringly wrote Lon with an offer no gay boy could refuse, “Lon, perhaps you’d like to buy some nudes?”

Perhaps? Perhaps he’d like you to sit on his face while you’re at it.
Perhaps.

Lon went where the action was, moving to New York, as I had, as so many gay boys had, and was able to strike up a personal friendship with his idol and lust object. That inspired him to pick up a camera, which led him to shoot countless beautiful men—gay, straight, and how-much-money-do-you-have-in-your-pocket? In the same way many future gay guys would be obsessed with divas, Lon was obsessed with perfect male bodies, and he didn’t care what color the skin was that covered them, which made him unique among his photographer peers, who favored white boys.

Listening to the 84-year-old man reminisce about his tossing-the-salad days was an unforgettable bonding moment for me. I felt connected to a continuum of gayness. I felt his pain when he described to me being raided for taking obscene photos. The postal police told him during one raid, “I see a pubic hair. You’re under arrest,” which sounded like a good title for Gypsy Rose Lee’s autobiography. Time and again, his entire archive was confiscated and destroyed, something that if it happened to my various collections—let alone to things I’d created—would gut me. That pubic hair was a metaphor for the traps that can bring a good gay man down, even to this day.

The cops also beat the hell out of Lon, but what bullies don’t realize is that hell can grow back—Lon did quit shooting for a while, but he always went back to it.

What bothered me about talking to Lon was when he told me he found “gay lib” distasteful, claiming gay culture had been better back when it was illegal.

“That’s long after me…[S]ome of them stick their necks out in the wrong way instead of doing it in a dignified way. They make some people dislike them all the more.” I’ve never bought that line of reasoning. I think homophobes hate what gay people are right down to the DNA. Packaging ourselves palatably may help politically, but it’s not always worth the sacrifice. The content of his comments
only seemed old to me when he was looking down on progress, and it taught me to try my best not to do the same.

I was also somewhat haunted by my encounter with Lon, because it underscored the fact that gay men who do not have children are risking helplessness as we age. The only people around Lon were buddies, and he had cultivated many of those because he had been a gifted photographer and so they gravitated to him like fans to stars.

I loved meeting the man and connecting with him on art, sex and idolatry, learning that the gay fanboy was not a new phenomenon.

In spite of my contributions to the porn mags, the office politics became pretty dicey over the years, with my boss getting more and more uptight over my successes (and it’s not like I was Neil Patrick Harris or anything) outside the office. Being listed as one of
The Advocate
’s “30 Under 30” really put me in the doghouse with him, since he was (1) not on the list and (2) not under 30. But I was in good company; lots of us hated the guy. He dashed off angry memos to remind the art department that they were running photos with limp dicks, no asshole, no feet, seamless paper, lubey dicks, no armpits. He came up with an elaborate style sheet so we would never write “ballsack” incorrectly (Strunk & White was completely M.I.A. on that one) and campaigned to get people fired.

A black woman who was working in the art department was an early target. He wrote memos tagging her as “lazy,” “extremely vocal,” and “belligerent.”

He also loathed his art director, Tom, a chipper guy who was gay in the ‘70s and therefore had had actual sex, so wasn’t really in touch with my boss’s more theoretical approach to it. He pitted us against Tom, who had stories of working at Mavety in the ‘80s, when guys would wear cut-off jeans with no underwear and let their balls hang out. Tom was painted as “old” and “mainstream.” Both of which could have been used as fair adjectives for our audience, by the way. My boss treated him like a self-pitying Goth girl would treat her embarrassing uncle.

But as much as my boss came to resent me, and as much as he hated everyone else, he had a special contempt for Gordon because Gordon had been his personal friend and knew his secrets, and when that soured and Gordon questioned all the loony directives and pretense, my boss railroaded him right out of a job. He went through HR (some of the support staff rarely set foot into the NYC office) and had Gordon formally fired, only to eat his non-existent heart out when Gordon was immediately rehired by Dian to work on the girlie magazines. Gordon was squeamish about vaginas when he first got the job, but that evaporated and his limitless imagination and mastery of the language combined to create a simultaneously hysterical and hot alter ego, a teenybopper editrix who drove blue-collar readers wild. They never knew they were
spoogeing
(I could use that style sheet) over the perverted thoughts of a fortysomething gay man.

I was going crazy working for someone who hated me. It was emotionally exhausting having to rat him out to the owner every time he did something that any other normal workplace would punish him for. So instead of quitting (why let him win?), and inspired by my non-sex work like my interview with Lon, I proposed to the powers that be that I be allowed to work on their
other
magazines.