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By Root 841 0

unslouching Elliott Gould, but in most roles he was shark sleek. I saw Gillis now and again with the porn actress Serena, with whom he did nasty things on-screen, and strolling along drinking in the dirty air, they managed to suggest that they got up to even nastier things offscreen, all kinds of paraphernalia-intensive amateur theatricals that required ice packs afterward. Once I saw a fan approach to compliment them on their work. They thanked him with a gracious nod, like a couple of off-Broadway stars fresh out of the pages of Playbill acknowledging their public. Gillis became the boyfriend of the restaurant reviewer Gael Greene, who more than anyone turned food writing into gustatory porn, and a familiar at Elaine’s, friends with the unlikely likes of the neurologist and best-selling author Oliver Sacks and James Watson, the discoverer of DNA. When the sex author Susie Bright, in a podcast interview with Gillis in 2008, noted that he had begun in the business in 1971, he replied, “[It] wasn’t even a business. It was a dirty basement.” A dirty basement that ate its way up into broad daylight and got bolder with every bite, just as a dirty bar on the Bowery became the manger for the squall heard round the world.

It was a logical segue for Punk magazine’s former mascot and semi-lovable fumblebutt, Legs McNeil, to follow his oral history of New York punk, Please Kill Me (co-written with Gillian McCain), with an oral history of porn that made punk look like a romp in the pasture. Populated with an above-average percentage of sick twisties, both porn and punk were amateur uprisings from below deck, ragtag operations of low production values and high casualty tolls where fame was sought under an assumed identity. It was a short sharp hop from Linda Lovelace (porn captive) to Lydia Lunch (poet-punk dominatrix). Although porn performers occasionally tail-wagged into CBGB’s—I once saw the porn actress C. J. Laing stroking a denimed bottom belonging to a stranger, judging by the exclamation mark on his face—and punk bands deployed porn motifs, the correspondences mostly remained on the mucky surface. Punk and porn both regarded the body as unconsecrated meat, a punching bag for blows inflicted and self-inflicted, pain being the price of admission into the sideshow. Punk, however, sought transcendence from a launchpad of sound, a release from bondage; porn operated under a lower ceiling, its repetitions feeding on themselves, a cycle of recurrence in which those who didn’t become jaded simply became affectless, devoid, not much caring what was done to them, drugs and disassociation providing cloud protection. It wasn’t too long before they looked on camera the way many punks looked offstage—slugged.

Punk was rooted in opposition to pretension, whereas porn adopted pretension as soon as it broke out of the basement and sought respectability, pursuing the fine cultural cachet of the art-house film where ennui hung heavy from the false eyelashes. A porn movie with a piano tinkle of sophistication such as The Opening of Misty Beethoven aimed to be a combination of My Fair Lady and Modesty Blaise, boasting location shooting, stylized sets (islands of white designer space), and an ingenue in the title role—the adroitly named Constance Money—who resembled a skittish foal, receiving instruction in the oral arts as taking her first clarinet lesson. (Jamie Gillis was the film’s Professor Higgins, with a glop of gigolo.) It was one of the few hard-cores that marketed itself like an art-gallery preview and preened its cat whiskers and coat to a glossy finish. Its smug vanities were preferable to the bitter medicine that other directors spooned for our own good. After Deep Throat, its director, Gerard Damiano, got an acute case of auteuritis, his The Devil in Miss Jones a study in damnation that consigned its title character (a very moving, soul-bruised Georgina Spelvin) to an eternity of diddling without deliverance. The Mitchell brothers’ moment-breaking Behind the Green Door was a satanic Black Mass where the white slave goddess—Marilyn