Hindsight: True Love & Mischief in the Golden Age of Porn

by Howie Gordon

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Carly and I had to figure out how to live together. We agreed that we had to tell the truth to each other. We decided that fidelity in marriage would mean that we’d be faithful to telling the truth.

  Monogamy was out. Neither one of us wanted monogamy. We were just in love with each other and we agreed to tell the truth and we would work all the rest out.

  Chapter Forty-Six

  With the Gomez Road Show deciding to close its doors in Santa Fe and all the members scattering in the wind, Carly and I moved back to Dragon’s Eye in Berkeley and took a room together.

  Our group was also in the process of falling apart. New waves of spirituality were passing through the great political and social youth movements that had brought so many of us together in the sixties. People were now becoming involved with a whole raft of new and ancient therapies and more personal searches for enlightenment. Berkeley seemed to become a place where you either had “the sickness” or you had “the cure.”

  No doubt, the “revolution” was over. Only the hardest of hardcore politicos seemed to soldier on. For the rest of us, we had been crushed. We were trying to heal. The “Left” seemed to be splintering and eating itself while the “Right” had just overwhelmingly gotten Richard M. “The Boogieman” Nixon elected to a second term.

  The commune days with their endless hours of house meetings had become picky-picky in the extreme and just too depressing. They were passing out of vogue. It was a return to every man for himself or, every woman for herself, as the case may be. People were looking for the next big thing.

  We, the people, “who had tuned in, turned on, and dropped out,” were now looking for ways to drop back in.

  About half of our group in Berkeley had become very disenchanted with life in the city. They argued that it was at odds with trying to live in a more spiritual way. They wanted to move us all up to Humboldt County, a rural area, way North of San Francisco and replant the flag there.

  I’d visited up there once. I took some psychedelic drug and tripped on a mountaintop waiting to hear from God. I was not disappointed.

  God said that he was surprised to see me up there. “There’s a whole lot of rattlesnakes around here,” He said. “It’s not really much of a “people” place and there’s no good pizza anywhere. It’s at least a two-hour ride to the nearest movie theater and you’re probably gonna have to learn how to raise and slaughter your own animals if you want to keep on eating meat. Why don’t you just get your ass back to Berkeley,” He said paternally. It wasn’t really a question.

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Carly got interested in sex therapy.

  Beginning with the publication of what became the 1966 best-seller Human Sexual Response, William Masters and Virginia Johnson emerged as internationally known authorities on human sexuality. Inheriting the mantel once worn by Albert Kinsey in the 1950s, they pioneered further research into the physiology of sex and developed diagnoses and treatments for sexual disorders.

  They used to joke that they had the most popular, least-read best-seller in history. People would buy it expecting there to be “juicy” parts and would become disappointed and stop reading when they discovered that it was really all quite clinical.

  Carly became involved with a group of therapists and others who were both studying and applying some of this new information. More specifically, she became a psychology intern at a clinic on the UC Berkeley campus, using women’s therapy groups as a way of treating what they referred to as pre-orgasmic women.

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  In recent years, the great porn legend Nina Hartley and I (as Richard Pacheco) have joined forces to do a number of performances together on college campuses.

  The show we do, called Backstage with the Porn Stars, was initially organized and produced by my daughter Polly as an AIDS Fundraiser at the University of Southern California. Since then, we have performed it at Stanford, UC Berkeley, and UCLA.

  I like to open that show by first giving “a gift” to the audience. As I tell the audience, it might not mean that much to some of them, but for others, it might just offer the keys to the kingdom.

  The Gift

  Years ago, when I was still courting the woman who would one day become my wife and the mother of my children, she was studying sex therapy techniques.

  One day, she came home and said that she had just learned some interesting sex therapy exercises. She asked, if I would I like to try one.

  “Well, sure,” I told her, feeling very much like a young man who was about to get laid or some variation thereof.

  “The first one,” she explained, “is called Sensate Focus.” It involved non-genital pleasuring. One partner agreed to do the pleasuring and the other agreed to be done to. The one that was receiving the pleasure was bound to accept only that which really felt good.

  Okay, without a lot of fanfare, we decided that she’d get pleasured first and I’d do the pleasuring. I would give her a back rub.

  I was touching this woman, a woman that I loved, by the way, for less than thirty seconds, I would say, when I started to feel this anger rising in me. “Fuck this!” I thought. I didn’t want to do this! I always did this! It got so intense that I didn’t want to fake it. It occurred to me at that moment, that I had been touching women like this for what seemed like all my life, in the hopes that, maybe, just maybe, they would touch me back! I had a ton of anger connected to this. It scared me. And it scared her. We had to stop. We had to back off.

  Somehow, the subtlety of it all being an exercise instead of just real life had allowed me to see my own feelings. I think we went to bed without any more touching that night and it was at least the next day before she asked, “Want to try another one?”

  This time around, we just switched parts. She’d pleasure me. She skipped the non-genital part and went right to sucking my dick. I think that after the trauma of that first exercise she was just trying to get us reconnected, but it didn’t have that effect.

  Maybe I was just scared because of what had happened earlier, but I couldn’t feel anything. There she was sucking my dick and it all felt very, very far away. This was wrong. This was very wrong. I couldn’t feel any pleasure! And that frightened me. What I felt was so much fear that I started trembling. I literally started shaking, and then I just popped! I broke out in tears. And the tears, were very young.

  And what I was thinking, what occurred to me at that moment, was that nobody in my life, not my mommy, not my daddy, not any teachers, not any doctors, not any clergy, not nobody in authority, had ever said to me in my whole life, that it was okay to experience sexual pleasure.

  I tell those college students that I came of age in a time when having sex meant marrying. And if you were doing sexual things and you weren’t married, well, you were stealing, you were sinning, you were cheating, and it wasn’t okay. And I never knew I felt all that. I never knew all that was even in there. And I had this cry and it was delicious.

  “And the gift that I’m giving to you today,” I tell them, “…is that I’m going to count to three…and then I want us all to say…

  ‘It’s okay for me to experience sexual pleasure.’”

  You can sing along at home if you want to.

  “One, two, three…

  ‘IT’S OKAY FOR ME TO EXPERIENCE SEXUAL PLEASURE!’”

  Good luck to all of you.

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  While Carly began learning about therapy, I got involved with theater.

  I was playing softball one day. It was a typical Berkeley kind of game. Both men and women played. There was a jug of wine on first base and marijuana on both second and third. If you hit the ball over the fence, you were out. The object of the game was anything but competition. I was playing catcher. When I gathered up some dog poop and put it on home plate to discourage the other team from scoring, the pitcher called me out to the mound.

  “You ought to think about auditioning for The Magic
Theatre,” he said. He explained that he was an actor there and thought I might fit in nicely. What he didn’t tell me at the time was that he was queer as a three-dollar bill and when he looked at my ass, he thought he might fit in there nicely.

  In any case, acting seemed like a good idea. I’d always had a flair for it, so why the hell not!

  There were a lot of people there that day when I went in to audition for The Magic Theatre. As I entered the room, a woman shrieked and shouted out my name. “HOWIE GORDON!” She said. It was loud enough to be all capital letters. That, my friends, was truly amazing! I felt like one of the Beatles!

  People looked at me quizzically. I could feel the buzz of them turning to each other, “Who’s Howie Gordon?”

  “What?”

  “Who’s he?”” It didn’t matter that I was nobody. I was already walking on air.

  As it turned out, the young lady who screamed was from my hometown of Pittsburgh. Not only that, she had gone to the same high school as me. When I was the Senior Class President, she was two years younger than me in the tenth grade. She said that she’d had an enormous crush on me and when I walked through that door, she just screamed.

  Chapter Fifty

  “I did that, y’know,” God said.

  “Well, I would guess so!” I told Him. “It seemed so extraordinarily specific! Who else could even begin to dream up something like that?”

  “I wanted to give you a false sense of security.”

  “It worked!” I told Him. “You know it did. I kicked ass in that audition. I got the part!”

  “Yeah,” He said. “I know. I wanted to see if you could be any good as a homosexual.”

  “But my character wasn’t gay,” I told Him.

  “I didn’t mean in the play,” He said.

  Chapter Fifty-One

  It was a one-act called, Auto-Destruct written by Jeff Wanshell. I was the Fourth Mexican. It was a cartoon cowboy exercise in black humor. Three American bank robbers of the Old West escaped and hid out in Mexico where they were terrorized and humiliated by farcical stereotypes of the local banditos. “We don’t need no stinkin’ badges!”

  I was now in the theater. This began my gay period, or at least bi-sexual if you want to be accurate.

  Our play had an all-male cast and was being performed on Friday and Saturday nights at Mid-night. One of our lead actors, the one who played the big macho role of the bandit chief, “El Jefe,” was Joel, the gay pitcher who had first suggested I try out for The Magic Theatre. He was a good guy and a very talented actor. He took the time to teach me a lot of things. One of them was how it felt to be fucked in the ass.

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  “What is it with you and all this ass fucking?” Marty the agent asked. “You fuck Melody in the ass. Joel fucks you in the ass. I don’t get it! Look, it’s very simple! It’s not complicated at all. The ass is an “out” valve. Things are supposed to come out of your ass. Any plumber will tell you that! You got a screw loose, you know that? Besides, you think you’re gonna go on Oprah and talk about ass fucking like you did at UCLA? You’re lucky they didn’t expel your son!”

  “Shut up, Marty,” I told him. “I’m trying to write.”

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Bi-sexuality was like “the new thing” for a while in the early seventies. At least in the Berkeley world where I lived, it became a weird kind of politically correct.

  Alright, it was a Brave New World out there to me, but I had some questions. I could get in the game. My first one was about cock sucking.

  “I’m leaving,” Marty said. “I’m walking out the door.”

  “G’bye, Marty.”

  When it came to cock sucking, it was unsettling to me that I could ask a woman to do something that I found so repugnant. I mean, beyond the obvious homophobia, it seemed wrong. How could I do that? These were the days of experimenting, so, I experimented. When the opportunity presented itself, I gave it a shot.

  You know what? Feh! And I didn’t even get to the swallowing part. The hell with that. Bottom line is having an occasional popsicle is about as far as I wanted to go in that direction.

  I just ended up being a lousy queer. I was completely non-orgasmic. My first lover didn’t care; though, he just wanted to plow my field and plant his seed.

  “Again with the ass-fucking!” Marty said.

  “You still here?” I asked him. “I thought you were leaving.”

  “I’m walkin’ out the door.”

  When Joel was fucking me that first time, well, he was plain just getting carried away with his own passion. Bam! Bam! Bam! And he was not a small man either. It hurt! Pinned to the bed, I was like twisting my head around and saying, “Hey! HEY! There’s somebody in here, y’know?? Take it easy, pal! Slow down!”

  Men! What are you gonna do with them!

  When it was over, that is, after he came, I felt like I understood how a mountain felt after they dug a tunnel in it. Yoi! And I thought that every man should know that feeling, at least once. If he had any kind of common sense at all, it would change forever the way he would touch a woman for the rest of his life.

  In fairness to gay lovers everywhere, my sex with men never got beyond the novelty act stage with me. I was never in love with a guy. I was never really trying to please him. It was all more like an exercise in physical mechanics, like I was learning how to drive a stick shift. I was lucky enough to be with some guys who were truly hot for me, but my own arousal would only go so far. It seemed like a guy would be sucking my dick forever and I’d be stuck behind closed eyelids, running through my catalog of naked women, and trying unsuccessfully to make myself come. Double Yoi! It was so frustrating on way too many levels.

  What was also telling was that Carly remained completely amused by all of these episodes. We’d already hit a fair share of jealousy bumps when I’d have sex with another woman, but none of these guy things ever fazed her in the least. If anything, she enjoyed the stories I would tell when I came home. It amused her.

  Eventually, I just stopped it with the men. Enough already, experiment over. The end results were that It had been like taking my brain and making popcorn out of it. It brought me far more confusion than it was ever worth.

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  What made me crazy, what I couldn’t understand, what totally discombobulated me, was, that after I’d met the love of my life, and knew unmistakably that she was the love of my life, and after I had moved in with the love of my life, how could I possibly find myself getting distracted, yet again, by some other woman?

  How? Tell me how! This wasn’t “happily ever after!” This wasn’t the way it was supposed to be! After finding Carly, I didn’t want to be feeling feelings like this anymore! This was a nightmare in the afternoon.

  Carly and I had gone to some hot springs somewhere in the countryside of Santa Fe, or maybe it was in the hills of Santa Cruz. It was a friend’s house or a public place, I don’t remember that either, but we were in a hot tub. It was a naked place. Another couple joined us there. I don’t remember who he was, but she might as well have been Julie Christie. She wasn’t, I’m pretty sure, but she was a dead ringer, right down to the blue eyes and the British accent. And she was sitting naked with her blonde pubic hairs right across from me in a hot tub. Oh, Jesus!

  This is embarrassing. I hate to even write this. It makes me sound like such a doofus, but, dear friends, I lost my mind.

  I was completely in love with Julie Christie. I thought she was the most beautiful woman in the world, the Helen of Troy of our time. She was the movie star chosen to portray the magnificent Lara in the great epic film, Dr. Zhivago. No woman had ever looked more beautiful or been more passionate. Probably an entire generation of young men had fallen in love with her, but it fell on me to be sitting naked in this hot tub next to her doppelganger. I was a goner.

  It was like I had a number of conflicting auto-pilot systems going off all at once. Number one, all of my male plumage came out immedi
ately. Every smile, glance, and flitting eye contact between me and this young lady said, “I want you.” And this wasn’t just my dick talking; this was the whole general assembly.

  Now, the young lady in question already had a date. The way that she was draping herself and intimately caressing the man she was with declared loud and clear that they were together. As a result, all my flirting had to go into a stealth mode so that she could see it and he could not. That was not an easy thing to do!

  And, oh, yeah, I’m sitting there with my new “wife,” who I’ve just been introduced to by God, and with whom I’ve just taken a vow of complete honesty!

  Y’see, I have this one alarm system going off which is trying to hide my feelings from Carly. And on the other hand, I have a new system of trying not to be hiding these things from Carly, even though I am still trying to hide everything from the guy who’s with Julie Christie.

  See? It’s getting complicated. I wonder if they are married? Does it make any difference?

  If I was a robot, this was the moment where smoke would’ve started coming out of my ears and I would’ve been grinding slowly to a halt. My speech would’ve become slurred and the lights in my eyes would’ve started flickering and fading. I was getting stupider, crazier, and dumber by the moment.

  Luckily, for me, I was with Carly. She took me by the hand and said, “Let’s go.” We left that place and didn’t look back. I think she saved my life.

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  Auto-Destruct proved to be a prophetic title. After the run of the play, The Magic Theatre folded in Berkeley. In some kind of political coup, Artistic Director John Lion dismissed the entire rebellious ensemble of actors and moved the theater’s operation to San Francisco.