Gen got drunk, I continued to throw up for the rest of the day and night and was unable to make sense of Gen’s reaction, especially as just weeks before he’d told me to make myself scarce for when he brought home a married work colleague to have sex with. I felt terrible about Ewa and apologised when I saw her.
6 February 1975
Peter Christopherson came round. Very willing to take part in COUM anything. May COUM to Holland too and be a guest star. But his professional casualty thing is coming on very well. We were saying how it’d be good in shows.
Since we first met at the Oval House, Sleazy had visited us when he felt like it, gradually getting more interested in the idea of joining us in our activities. He became a member of COUM and joined us for the first time when we did a version of ‘The COUMing of Age’, retitled as ‘The COUMing of Youth’, at the Melkweg in Amsterdam. Being a sexually liberated place, Amsterdam seemed a great opportunity to indulge ourselves and we took the brakes off … Sleazy was a seditious influence. The three of us together made for a volatile mix, encouraging each other to indulge in our sexual interests and explorations and putting them centre stage in Amsterdam. We used some of Charles Manson’s music for the show, not least because we were performing at the Melkweg – the same name as his band, Milky Way.
To start proceedings, Foxtrot walked on to the stage looking menacing in his SS leather coat and hat, his riding boots and sunglasses, wielding a blowtorch which he used to light the torches on the stage. He and I had a scene together, both dressed identically as homosexual soldiers, kissing and groping. Gen had wanted me to give Foxtrot a blow job but I refused. Biggles was on a table being massaged by Fizzy in his ‘Shirley Shassey’ dress, who offered Biggles the ‘extra’ service, turned to the audience, smiling, and proceeded to oil and massage Biggles’ bits – rather too vigorously for comfort, judging by Biggles’ face. Sleazy chose to perform a type of confessional. He was positioned to one side of the stage, fully dressed, seated alone on a chair, softly lit, reading aloud his public-schoolboy sexual fantasies from handwritten notes. I had a much more full-on time. I strode on stage dominatrix-style, in high heels and naked save for a strap costume that didn’t cover much. I’d made it from strips of black PVC and gold buckles I’d found in a bin outside a handbag factory near Martello Street. I felt the part as I stood watching a naked Gen being chained and tied to a large wooden X-shaped cross that was placed centre stage, where he would await my treatment. I daubed him in flour paste and chicken’s feet and whipped him hard. He pissed on my legs, I inserted a lit candle in my vagina, cracked the whip and left the stage. Gen had told me to whip him properly – it had to be real. I liked the idea of that, something new for me, and I’d practised and mastered cracking my bullwhip. I don’t think he’d really thought about what being whipped meant in terms of pain, nor that that I’d actually do it, but I really got into it and Fizzy was itching to have a go too. I had to hold back a bit the second night because of the welts that I’d inflicted.
We’d performed to 1,500 people each night for £240 and free accommodation – of a kind. We were put up in an old, derelict, damp and filthy squat, cooking on a small camping stove. Being March, it was freezing cold. As an attempt at providing privacy for the different performing groups, areas had been sectioned off by dirty sheets of cloth strung on thin wire. With everyone coming and going at different times, no one got much sleep. It was a depressing place so we spent a lot of our downtime wandering around the red-light district and looking at the girls in their windows displaying their wares to attract business. It was relevant to our show as well as personally fascinating, and there was talk about us having our own window as an action piece, as well as other possible indulgences that Foxtrot remembers: ‘We used to walk past a beautiful mulatto girl in her window every day and Gen wanted us all to club together to pay for me to have a session with her. He mentioned it regularly. At that time I was a little wary and also had suspicions of how he might use it.’ Like Gen’s suggestion of my blow job with Greg, it never happened.
We’d had little sleep but felt elated at what we’d done. Fizzy was excited as he’d ‘come out’. He and Sleazy had been together the whole trip. Whipping Gen crucified on the cross worked so well that we restaged it in Martello Street for a new COUM poster image. Sleazy borrowed a large-format Mamiya camera from Hipgnosis and did some photographs with Gen drunk, cuffed and chained to the cross, covered in fake vomit and feathers, and me in the foreground in my strap costume clutching my trusty whip and adopting a strident, assertive stance. Me and Sleazy loved it but Gen wasn’t too keen. It was printed up as a large-format poster, a bold, powerful, black-and-white image that reflected a shift in the dynamics of my and Gen’s personal and working relationship. For the first time I was portrayed in the dominant position.
6 March 1975
Today I made my very first blue movie. ‘Pussy’s Galore’.
The COUM shows were a hybrid of art and music, with an increasing emphasis on more extreme and obscure actions. Things were changing, including the Ragdoll agency, which had now been taken over by none other than Nanny Rigby, who called me about going in to talk over what work she could offer me. She’d always been discreet about blue movie work and I was asked if I’d be interested in doing some hard-core films with a few of the main players – John Lindsay, George Harrison Marks and a middleman called Alan Selwyn.
I told Gen. It excited him, it paid well and he was all for it. I thought some more and decided to go ahead; for me it was part of my infiltrating the sex industry. I was about to find out how tough a task it was and how much I was asking of myself.
Nanny sent me on auditions and I got a lot of work, including lesbian and group-sex shoots. It’s not easy getting naked with people you’ve never met before, let alone having sex with them in front of a camera crew and lighting technicians, but I adjusted to it, facing each challenge that presented itself. I dealt with it by looking at it as a ‘job’, disengaging from emotion, focusing on the required techniques, giving head or whatever was required, while also placing myself to give the best angles for the camera, learning how to ‘fluff’ to help guys get up and stay up, and to hold off for the come shot. It was pretty clinical and that’s how I approached it to help me cope.
I was certainly no actress – I was embarrassingly bad at that – but I performed the sex well enough. There was no pleasure, love or desire involved; it was simply job-descriptive sex – that in itself was a revelation to me. Most girls I worked with held back on something, set boundaries to retain a part of themselves as sacred, only to be shared with those they loved. The sex part was something I had to manage as I went along but what unnerved and challenged me more was the risk of the unknown. I’d already been questioned by a detective about the recent Bunny Girl murder case – did I know any photographers that had tried it on? Where would I begin? Hard-core pornography was underground in the 1970s, simply because, under the obscenity laws, it was illegal to make and distribute it in the UK. John Lindsay, who I did my first blue film for, was harassed by the police and had his shops and cinemas raided. I wondered what risks I could be exposing myself to.
When things go underground to avoid the law, the normal rules can get bent out of shape to suit the purposes at hand. There were some very tricky moments when I felt unsafe and couldn’t wait to get away. No matter what I’d agreed to beforehand, there were often extras added on once I got there, some in the form of favours for friends of the photographer or magazine editor who wanted an exciting time with a naked girl and hoped for more. Those people were hard work. They didn’t know how to model, for one thing, and some thought they’d get free sex. One guy was particularly bad. His flat was the location. I immediately got the impression he was expecting sex and he was persistently groping and trying to put his fingers and cock inside me. The photographer apologised but I felt set up, and the attempts to coerce me were relentless and intimidating. The male ‘model’ made us all coffee, asking, ‘Does “that
” want a cup too?’ ‘That’ was me. I just wanted to get out of there. In the end I mentioned the magazine editor’s name, saying it’s not what he said I was booked for, and that I’d walk off the job if the guy didn’t stop. He got aggressive and nasty, calling me a slag and more.
That session was later published with the heading ‘Prick Tease Tormentor and Keith the Randy Tycoon’ … I was presumably the ‘prick teaser’ indicated in the title and the accompanying text. That was the reader’s fantasy delivered as per usual. The reality of providing that fantasy was my torment from the full-on sexual harassment of the ‘Randy Tycoon’.
Pornography in the 1970s was a closed shop run by a small circle of people, including some dodgy chancers. I made the mistake of choosing the wrong people a couple of times before I figured out who were the safer ones to work for. By and large, the films were made using professional cameramen, lighting technicians, TV and film producers and actors, make-up artists and (rarely) a wardrobe lady. The main players all worked with a small group of trusted and reliably capable people who did hard-core work. I became part of that group. We looked after one another. We knew our boundaries and would modify requests if they involved anything that made someone uncomfortable – something as simple as one girl preferring to take the lead in a lesbian shoot. I took on the challenge of new experiences. Some I found I liked, others I didn’t and I chose not to repeat them. The models I worked with didn’t know the reason behind my doing modelling and porn. They did it for various reasons – some for the money, whether through necessity or in preference to lesser-paid straight jobs, some stumbled into it through friends, and some just for the sex. Those who only did it once or twice and were inhibited by shyness or nerves were difficult to work with and needed careful handling. Working with familiar faces made life much easier. We knew our job, were efficient and had some fun. A lot of the soft-core films also had a hard-core version for the export market. I did both and body-doubled for actresses who didn’t want to be naked on camera.
Relinquishing control of my image and identity was an important part of the project, and that intrigued me as much as the experience of the process of co-creating those images. Whether I was ‘Tessa from Sunderland’, ‘Slippery Milly from Piccadilly’, ‘Geraldine’, ‘Susie’ or ‘Cosey’, I was just like the other girls, sexual fantasy material for masturbation. Anything too close to (my) reality would dispel that illusion. As a willing participant I’d placed myself in a position to be used this way, and right in the line of fire of 1970s feminism. The sexual exploitation and objectification of women by men was the feminist hot topic, very high on their agenda, and I and other sex workers were perceived as the enemy. I didn’t identify with 1970s feminism: it didn’t speak for me or the diverse and complex nature of women. I was a free spirit and didn’t want yet more rules and guilt thrown at me about my actions. Yes, by doing my sex work I was contributing to, but not necessarily endorsing, the thing they were fighting against. But I was no ‘victim’ of exploitation. I was exploiting the sex industry for my own purposes, to subvert and use it to create my own art. It was my choice. I wanted to get to know the sex industry from within, to speak from first-hand experience. I wanted a purity in my work, to push against existing expectations and my own inhibitions, and to understand all the complex nuances and trials it imposed on everyone in that business, including the target market. I was transgressing rules – feminist ones included. I live my life as a ‘person’, seeing all options as being equally open to me and everyone else. I refuse to be defined or confined by my gender.
Most of the films I did were typical of the 1970s porn set-up: orgies, frustrated housewives, or plumber knocks on the door – ‘I’ve come to fix your pipes, darlin’ …’ But the film I did for Lasse Braun (who was introduced to me as Alberto Ferro) was different. The basic premise was familiar: a party scene turning into an orgy. We all turned up at the location early in the morning, a large four-storey terraced house in West London. There were at least twenty of us, a real mixture for possibly every variation of sex Lasse could think of. We were gathered in the back room waiting to be assigned roles and sorting out costumes. I was given skintight pale-pink satin trousers, a matching feather boa and a pink leotard worn back to front to expose my boobs. There were three familiar faces, Tim, John and Lotus, and the rest were all new to me, including a vivacious girl called Bobby, who was dressed in a satin corset, fishnet stockings and high heels, doffing her top hat at everyone. She and her biker boyfriend were an odd combination but great fun. The other cast members were reserved in comparison to Bobby and a pretty, petite, blonde transsexual called Daisy, who was undergoing hormone therapy in preparation for her sex-change operation, and doing the film to fund it. She was a constant delight, dressed in pretty white satin lingerie, dancing and gyrating around the place, rubbing herself flirtatiously against people and singing Donna Summer’s ‘Aaah, love to love you, baby …’, panting, pouting and looking alluringly at people. A young guy in very brief, tight, black PVC swimming trunks was wandering around striking poses like he was the greatest hunk in the world, giving all the girls the come-on and looking like Elvis. He and Daisy were put together for a scene. Him buggering Daisy was a sad sight, and I really felt for Daisy. Neither of them wanted to do it and Daisy was self-conscious about her small, atrophying penis, which was cruelly made the main focus, to drive home that she was transsexual. While the camera filmed them others were getting it on all around the room. It was unusual to have so much sex action going on at the same time, and with only one camera it meant that whoever was in the background had to do it all over again.
But Lasse had chosen his cast well: they were reliable guys who could deliver on demand. I and another girl, Janine, were to go with ‘Big John’. He was laid on the sofa and we were told to take it in turns to climb aboard for the ride – until he proudly revealed the largest cock I’ve ever seen. They say ‘as big as a baby’s arm’ – and it was, and very ugly too, all veiny and lumpy. Me and Janine recoiled. We had to reshoot. There was no way either of us was going to sit on that thing. As chance would have it, there were some who were so in awe of the massive cock that we were able to arrange an alternative plan that wouldn’t involve being impaled and possibly torn. We did a lesbian scene instead.
The whole day was chaotic. With so many people, it was verging on unmanageable. The extras were dancing (badly) to disco music, with couples and threesomes groping each other and screwing in the front room, the hallway and on the stairs. The chaos went up a gear into near hysteria when the police arrived and raided the place. We hadn’t been told that they were actors, so everyone panicked at first, but it got a genuine response from us. The police, looking like something from The Sweeney, bundled everyone into a van that drove off as if to take us to the police station. By then we were all giggling at the ridiculousness of the day. Cameras stopped rolling and we were driven back to the house to get paid.
That’s when Lasse told us his briefcase with all the money in had been stolen. One guy was missing and assumed to be the culprit, but there was no way the real police could be called in to investigate. I don’t know how, but it got resolved and everyone was paid, and Royston, one of the ‘extra’ guys, drove me home at 5.30 a.m. I was so tired I was hallucinating and slurring my speech, but had to go to another job for the Sun. I hadn’t slept for thirty-six hours.
8 July 1975
I fell asleep and got woken by Selwyn trying to shag me. I told him no. Sat and read ‘Diary of a Drug Fiend’.
My day started at 5 a.m. so I could get to Twickenham Studios on time for filming Custer’s Thirteen. I arrived exhausted, not least because Gen had kept me awake talking till 3 a.m. Once in the dressing room, I fell fast asleep – and prey to Selwyn’s unwanted attentions. He soon got off me when I told him I’d started my period.
Guys trying it on was commonplace. Because you did porn they thought you’d fuck anyone – and some girls did, as a token payment for getting more work.
; I didn’t do my scene until 6.30 p.m. Waiting around on set was boring and infuriating when I had so much else to do. I was Custer’s ‘thirteenth’ girl, dressed as a gasman in a long black coat, with a hat and stuck-on moustache. I looked like Blakey from the sitcom On the Buses. I accosted Custer in the gas cupboard on the pretence of reading his gas meter. I had a few lines but I was rubbish at it and my Yorkshire accent was still quite strong. It just didn’t work so I did it ‘mute’ and they got what they wanted.
When I got home, Gen wasn’t there – he’d gone off to have sex with his workmate Pat again. I waited up as long as I could but I needed sleep to look half-decent for the rest of the film scenes over the coming week. I took Crowley books with me to fill the hours between calls to set, where I was doing a short dream sequence of me dancing on an office desk … Very Tales of the Unexpected. Then reshooting the gas-cupboard scene.
I was back at Twickenham Studios within a few weeks, working on a straight film in a bar-room fight scene with another girl, having beer poured over us before I smashed toffee-glass beer bottles over Graham Stark’s head. It was all very Carry On but great fun working with Mary Millington, Tim (again), Rita Webb from The Benny Hill Show and, surprisingly, James Booth from the film Zulu.
Art Sex Music Page 17