THE AMERICAN ACADEMY of Emergency Medicine confirms it: Each year, between one and two dozen adult US males are admitted to ERs after having castrated themselves. With kitchen tools, usually, sometimes wire cutters. In answer to the obvious question, surviving patients most often report that their sexual urges had become a source of intolerable conflict and anxiety. The desire for perfect release and the realworld impossibility of perfect, wheneveryouwantit release had together produced a tension they could no longer stand.
It is to the 30+ testosteronically afflicted males whose cases have been documented in the past two years that your correspondents wish to dedicate this article. And to those tormented souls considering autocastration in 1998, we wish to say: “Stop! Stay your hand! Hold off with those kitchen utensils and/or wire cutters!” Because we believe we may have found an alternative.
THE AMERICAN ACADEMY of Emergency Medicine confirms it: Each year, between one and two dozen adult US males are admitted to ERs after having castrated themselves. With kitchen tools, usually, sometimes wire cutters. In answer to the obvious question, surviving patients most often report that their sexual urges had become a source of intolerable conflict and anxiety. The desire for perfect release and the realworld impossibility of perfect, wheneveryouwantit release had together produced a tension they could no longer stand.
It is to the 30+ testosteronically afflicted males whose cases have been documented in the past two years that your correspondents wish to dedicate this article. And to those tormented souls considering autocastration in 1998, we wish to say: “Stop! Stay your hand! Hold off with those kitchen utensils and/or wire cutters!” Because we believe we may have found an alternative.
Every spring, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences presents awards for outstanding achievement in all aspects of mainstream cinema. These are the Academy Awards. Mainstream cinema is a major industry in the United States, and so are the Academy Awards. The AAs’ notorious commercialism and hypocrisy disgust many of the millions and millions and millions of viewers who tune in during prime time to watch the presentations. It is not a coincidence that the Oscars ceremony is held during TV’s Sweeps Week. We pretty much all tune in, despite the grotesquerie of watching an industry congratulate itself on its pretense that it’s still an art form, of hearing people in $5,000 gowns invoke lush clichés of surprise and humility scripted by publicists, etc.—the whole cynical postmodern deal—but we all still seem to watch. To care. Even though the hypocrisy hurts, even though opening grosses and marketing strategies are now bigger news than the movies themselves, even though Cannes and Sundance have become nothing more than enterprise zones. But the truth is that there’s no more real joy about it all anymore. Worse, there seems to be this enormous unspoken conspiracy where we all pretend that there’s still joy. That we think it’s funny when Bob Dole does a Visa ad and Gorbachev shills for Pizza Hut. That the whole mainstream celebrity culture is rushing to cash in and all the while congratulating itself on pretending not to cash in. Underneath it all, though, we know the whole thing sucks.
Your correspondents humbly offer an alternative.
Every January, the least pretentious city in America hosts the Annual AVN Awards. The AVN stands for Adult Video News, which is sort of the Variety of the US porn industry. This thick, beautifully designed magazine costs $7.95 per issue, is about 80 percent ads, and is clearly targeted at adultvideo retailers. Its circulation is appr. 40,000.
Though the subline vagaries of entertainment accounting are legendary, it is universally acknowledged that the US adultfilm industry, at $3.54 billion in annual sales, rentals, cable charges, and videomasturbationbooth revenues, is an even larger and more efficient moneymaking machine than legitimate mainstream American cinema (the latter’s annual gross commonly estimated at $22.5 billion). The US adult industry is centered in LA’s San Fernando Valley, just over the mountains from Hollywood.1 Some insiders like to refer to the adult industry as Hollywood’s Evil Twin, others as the mainstream’s Big Red Son.
It is no accident that Adult Video News—a slick, expensive periodical whose articles are really more like infomercials—and its yearly Awards both came into being in 1982. The early ’80s, after all, saw the genesis of VCRs and homevideo rentals, which have done for the adult industry pretty much what TV did for pro football.
From the 12/11/97 press release issued by AVN (visitable also at www.avn.com):
The nominations for the 15th Annual AVN Awards were announced today.2 This year’s awards show, commemorating AVN’s 15th anniversary, celebrates “History”. [sic]
Awards will be presented in a record 106 categories over a two night period.
The adult industry released nearly 8,000 adult releases [sic] in 1997, including over 4,000 “new” releases (noncompilation). AVN reviewed every new release in every categroy [sic] this past year, logging over 30,000 sex scenes.3
By comparison, last year there were approximately 375 films eligible for the Academy Awards that these voters [sic—meaning different voters from the AVN voters, presumably] were required to see. AVN had to watch more than 10 times the amount of releases in order to develop these nominations [usage and repetition sic, though 4,000 divided by 375 is indeed over 10].
From the acceptance speech of Mr. Tom Byron, Saturday, 10 January 1998, Caesars Forum ballroom, Caesars Palace Hotel and Casino complex, Las Vegas NV, upon winning AVN’s 1998 Male Performer of the Year Award (and with no little feeling): “I want to thank every beautiful woman I ever put my cock inside.” [Laughter, cheers, ovation.]
From the acceptance speech of Ms. Jeanna Fine, ibid., upon winning AVN’s 1998 Best Supporting Actress Award for her role in Rob Black’s Miscreants: “Jesus, which one is this for, Miscreants? Jesus, that’s another one where I read the script and said ‘Oh shit, I am going to go to hell. [Laughter, cheers.] But that’s okay, ’cause all my friends’ll be there too!” [Huge wave of laughter, cheers, applause.]
From the interAward banter of Mr. Bobby Slayton, professional comedian and master of ceremonies for the 1997 AVNAs: “I know I’m looking good, though, like younger, ’cause I started using this special Grecian Formula—every time I find a gray hair, I fuck my wife in the ass. [No laughter, scattered groans.] Fuck you. That’s a great joke. Fuck you.”
Bobby Slayton, a gravellyvoiced Dice Clay knockoff who kept introducing every female performer as “the woman I’m going to cut my dick off for,” and who astounded all the marginal print journalists in attendance with both his unfunniness and his resemblance to every apartmentcomplex coke dealer we’d ever met, is mercifully absent from the 1998 Awards gala. The ’98 emcee is one Robert Schimmel, alumnus of In Living Color and a Howard Stern regular. Schimmel looks like a depraved, deeply tan Wallace Shawn and is no less coarse than B. Slayton but a lot better. He does a pantomime of someone attempting intercourse with a Love Doll he’s been too lazy to blow up all the way. He contrasts the woeful paucity of his own ejaculate with the concussive orgasms of certain wellknown male performers,4 comparing these men’s ejaculations to automatic lawn sprinklers and doing an eerie sonic impression of same. All of 1998’s marginal print journalists are together at Table 189 at the very back of the ballroom. Most of these reporters are from the sorts of men’s magazines that sit shrinkwrapped behind the cash registers of convenience stores, and they are a worldly and jaded crew indeed, but Schimmel gets a couple of them—whose noms de guerre are Harold Hecuba and Dick Filth—laughing so uproariously that people at the Anabolic Video table nearby keep looking over in annoyance. At one point during a routine on premature ejaculation, Dick Filth actually chokes on a California roll.
… But all this is Saturday night, the main event. And there are a whole lot of festivities preceding Saturday’s climax.
The adult industry is vulgar. Would anyone disagree? One of the AVN Awards’ categories is “Best Anal Themed Feature”; another is “Best Overall Marketing Campaign—Company Image.” Irresistible, a 1983 winner in several categories, has been spelled Irresistable in Adult Video News for fifteen straight years. The industry’s not only vulgar, it’s predictably vulgar. All the clichés are true. The typical porn producer really is the ugly little man with a bad toupee and a pinkiering the size of a Rolaids. The typical porn director really is the guy who uses the word class as a noun to mean refinement. The typical porn starlet really is the lady in Lycra eveningwear with tattoos all down her arms who’s both smoking and chewing gum while telling journalists how grateful she is to Wadcutter Productions Ltd. for footing her breastenlargement bill. And meaning it. The whole AVN Awards weekend comprises what Mr. Dick Filth calls an IronyFree Zone.
But of course we should keep in mind that vulgar has many dictionary definitions and that only a couple of these have to do w/ lewdness or bad taste. At root, vulgar just means popular on a mass scale. It is the semantic opposite of pretentious or snobby. It is humility with a combover. It is Nielsen ratings and Barnum’s axiom and the real bottom line. It is big, big business.
Thirtyfouryearold porn actor Cal Jammer killed himself in 1995. Starlets Shauna Grant, Nancy Kelly, Alex Jordan, and Savannah have all killed themselves in the last decade. Savannah and Jordan received AVN’s Best New Starlet awards in 1991 and 1992, respectively. Savannah killed herself after getting mildly disfigured in a car accident. Alex Jordan is famous for having addressed her suicide note to her pet bird. Crewman and performer Israel Gonzalez killed himself at a porn company warehouse in 1997.
An LAbased support group called PAW (=Protecting Adult Welfare) runs a 24hour crisis line for people in the adult industry. A fundraiser for PAW was held at a Mission Hills CA bowling alley last November. It was a nude bowling tournament. Dozens of starlets agreed to take part. Two or three hundred adultvideo fans showed up and paid to watch them bowl naked. No production companies or their executives participated or gave money. The fundraiser took in $6,000, which is slightly less than two onemillionths of porn’s yearly gross.
As you know if you’ve seen Casino, Showgirls, Bugsy, etc., there are really three Las Vegases. Binion’s, where the World Series of Poker is always played, exemplifies the “Old Vegas,” centered around Fremont Street. Las Vegas’s future is even now under latestage construction at the very end of the Strip, on the outskirts of town (where US malls always go up); it’s to be a bunch of themeparkish, more “familyoriented” venues of the kind that De Niro describes so plangently at the end of Casino.
But Las Vegas as most of us see it, Vegas qua Vegas, comprises the dozen or so hotels that flank the Strip’s middle. Vegas Populi: the opulent, intricate, garish, ecstatically decadent hotels, cathedra to gambling, partying, and live entertainment of the most microphone swinging sort. The Sands. The Sahara. The Stardust. MGM Grand, Maxim. All within a small radius. Yearly utility expenditures on neon well into seven figures. Harrah’s, Casino Royale (with its big 24hour Denny’s attached), Flamingo Hilton, Imperial Palace. The Mirage, with its huge laddered waterfall always lit up. Circus Circus. Treasure Island, with its intricate facade of decks and rigging and mizzens and vang. The Luxor, shaped like a ziggurat from Babylon of yore. Barbary Coast, whose sign out front says CASH YOUR PAYCHECK—WIN UP TO $25,000. These hotels are the Vegas we know. The land of Lola and Wayne. Of Siegfried and Roy, Copperfield. Showgirls in towering headdress. Sinatra’s sandbox. Most of them built in the ’50s and ’60s, the era of mob chic and entertainmentcumindustry. Halfhour lines for taxis. Smoking not just allowed but encouraged. Toupees and convention nametags and women in furs of all hue. A museum that features the World’s Biggest Coke Bottle. The HarleyDavidson Cafe, with its tympanum of huge protruding hawg; Bally’s H&C, with its row of phallic pillars all electrified and blinking in grand mal sync. A city that pretends to be nothing but what it is, an enormous machine of exchange—of spectacle for money, of sensation for money, of money for more money, of pleasure for whatever be tomorrow’s abstract cost.
Nor let us forget Vegas’s synecdoche and beating heart. It’s kittycorner from Bally’s: Caesars Palace. The granddaddy. As big as 20 WalMarts end to end. Real marble and fake marble, carpeting you can pass out on without contusion, 130,000 square feet of casino alone. Domed ceilings, clerestories, barrel vaults. In Caesars Palace is America conceived as a new kind of Rome: conqueror of its own people. An empire of Self. It’s breathtaking. The winter’s light rain makes all the neon bleed. The whole thing is almost too pretty to stand. There could be no site but Las Vegas’s Caesars for modern porn’s Awards show—here, the AAVNAs are one more spectacle. Way more tourists and conventioneers recognize the starlets than you’d expect. Doubletakes all over the hotel. Even just standing around or putting coins in a slot machine, the performers become a prime attraction. Las Vegas doesn’t miss a trick.
The Annual AVN Awards are always scheduled to coincide with the International Consumer Electronics Show (a.k.a. CES), which this year runs from 8 through 11 January. The CES is a very big deal. It’s like a combination convention and talent show for the best and brightest in the world of consumer tech. Steve Forbes is here, and DSS’s Thomson. Sun Microsystems is using this year’s CES to launch its PersonalJava 1.0. Bill Gates gives a packedhouse speech on Saturday morning. Major players from TV, cable, and merchandising host a panel on the shortterm viability of HDTV. A forum on the problem of product returns by disgruntled customers seats 1,500 and is SRO. The CES as a whole is bigger than your correspondents’ hometowns. It’s spread out over four different hotels and has 10,000+ booths with everything from “The First Ever Full Text Message Pager in a Wristwatch” to the world’s premier selfheating home satellite dish (“The Snow and Ice Solution!”).
But far and away the CES’s most popular venue, with total attendance well over 100,000 every year, is what is called the Adult Software5 exhibition, despite the fact that the CES itself treats the Adult tradeshow kind of like the crazy relative in the family and keeps it way out in what used to be the parking garage of the Sands hotel. This facility, a serious bus ride from all the other CES sites, is an enormous windowless allcement space that during show hours manages to induce both agoraphobia and claustrophobia. A big sign says you have to be 21 to get in. The median age inside is 45, almost all males, nearly everyone wearing some sort of conventioneer’s nametag. Every production company in the adult industry, from Anabolic to Zane, has a booth here. The really big companies have booths that are sprawling and multidisplay and more like small strip malls. A lot of porn’s top female performers are contract players, exclusive vendors to one particular production company; and one reason why a lot of the starlets seem kind of tired and cranky by Saturday night’s Awards gala is that they will have spent much of the previous 72 hours at their companies’ CES booths, on their feet all day in vertiginous heels, signing autographs and posing for pictures and pressing all manner of flesh.
The best way to describe the sonic environment at the ’98 CES is: Imagine that the apocalypse took the form of a cocktail party. Male fans move through the fractal maze of booths in groups of three or more. Their expressions tend to be those of juniorhigh boys at a peephole, an expression that looks pretty surreal on a face with jowls and no hairline. Some among them are video retailers; most are not. Most are just hardcore fans, the industry’s breath and bread. A lot of them not only recognize but seem to know the names, stage names, and curricula vitae of almost all the female performers.
It takes an average of two hours and twelve minutes to traverse the Adult CES expo, counting an average of four delays for getting lost after a chicane turn or some baroque ceilinghigh cheval glass designed to double the visual exposure of Heatwave Video’s display for Texas Dildo Masquerade gets you all turned around. Your correspondents are accompanied by Harold Hecuba and Dick Filth, who have very generously offered to act as guides and docents, and here is a random spatter of the things we see the first time we come in:
A secondtier Arrow Video starlet in a Gstring poses for a photo, forked dorsally over the knee of a morbidly obese cellphone retailer from suburban Philadelphia. The guy taking the picture, whose CES nametag says Hi and that his name is Sherm, addresses the starlet as “babe” and asks her to readjust so as to “give us a little more bush down there.” An Elegant Angel starlet with polyresin wings attached to her back is eating a Milky Way bar while she signs video boxes. Actor Steven St. Croix is standing near the Caballero Home Video booth, saying to no one in particular “Let me out of here, I can’t wait to get out of here.”6 Adultvideo stores all have a distinctive smell—a mix of cheap magnetic tape and disinfectant—and the Sands’ former parking garage is rank with it. Asian businessmen move through the aisles in dense graceful packs and are assiduously cheery and polite. A young guy in a fullcolor Frankenstein Tshirt is spraypainting cartoon flames on an actress’s breasts at the Sin City booth. The actress—an obscure one, not even Filth and Hecuba know her name—has normalsize breasts, and there’s not much of an audience. Producer/director Max Hardcore draws a way bigger crowd at the MAXWORLD booth, where one of his girls is squatting on the countertop masturbating with the butt of a riding crop. Max’s videos’ promotional posters have him carrying a girl in minishorts over his shoulder against the backdrop of various city skylines; the pitches at the bottom say “SEE PRETTY GIRLS SODOMIZED IN MANNERS MOST FOUL! SEE CUMSPLATTERED GIRLS TOO STUPID TO KNOW BETTER!” Max is a story all to himself, according to Harold Hecuba. D. Filth and a porn executive dressed entirely in Campbell Nightwatch plaid are smoking cigars and keep holding their cigars up together and comparing the ash to see which one has the cleanest burn. A lot of the industry males and even some of the starlets are also smoking cigars. 1998 is definitely the Year of the Cigar. The starlets are all in either extremely formal cocktail dresses or else abbreviated latex/vinyl/ Lycra ensembles. Heels are uniformly sharp and ultrahigh. Some of the starlets are so heavily made up they look embalmed. They tend to have complexly coiffed hair that looks really good from 20 feet away but on closer inspection is dry and dead. Someone who is either sometimeperformer Jeff Marton or “BizarroSleaze” filmmaker Gregory Dark is doing sleightofhand tricks with his trademark fedora.7 Whoever he is, he has a goatee. Harold Hecuba also has a goatee; Dick Filth has more like a soul patch. H.H. and D.F., longtime industry journalists, know everybody here and keep getting stopped and drawn into conversations. (These delays, during which yr. corresps. sort of stand there awkwardly at the edge of the conversation and try to look around as if they too know people here and are waiting only to spot them in the crowd before they go off and get into their own involved conversations, have not been included in the 132minute Adult CEStraversal average.) This year, a good 75 percent of the males in and around the porn industry appear to be sporting variants of the goatee.8
Next to the Outlaw Video booth, a starlet in a gold lamé spaghettistrap gown, chewing gum and blowing large blue bubbles, is being videotaped by a disabled fan whose camera and parabolic mike are bolted to the arm of his wheelchair; the starlet is pointing to the tattoos on her left arm and appears to be explaining the origin and context of each one. At the Vivid Video multibooth complex,9 Ms. Taylor Hayes has what is probably the longest autographandfleshpress line in the entire Sands garage. Taylor is majorleague pretty—she looks like a slightly debauched Cindy Crawford—and an oversize monitor suspended from the ceiling over the Vivid area plays clips of her scantily clad and dancing amid dryice fumes. There’s a berm of boxed videos on the floor by the counter and a huge man with a visor and handheld credit card machine on Taylor’s right flank as she greets each fan like a longlost relative. According to Dick Filth, Taylor is both a genuinely nice person and a consummate pro.
The booth for XPlor Media—a company known for its “Southern Belles” video series and ORGY FOR WORLD PEACE Website—is arresting because all the execs at XPlor seem to be under 25 and the booth’s atmosphere is that of a fraternity party in its third straight day. One young bald guy is unconscious in a fetal position on the counter, and some wag has glued all sorts of feathers and flaccid plastic twoheaded dildoish things to his skull. XPlor’s ownerauteurs are two brothers, trustfund babies from a Connecticut suburb of NYC. Their names are Farrel and Moffitt Timlake. Farrel, who wears twelvehole Doc Martens and cargo pants and what’s either a very light parka or very heavy sweatshirt with a hood that stays up at all times, is a particular cause célèbre at the ’98 CES because he’s apparently a friend of the two guys who do South Park, and these guys are rumored to be in Vegas and to possess tickets to Saturday’s Awards banquet.10
Everyone without exception is sweating. At all but a few of the booths, contract starlets treat the fans with the same absent, rigidfaced courtesy that flight attendants and restaurant hostesses tend to use. You can tell how bored the performers are by the way their faces light up when they see someone they know. Well over half of the industry’s current superstars are in this huge room.11 The infamous T.T. Boy is here, standing alone with his trademark glower, the Boy who is rumored to bring a semiautomatic pistol with him to the set and who was featured in a 1995 New Yorker article that was full of lines like “A porn shoot is an intricately delineated ecology.” Mr. Vince Vouyer (sic) is on hand, as are Seth Gecko, Jake Steed, Serenity, Missy, and Nick East. Here is the ageless Randy West, who looks just the way a surfer would look if that surfer were also a Mob enforcer, with his perennial tan and hair like frozen surf. Mr. Jon Dough—winner of AVN’s coveted Best Actor/Video statuette in both ’96 and ’97—alternates between various booths, wearing his customary expression of having psychologically evolved to the point where he’s so incredibly cool and detached that life is one long yawn. Here also is Mark Davis, far and away the most handsome of the current males, a neardouble for Gregory Harrison of the old Trapper John series except for Davis’s ultrashort psychpatient haircut (plus goatee).
And 20year veteran Joey Silvera is at this year’s CES, though mostly in his capacity as an auteur: Silvera now directs Evil Angel’s popular “Butt Row” video series.12 Following the lead of pioneers like John Leslie and Paul Thomas, most of today’s top male stars now also direct (and, per the store boxes, “Present”) their own line of videos, e.g. “Tom Byron’s Cumback Pussy” series, “Jon Dough’s Dirty Stories,” the eyepopping Rocco Siffredi’s “[Various European Cities] By Night” line, etc. The SoandSo Presents series seems to be an industry trend, like cigars and goatees.
It is difficult to describe how it feels to gaze at living human beings whom you’ve seen perform in hardcore porn. To shake the hand of a man whose precise erectile size, angle, and vasculature are known to you. That strange Ithinkwe’vemetbefore sensation one feels upon seeing any celebrity in the flesh is here both intensified and twisted. It feels intensely twisted to see reigning industry queen Jenna Jameson chilling out at the Vivid booth in Jordaches and a latex bustier and to know already that she has a tattoo of a sundered valentine with the tagline HEART BREAKER on her right buttock and a tiny hairless mole just left of her anus. To watch Peter North try to get a cigar lit and to have that sight backlit by memories of his artilleryesque ejaculations.13 To have seen these strangers’ faces in orgasm—that most unguarded and purely neural of expressions, the one so vulnerable that for centuries you basically had to marry a person to get to see it.14 This weirdness may account for some of the complex emotional intercourse taking place between the performers and fans at the Adult CES. The patrons may leer and elbow one another at a distance, but by the time the men get to the front of the line and face the living incarnation of their VCR’s fantasybabe, most of them turn into quivering goggleeyed schoolboys, sheepish and salivaless and damp. The same thing evidently happens at the hundreds of strip clubs all over the country where porn starlets appear as Featured Dancers (for five figures a week, according to Filth) and do photos and autographs after the show:
“Most of these guys become incredibly nervous when I come up to them,” veteran starlet Shane has explained. “I’ll put my arms around a guy and his whole body will be trembling. They pretty much do whatever I tell them to do.” The whole industry, now, has this oddly reversed equation—the consumers are the ones who seem ashamed or shy, while the performers are cocky and smooth and 100 percent pro.
It is no longer the 1980s, and the Meese Commission mentality that led to a major crackdown on video porn is long gone. Federal task forces and PTA outrage are now focused on the Internet and kiddie porn. But today’s adult industry is still hypersensitive about what it perceives as fascist attacks on its First Amendment freedoms. A specially prepared trailer now runs before many higherend adult videos, right between the legal disclaimer on the product’s compliance with or exemption from 18 U.S.C §2257 and ads for phone services like 900666FUCK. Against shots of flowing flags and the Lincoln Memorial, a voiceover says stuff like:
Censorship goes against our Bill of Rights and the founding principles of this country. It is an attempt on the part of the government to legislate morality and to stifle free expression.15 This new, “legal”
Inside the hotel, a kind of impromptu cocktail party forms in the broad marble hall outside Caesars Palace’s largest and reportedly classiest ballroom, which is called Caesars Forum. Burly casino staffers stand taking tickets and being very discouraging about anybody trying to bumrush the show. The crush of bodies out here entails a degree of physical contact that CES mooks never even dreamed of. There are pockets of kliegglare as cable TV reporters interview various performers about (sic:) the air of keen excitement in the air. Mysterious bundles of coax emerge from under the Forum doors and go all the way up the length of the hallway and disappear around the corner. A suspicion that we’d had all week but decided was unverifiable is now instantly verified when one of yr. corresps. gets accidentally shoved against a starlet and is jabbed in the side by her breasts and it hurts. A lot of people are holding drinks in plastic glasses and it’s unknown where they got them. The starlets take turns getting interviewed re atmospheric excitement while the woodmen all avoid the cameras like mafiosi. The TV lights are not doing anyone’s skin tone any good at all. In their allblack tuxes, several of the male Insiders—including e.g. John Leslie and Tony Tedeschi—are so pallid and sallow as to appear diseased. Mr. Nick East devotes a full 5.5 minutes of rapt concentration to the cuticle of his left thumb. A slight surprise is that a lot of the industry’s elite woodmen are short—5'6", 5'7"36 —and most of their companions tower over them. Dick Filth confirms that the contemporary industry’s 5'6" standard helps a prodigious male organ look even more prodigious on videotape, a medium that apparently does all kinds of strange things to perspective.
Tickets for Saturday’s main event are $195 per, in advance. It’s unclear whether any Insiders’ tickets are comped, but journalists pay full retail. Our tickets designate our table as #189. Twentyfive hundred tickets have been sold, and since it’s highly doubtful that anybody got past the flintyeyed casino guys outside without a ticket, tonight’s attendance can confidently be fixed at 2,500.
The Caesars Forum ballroom itself is a huge Lshape with the stage at the—as it were—joint; thus half of the 15th Annual AVN Awards’ audience is geometrically invisible to the other half. This problem is addressed via six sailsized video screens that hang from the ceiling at strategic points throughout the auditorium. During the nearly two hours37 between when the doors open and the Awards show actually starts, the screens alternate quick clips from porn classics38 (recall that the theme of the 15th AAVNAs is “The History of Adult”) with live shots of various people making their entrances and mugging for the remote cameras AVN has got circling the room.
Both Harold Hecuba and Dick Filth have come equipped with binoculars (H.H.’s in a very officiallooking Audubon Society case), which seems mysterious until we all arrive at Table 189, which is at the very, very back of the ballroom’s L’s northern leg, hundreds of yards from even the nearest video screen. “They always put the print guys out in mookland,” Hecuba explains. This fact is unpleasant surprise #1. Unpleasant surprise #2 is the supper the $195 includes, which turns out to be buffetsteamtablestyle and might best be described by inviting you to imagine a very cosmopolitan and multiethnic hospital cafeteria. 39 Several of the male Insiders, we now notice, have brought in their own picnic hampers.
Now moving w/ laden plate to a table near us is a man in a fullbody leopardskin suit whose way of acknowledging people he knows is to point at them rather than wave at them. On his arm is a Bgirl in a body stocking made of what appears to be a densely woven net. Two Astral Ocean Cinema contract starlets have on identical coppercolored beaded gowns with myriad lengthwise slits in the skirt parts’ fronts and backs and sides, so that as they walk to their table their upper halves look normal and their lower halves seem to be passing through an infinity of bead curtains. Obviously, the whole scene is overwhelming. The average American rarely gets to see aerobic legwarmers with 4" spike heels. The Caesars Forum ceiling is the color of rancid meringue; it has 24 chandeliers that are designed to look like concentric opened fans but actually look more like labia or very wellorganized fungus. Mr. Joey Buttafuoco is in the house, accompanying40 Al Goldstein of Screw, who is here to receive a Special AVN Achievement Award for His Lifelong Defense of the First Amendment. Black is so resoundingly In this year that even the starched linen napkins at everyone’s place settings are black. The wineglasses all have little frosted cameos of J. Caesar on them. Humorless men with walkietalkies stand guard at each of the ballroom’s fire doors—apparently last year there were some problems with unauthorized Caesars Palace employees sneaking in to watch the gala. The video screens are now showing the climactic scene of Debbie Does Dallas, the one where the nebbishy little standin for all mooks everywhere finally has sex with Bambi Woods and then the screen flashes “NEXT?” The South Park boys are indeed in attendance, up at Table 37 w/ Farrel and the XPlor coterie. There are also rumors that Boogie Nights auteur Paul Thomas Anderson possesses a ticket to the gala and might show up.41
The closest thing to any kind of Insider table near ours is #182, which according to its black tabletent is reserved for Anabolic Video (not an industry force) and is currently occupied by a spiriferously coiffed and sullenly chewing Dina Jewel (who declines to return Harold Hecuba’s blown kiss) and her escort, a young fellow whom one can easily envision headbutting somebody in a mosh pit. D. Filth confides that this Anabolic guy is a close friend of woodman Vince Vouyer (again, sic), who himself is not up for many ’98 Awards because he spent a good part of the past year in court and/or detention for helping operate an escort service which authorities alleged was not a bona fide escort service at all.
It turns out that Hecuba and Filth have kept from yr. correspondents as unpleasant surprise #3 the single chintziest thing about the $195ahead 15th AAVNAs banquet & gala: Beverages are not compris. And not just alcohol, either; even a lousy club soda w/ lime42 is $6.00. Worse, it turns out you can’t run any sort of tab—you have to pay the waiter in cash when you order the lousy club soda w/ lime, and he (theoretically) brings your change back with the beverage. Thus a separate and memoryintensive transaction is required for each drink that each of the sixtoeight persons at each of the appr. 375 tables in the auditorium might order, with additional complications if certain people are buying drinks for certain tablemates but not for certain other tablemates, etc.43 The whole unfreedrink situation is incredibly annoying, not only because of the outlandish ticket price but because the ballroom’s 100 percent Middle Eastern waiters (decent and hardworking fellows all, to be sure, who are taking some serious abuse about the payasyougo beverage policy from mooks with cigars at the nearby tables, despite the fact that the waiters don’t make the rules and must surely find having to remember and make change for six to eight different customers per table a piercing pain in the ass44 ) have only rudimentary ESL skills and tend to confuse both drink orders and currency denominations. Dick Filth leans over and shouts: “Now you can maybe see why this is a multibillionayear industry—they’re tight as a duck’s butt!”45
The crowd lingers over hypersucrotic cake and coffee and $9.00 cordials and howls conversation at itself for 90 more minutes before the house lights dim and the 15th Annual AVN Awards gala starts. What follows thereon is a kaleidoscopic flux of stilted acceptances and blue oneliners and epileptic strobes and spotlights following winners’ serpentine and high fivestudded paths to the stage, of everything from generic Awards Show schmaltz to moments of nearPericlean eloquence, as in e.g.:
“Fellow MENSA members and aficionados of Shakespeare!” intones Al Goldstein of Screw, 62 and obese and whitebearded and crazyhaired and dressed in a sportcoat whose lapels are two different primary colors, looking pretty much exactly like that one certain old guy in the neighborhood your mom warned you never to try to sell Cub Scout chocolate mints to, and glorying in a Special AVN Achievement Award he confesses to feeling he’s long deserved. “I want to thank my mother, who spread her legs and made all this possible.” Large sections of the crowd are on their feet—Goldstein is a porn icon. He was distributing NYC’s Screw on photostat when most of the people in this room were still playing with their toes. He’s been a First Amendment ninja. He drinks in the applause and loves it and is hard not to sort of almost actually like. He’s clearly an avatar of contemporary porn’s unabashedness, its modern YeahOKI’mScumbutUnderneathAllYourHypocrisySo AreYouandatLeastIHavetheGutstoAdmitItandHaveaGoodTime persona:
“I salute the women with elevenIQs and the men with eleveninch cocks. The real heroes are the cocks and pussies who fuck onscreen. They’re the real heroes.” Goldstein is less conducted than borne back to his seat.
This has followed Robert Schimmel’s intro and a 20minute “Musical Salute to the History of Adult,” in which topless dancing girls do a medley of disco, new wave, and so on.46 The stage band is ragged and unevenly amplified, and they all have flared collars and tight perms—it’s like watching The Brady Bunch’s final season through borrowed binoculars. The stage is lit by autotrack spotlights whose colors alternate w/o discernible scheme.
The whole 15th AAVNAs Show lasts 3.5 hours and resembles nothing so much as an obscene and extremely wellfunded high school assembly. The mix of garish selfcongratulation47 and clumsy choreography is often so weird as to be endearing. There are never fewer than six presenters for each award, and they never seem to know whose turn it is to announce a nominee, and there are always a couple who don’t get close enough to the mike to be audible and a couple others who get too close to the mike and produce a jolt of feedback that sends people and cocktails flying out of chairs in the first rows of tables. Wicked Pictures’ Satyr, a multiplecategory nominee, gets repeatedly pronounced “Satter.” Winners are supposed to exit stageleft after their acceptance speeches, but even people who’ve won and been through the process several times in recent years keep forgetting and trying to exit stageright and colliding with the hostesses who are there to escort them leftward. Some presenters insert brief rote antidrug messages into their intros, while around them twitch and sniff other presenters—not many, but some—who are obviously coked to the gills.
Probably the most neutral and economical thing to say is that large parts of the ceremony are unintentionally funny. Winning woodmen extend earnest thanks to directors and execs for giving them “an opening” or “a shot” or “my big shot” and seem wholly unaware of the carnal entendres involved. Back at the journalists’ table with us is a 40ish woman in twopiece Armani who’s doing a spot on the Awards for ABC Radio; she spends most of the evening hunched over with her head in her hand and her tape recorder not even on. Dick Filth spends the show’s whole second hour trying to track down a waiter who owes him beverage change. AVN’s Gene Ross pays tribute to ’98’s Male Performer of the Year by saying: “You haven’t lived until you’ve seen Tom Byron’s wrinkled nuts on a seventyinch TV screen.” Rob Black’s Miscreants keeps getting nominated in category after category, and time and again there’s a frantic caucus at the podium about the correct pronunciation of miscreant, complete with a couple of presenters audibly whispering what in the fuck is the word even supposed to mean.48
To be fair, some of the nominated products’ titles are genuinely confusing. Triple Penetration Debutante Sluts 4 is up for Most Outrageous Sex Scene—along with Wild Bananas on Butt Row and 87 and Still Bangin’—but loses out to a scene the Program entitles “Anal Food Express”49 from a video called My Girlfriend’s Girlfriend. Paul Thomas’s Bad Wives wins Best Film. Evil Angel’s Buda wins Best ShotonVideo Feature. The Best Foreign Release statuette goes to something European called President By Day, Hooker By Night. Bad Wives also wins Best Actress/Film for Dyanna Lauren, Best Supporting Actress/Film for Melissa Hill, and Best Anal Sex Scene/Film50 for Lauren and Steven St. Croix. Best Compilation Tape honors go to The Voyeur’s Favorite Blow Jobs & Anals. David Cronenberg’s mainstream Crash comes out of absolutely nowhere to win something called Best Alternative Adult Feature Film. Ms. Stephanie Swift wins Best Actress/Video and tells the crowd: “Thanks, everybody. My gang bang was a blast.”51
Max Hardcore, to Table 189’s immense and unkind delight, doesn’t win one single thing.
An actor named Jim Buck wins AVN’s Gay Performer of the Year Award, and you better believe yr. corresps. sit bolt upright when the person who appears onstage to accept the award is a pink and leptosomatic 4'10" and is wearing an Eton collar and appears, even under 125X binoculation, to be a twelveyearold boy. And it turns out it is a twelveyearold boy: It’s Jim Buck’s little brother. “Jim can’t be here tonight because he’s performing in a Shakespeare festival in New Orleans,” the little boy says (correspondential expressions of bugeyed inquiry at Hecuba and Filth—Shakespeare festival? sending a prepubescent relative to collect your excellenceinfilmedsodomy prize?—are met with bemused shrugs), “but I’m here to thank you on his behalf, and to say that I taught Jim everything he knows.” [Enormous audience laugh and ovation, single spasmodic shudder from hunched ABC Radio lady.]
A strange and traumatic experience which one of yr. corrs. will not even try to describe consists of standing at a men’s room urinal between professional woodmen Alex Sanders and Dave Hardman. Suffice it to say that the urge to look over/down at their penises is powerful and the motives behind this urge so complex as to cause anuresis (which in turn ups the trauma). Be informed that male porn stars create around themselves the exact same opaque affective privacy bubble that all men at urinals everywhere create. The whole Caesars Forum’s men’s room’s urinal area is an angst festival; take it from us. The sinkandmirrorandtowelette area, however, turns out to be a priceless mash of Insider jargon and shoptalk, all made extraresonant by echolalic tile and a surfeit of sixdollar drinks. One performerturnedauteur is telling a colleague about an exciting new project:
“Found this Russian, this chick like nineteen, can’t speak a word of English, which for this [ = for the exciting project] is perfect.”
“You going to get in there? Just for maybe like one scene?”
“Nah. That’s the whole point. I’m the director. This is my package now.”
“Oh man though but you got to get in there. Just one scene. Nineteen, no English. Probably got a butthole about this big” [illustrative gesture unseen because auditor is still standing complexly traumatized at urinal].
“Well, we’ll see.” [Mutual laughter replete w/ warmth of genuine friendship, fellowfeeling; exeunt.]
The Awards Show’s planners have obviously studied at the Oscars’ feet. Not only are the highprofile AVNAs held to the end—though with occasional teasers like Best Supporting thrown into the first twothirds to keep people attentive52 —but the endless lists of categories and nominees are interspersed with little entr’actes of musical entertainment. Ms. Dyanna Lauren, for instance, appears between BestSelling Tape and Best Foreign Release to sing her original composition “Psycho Magnet,” a hardrock ballad about being a porn star and getting constantly stalked and harassed by mentally ill mooks. The song’s argumentation strikes yr. corresps. as a bit uneven, but Ms. Lauren struts and contorts and punctuates her phrasing with uppercuts to the air like a genuine MTV diva. The downside is that vocally, even with heavy amplification and digital synthesis, Dyanna Lauren sounds like a scalded cat, although Dick Filth points out that so does Alanis Morissette, and H. Hecuba chimes in by shouting: “Say whatever you want about the songanddance numbers here, they sure beat what Wahlberg and Reilly were coming up with in Boogie Nights!”
Hecuba’s claim seems unassailable until right before the Best Boxcover Concept category, when suddenly a piano is wheeled out for a chinless middleaged man in the same sort of undersize porkpie that Art Carney always wore in The Honeymooners. This entertainer, who is introduced as “Doctor Dirty—the Dirtiest Musician in the History of Music,” proceeds to belt out obscene parodies of popular ditties that put Table 189 in mind of Mad magazine if everyone at Mad somehow all lost their mind at the same time. “Just got home from prison./My asshole is fizzin’./Goo goo goo drippin’ out my back door” is the only snatch of actual lyrics that persists in memory, though titles like “Sit on a Happy Face” and “It’s a Small Dick After All” have proved maddeningly hard to forget. Nobody at or around our table has ever heard of Doctor Dirty before, but almost everyone agrees that he’s the ’98 gala’s low point and a credible rival for Scotty Schwartz’s 1997 seminude rendition of “Thank Heaven for Little Girls” as the most repellent AVNA interlude in modern memory. There’s also the ’98 ceremony’s climax, in which Midori53 and two other starlets take the stage as “the Spicy Girls” and do a rappish 4/4 number that ends with pretty much every female porn performer in the crowd54 up on stage dancing lasciviously and blowing kisses at the AVN cameras. This climactic distaff shindig apparently caps the Awards every year.
Something else happens every year. It’s never part of AVN’s videotape of the gala, but it’s a tradition that finally explains why the ballroom’s poor waiters are willing to spend five hours enduring beverage abuse and scuttling around to find change. After the Awards Show is over and the lights go up, some of the starlets always pose for obscene snapshots with the Forum’s waiters. A lot of this year’s picturetaking happens at the back, right near our table. One waiter stands with his arm around the shoulders of Leanna Hart, who pulls down the starboard side of her strapless taffeta and allows the waiter to cup her right breast while Table 189’s own personal waiter55 snaps the photo. Another waiter goes around behind Ms. Ann Amoré—a very personable black lady with a 50inch bust and gang tattoos all down both arms—and hunches over behind her as she bends forward and releases her breasts from confinement, and the waiter paws them and tries to look like he’s having intercourse with her from behind as his friend’s flash goes off. What the waiters are going to do with these photos is unguessable, but they’re visibly thrilled, and the starlets are patient and obliging with them in the same blank, distant way that they were with the mooks at the Adult CES.
Trying to leave after the AAVNAs gala is another slow process, because the broad hallway outside the ballroom is again filled with industry people with Caesarcameo’d glasses they’ve somehow forgotten to leave at their tables, all standing in clumps and congratulating one another and making plans for various Insider parties later. But the slowest, scariest egressive part is traversing the long glass vestibule to the hotel’s side exit. A mass of fans and Caesars Palace custodians and assorted other civilians are there, and the crowd parts slightly to allow a narrow passage for the Awards’ attendees, who must run this gauntlet nearly single file. It’s late, and everyone’s tired, and this crowd has none of the awestruck reticence of the cabstand’s spectators earlier. Now it’s like every mook has his own special highvolume comment for the passing stars, and there’s a weird mix of adulation and derision:
“Love you, Brittany!”
“How’d you get that dress on, baby?”
“Look over here!”
“Does your mother know where you’re at right now?”
One florid 30ish man holding a plastic cup of beer now reaches out from the crowd and very deliberately pinches the breast of the Bgirl walking just in front of us. She slaps his hand away without breaking stride. Because we cannot see her face, we don’t know whether there is any reaction there at all. We have an informed guess, though.
Mr. Dick Filth is behind us with one hand on each of yr. corresps.’ shoulders (we’re basically supporting him out). Everyone’s ears are still ringing, and Filth knows enough to almost shout:
“You know,” he says, “we’ve also got the XRCO Awards in February. XRated Critics Organization Awards—you get me? They’re not in Vegas, and they’re not rigged. And yet they manage to be just as ridiculous.”