by Dr. Susan Block

This year marks the golden anniversary of Deep Throat—the erotic, ironic, iconic 1972 movie that, for many, personified the Sexual Revolution in America.

Deep Throat gave the world a taste of Porno Chic with a Big Gulp of Free Speech, followed by a bubbly chaser of U.S. politics mixed with presidential scandal, spiced with make-love-not-war fervor, spliced with sex-positive feminism and diced with pungent controversies; leaving a complex aftertaste that still lingers five decades later.

It’s all shaken up into a flavorful 50th anniversary tasting tour courtesy of Gerard Damiano, Jr. and Christar Damiano, devoted son and daughter of Deep Throat auteur/director Gerard Damiano. The world tour honors their father’s seminal (in every sense of the word), cinematic creation-cum-pop culture sensation that shocked and seduced the nation—not always in that order.

Director’s cut screenings have been playing throughout this golden anniversary in theaters, festivals, clubs and other venues around the globe.  All of Deep Throat’s quirky scenarios, jingle-happy soundtrack and explicit, unexpurgated sex scenes in their full-on, glorious, notorious, 4K-restored clarity and color can be seen on the big screen once again.

Down the hatch!                            

Not that it all goes down easy or creamy. Some aspects of Deep Throat are tough to swallow.

This is, after all, the movie that launched a thousand protests—ranging from the raging Religious Right to the anti-porn feminist “Left,”  from Chicago Sun-Times film critic Roger Ebert to Memphis, Tennessee’s “smut”-smiting prosecutor Larry Parrish, from “liberal” New York City Mayor John Lindsay to “conservative” U.S. President Richard M. Nixon, as well as the FBI, the NYPD, Charles Keating, the Meese Commission and many more. Over the years, a myriad of people, organizations and political movements have tried to shut down, shut up and choke off Deep Throat.

Talkback or Pushback

That’s one reason why the Damianos arranged post-screening “talkback” panels at every venue, featuring experts of different kinds from Golden Age adult stars to leading-edge “intimacy coordinators.”

I was honored to accept their invitation to moderate the panels at the two Los Angeles venues, though moderating a discussion about something so immoderate as Deep Throat has its challenges. I brought my riding crop just in case I needed to discipline a panel member (kidding—I just brought it for fun).

Having broadcasted shows live from “The Deep Throat Sex Scandal” (the play) and “Harry Reems Tribute” in 2013, and having been interviewed for the E! True Hollywood Story’s “Linda Lovelace” episode in 2000—AND having actually seen the movie in a theater circa 1978—I felt prepared. Little did I know how deeply we would go into the sometimes bizarre, controversial and socially significant qualities of Deep Throat.

The first LA screening was held at the venerable, old Laemmle Royal Theater in West LA, and the second at the kink-positive, new 910 WeHo center in West Hollywood, owned and operated by the courageous and congenial Tom Hoffman.

There was supposed to be a third, the Frida Cinema in Santa Ana. However, controversy reared its scandalous head as the Frida canceled its scheduled screening just over a week prior to showtime due to outrage expressed by anonymous “community” members. The reaction was so “swift and severe” that no amount of “talkback” would moderate the “pushback.” Or so said Management—that is, the same person who had originally, and quite enthusiastically, scheduled the screening—as they apologetically but resolutely canceled it.

Funny how censorship, bans, complaints, deactivations and cancellations are so often based on anonymous outrage.

However, the show must go on, and on it went at the two remaining So Cal venues, with flash and panache, as befits the subject. Swinging Seventies nostalgia was in the air. Golden Age porn stars, most of whom had worked with Damiano and all of whom adored him, strutted across the red carpets, including Nina Hartley, Veronica Hart, Amber Lynn, Christy Canyon, Keisha, porn power couple Luc Wylder and Alexandra Silk (who are also making a film about the tour), “Naked John,”  Golden Age porn star/director Gloria Leonard’s granddaughter Nai’a, and the legendary Herschel Savage.

Sadly, though Mr. Savage seemed ageless at this event, he passed away suddenly just four months later. Star of another classic, Debbie Does Dallas, (graphic descriptions of which helped make Ronald Reagan’s “Meese Commission” Report a best-seller), as well as the lesser-known Satisfiers of Alpha Blue, directed by Gerard Damiano, Herschel was a trained Broadway actor who studied with renowned Stanislavski “method” teachers, Uta Hagen and Stella Adler, before doing Debbie, and he went on to become one of the world’s first and biggest porn stars.

RIP Herschel Savage, née Harvey Cohen, November 25, 1952 – October 8, 2023. 

However, that night a very much alive and wisecracking Herschel joined the rest of us to commemorate one of the most groundbreaking American films ever made… which happened to be about blowjobs.

Of course, Deep Throat was (and still is) not just “about” blowjobs. It also actually showed these blowjobs, as well as cunnilingus, doggy-style, reverse cowgirl, orgies and more—close-up!—on the big screens of major movie theaters throughout the greater U.S. of A.

Talk about a cinematic sexual revolution!

Many audiences were thrilled to partake in an adults-only group sex–watching experience that—with the right crowd—was like a rock concert, love-in and midnight screening of The Rocky Horror Picture Show (to be released a few years later in 1975) combined, creating a palpable sense of “communal ecstasy”… with a hat tip to the late great Barbara Ehrenreich’s not-so-kinky concept of “collective joy.”

No, Deep Throat wasn’t as spiritual as Woodstock (1969), though you could say they were both “dirty”… in different ways.

Of course, other Deep Throat audience members (perhaps with the wrong crowd) were more shell-shocked than thrilled, wondering what in hell they were watching… genitalia as big as a house?!?

Well, a tiny house; but still, this was big-screen, wide open-to-the-public entertainment, and the public ate it up like ice cream after a tonsillectomy.

Make Porn Not War

From the movie’s initial release in 1972 to its vast dissemination in ’73, through Watergate and the socially liberal Jimmy Carter years, right up until the invention of the VCR in the late seventies that led porn out of the big theaters (and even most small theaters) and into private bedrooms, the 1970s was the decade of Deep Throat.

It was “the film that brought the country to its knees.”  Whether you loved it or hated it, even if you’d never seen it, everyone knew—and still knows—“Deep Throat.”

It was so popular, so catchy and so outrageous, “Deep Throat” became a household term. Whether or not the people in these respectable, middle-class households actually saw the flick or practiced the act is unknown. What is known is that the words “Deep Throat” penetrated their consciousness via their trusted late-night companion Johnny Carson’s winking wisecracks, the insider patter of Truman Capote and breathless glimpses of Jackie O, not to mention Martin Scorsese, Barbara Walters and Frank Sinatra (not-so-discreetly) slipping in and out of a Pussycat Theater for an afternoon screening. Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-in laughed about it. Ralph Blumenthal of the New York Times dubbed it “porno chic,” and “Deep Throat” became a part of the lexicon. Everyone wanted to experience it, wear it, practice it, or at least see what it was.

Whether or not it was the flagship film of the Sexual Revolution, Deep Throat was a cinematic symbol of erotic liberation. Americans were coming out of their fallout shelters as well as their closets. People—especially young people—wanted to make love, not war.

“It was the Age of Aquarius,” Herschel recalled on our Laemmle panel, “People wanted to be free, and Deep Throat was a part of being free.”

How’s that “freedom” going these days?  “Well,” Herschel confessed, “as fast as we moved forward, we’re now being pulled back, so people really can’t be free.”

Watergate’s “Deep Throat” swallows Tricky Dick

It wasn’t just Free Lovers and hipsters who made this little low-budget skin flick a sensation. Even cranky conservatives like Bob Hope joked about it: “I thought ‘Deep Throat’ was a movie about a giraffe.” Cue the eyeroll.

And then, most historically, there was politics. In an effort to court and spark his precious “silent majority,” U.S. President Richard M. Nixon—as conservative as Bob Hope with an equally extravagant nose for “smut” (rhymes with slut)—vowed to go after the scourge of pornography, embodied by Deep Throat.

However, Nixon’s anti-porn crusade didn’t kick off as planned. In fact, his own Presidential Study on Obscenity and Pornography found that smut actually didn’t do much harm to adults. So, Tricky Dick declared the report “fake news” (or its 1970s equivalent) and pronounced the committee (mostly Lyndon B. Johnson appointees) “morally bankrupt.” He chose a new committee leader: prominent Catholic, pro-censorship, anti-smut crusader and “Citizens for Decent Literature” founder Charles Keating—his reputation as a censor to be later eclipsed by his conviction as a swindler.  

Then, in a sublime stroke of cultural karma, Washington Post managing editor Howards Simmons is said to have chosen “Deep Throat” as the codename for the Watergate informant who provided “deep background,” later revealed to be Assistant FBI Director Mark Felt. As described in All the President’s Men, Watergate’s “Deep Throat” exposed Nixon for being a common criminal (in addition to being a war criminal, like most U.S. Presidents), forcing him to resign in disgrace.

More than a few holes have been poked into Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s made-for-Hollywood Watergate story, but one fact remains:

Tricky Dick tried hard to shut down Deep Throat, but “Deep Throat” shut down Tricky Dick.

Or you could say, it swallowed him up.

Sexual Freedom Song

No doubt, Deep Throat was as integral to early 1970s American pop culture as tie dyed bell bottoms, peace signs, The Joy of Sex, hippies, Yippies and Andy Warhol. But it was deeper than that. Out of Deep Throat arose a voice of sexual freedom, ringing like the Liberty Bell through the conformist, conservative, Eisenhower era fog, a clarion call to sexual revolution, revelation, exploration, recreation (as opposed to procreation), sharing, healing, fun and love—in the midst of a blatantly horrible war. Through movie theaters, courtrooms, bedrooms, ballrooms, backrooms and in the highest halls of American justice, it rang and sang its make-love-not-war freedom song.

For 50 years (and counting), that song of sexual freedom has been celebrated, followed, employed and enjoyed, as well as challenged, strangled, suppressed and repressed, but it was never completely silenced.

Other Damiano films, like The Devil in Miss Jones (which Roger Ebert actually liked) may be more artistically refined, but Deep Throat was a zeitgeist phenomenon. It was also a porno miracle. Here was a little $24,000 shoe-string skin flick made at Miami’s Voyager Inn Motel playing to packed houses in some of the biggest theaters in the country, grossing $400-600 million. Its exact profits (of which the Damianos barely saw a dime) are shrouded in mob-imposed mystery, but in a capitalism-driven movie industry where bigger is better, Deep Throat was HUGE.

Deep Inside Deep Throat

Deep Throat’s surprise success made an overnight sensation out of its leading lady, Linda Lovelace. The original “girl next door,” Linda played a sexually liberated, but orgasmically frustrated, woman whose psychiatrist—the great and hilarious Harry Reems as the quintessential white-coat parody, “Dr. Young”—discovers that her clitoris is located in her throat.

The good doctor then helps her to pinpoint it—in the interests of medical science and his patient’s relief, of course—with his dick. Like I said, it’s all about blowjobs.

It’s also a comedy. Linda’s oral technique may have been gag-free, but the film spouts more silly gags than a second-string Catskills comic. The running joke of Deep Throat is that a conventional male sexual fantasy that absurdly distorts women’s physiology in service of the ultimate male climax is actually real… at least in this one amazing woman.

The Kinsey Report, it wasn’t.

Nevertheless, Deep Throat did teach a lot of sexually clueless adults that women are capable of experiencing big, bell-ringing orgasms, usually via stimulation of the clitoris—which is never in the throat, but which can be difficult for the uneducated male novice—or even sometimes the female herself—to locate.

Moreover, for a film called “Deep Throat,” it certainly features a lot of cunnilingus, much more than most porn in the 1970’s… or in the 2020s for that matter. You can tell director Damiano had a real taste for the hitherto barely seen mysteries of the vulva.

Back then, porn was almost all made by “a handful of white men… for other men,” Gerard Damiano, Jr. pointed out on our 910 WeHo panel. Nowadays, adult material is far more diverse, much of it made by women, LGBT folks, people of color and all ethnicities and from many religious backgrounds (though most are “lapsed”), and across the full political spectrum.

Porn is watched by an even more diverse audience—from the amorous atheist to the devoutly religious, from the erotically educated to the sexually ignorant. Since Deep Throat opened, porn has become ubiquitous.

On the surface, Deep Throat was a movie about blowjobs—almost a “how to.” As Harry Reems’ Dr. Young patiently instructs, “Relax your muscles… Regulate your breathing to the movement of your head. “ But when you delve a little deeper (so to speak), it’s also about honoring recreational—as opposed to procreational—pleasure; your own, as well as the pleasure of others.

Consider the fact that the title activity—one of the more popular and “intimate”  recreational-not-procreational pleasures—was illegal in many states, even in private (until Lawrence vs. Texas in 2003), let alone on the big screen.

The growing Religious Right considered oral sex  to be “sodomy,” forbidden by God, even though 20 years before Deep Throat, the Kinsey Reports had found that about half of married women and over 60% of men had experienced oral sex (giving or receiving), and the great majority said they enjoyed it. By the 2010s, according to the National Survey of Family Growth, that number rose to 83% of men and 82% of women (married or single). 

Erotic historian Camille Paglia attributed the 1970s rise in oral activities to seeing Deep Throat. “They saw it demonstrated on the screen, and all of a sudden it was on the map,” says Paglia. “Next thing you knew, it was in Cosmo with rules about how to do it.”

It’s also perfectly natural; our bonobo ape cousins love oral pleasures—maybe more than PIV (penis-in-vagina) sex—and so do many other nonhuman animals, such as dogs, cats or really any creature with a tongue.

Spoiler Alert: One of the film’s most memorable oral sex jokes is uttered by Linda’s roommate, played by Dolly Sharp, aka Helen Wood, another Broadway performer moonlighting in porn. Dolly lights a cigarette while perched on the back of a couch with a young man’s head bobbing between her open legs. She then looks down and inquires, “Mind if I smoke while you’re eating?”

But Deep Throat is more just than a mouthful; it’s about the sexual healing needed by all of the characters: patients, nurse and doctor. A new spin on the age-old medical fetish, the film implies that sexual healing reduces tension and violence in humans—just as it actually does among bonobos.  

Deep Throat also played a pivotal role in defining and defending America’s kinkiest founding principle, “the pursuit of happiness.” Indeed, the story of Deep Throat is that of a woman’s pursuit of her own erotic happiness.

Of course, that happiness is seen through the “male gaze.” Besides its auteur/director and mobster producers, Deep Throat was also shot by a man: Brazilian-born, crossover cinematographer, João Fernandes, aka “Harry Flecks.” However, from Linda’s opening drive (in Damiano’s own 1970 Fleetwood El Dorado Cadillac that Harry Reems drove from New York to Miami for the shoot) to her climactic ending, Damiano tried to present a woman’s point of view, which was rare in porn at the time. He even hoped women might want to watch his film—which was also rare. In that endeavor, he succeeded beyond his wildest celluloid dreams.

Not only did women watch Deep Throat, it was considered a hot “date movie” that many couples enjoyed together, breaking or at least bending the old sexist porno patterns… and other patterns.

In its own way, Deep Throat undermined misogyny, violence, hypocrisy, humorlessness, slut-shaming and other kinds of sexual shaming. It supported sex-positive feminism (before that was even a term), and the lovely and talented Linda Lovelace was its poster girl.

Linda Lovelace: Feminist or Victim?

But alas, all was not as it seemed (is it ever?). Years later, Linda published a book (her third) entitled Ordeal. It was 1980. Rhinestone Cowboy Ronald Reagan was riding his reactionary Republican horse into the White House, and the integration of Church and State, along with the repeal of the Sexual Revolution and (eventually) the rollback of Vietnam Syndrome (that glorious natural aversion to war) was underway.

Times had changed. Porno was not so chic.

In her seemingly unassuming way, Linda assumed the position at the forefront of the anti-porn movement. Through Ordeal, she revealed that she suffered traumatic physical and emotional abuse, first from her mother, and then more severely at the hands of her ex-husband Chuck Trayner. Also acting as her “manager,” Chuck sounds like he was a cuckold who liked the race but couldn’t handle the pace… or his own jealousy.

According to some, Chuck the Cuck craved the cash and excitement of pimping his wife out in porn (having already done so in other, far less savory venues), but he also resented the star power and freedom from his control that Deep Throat gave her.

After Linda Traynor became Linda Lovelace, she divorced Chuck and got involved with choreographer David Winters who produced the parody Linda Lovelace for President (1975) with X and R-rated versions. It has some so-bad-its-good moments that try to satirize America’s post-Vietnam political system, but it was critically panned and bombed at the box office.

Her crossover dreams crushed, Linda tried to slip out of the limelight. She metamorphosed into Linda Marchiano, marrying cable TV installer Larry Marchiano, had two children and became a Born-Again Christian. It was years later, after her divorce from Larry the Cable Guy, that Linda revealed Chuck’s abuse.

As soon as she asserted her victimhood, Linda became a star again, but a totally different kind. Anti-porn feminists—most notably Gloria Steinem, Catherine McKinnon and Andrea Dworkin—jumped at the chance to cast blame upon the fledgling adult industry for Linda’s suffering, and *helped* her to express her grievances to larger audiences.

At the time, a struggle was re-emerging between opposing schools of feminism. There were the sex-positive feminists, like my mentor, the late great Dr. Betty Dodson, as well as journalist Ellen Willis and former ACLU president Nadine Strossen. And there were the anti-sex feminists like McKinnon, Dworkin, Steinem and Women Against Pornography, a.k.a. WAP, which, ironically, was pretty much the opposite of Cardi B’s WAP.

Taking Linda Lovelace (now Linda Boreman) under their wing, WAP rebranded this former poster girl for the Sexual Revolution into a poster girl for the dangers of porn. What better way to prove your righteous cause than by converting the leading lady of the most famous adult movie ever, Deep Throat, to your anti-porn crusade? The mainstream media ate it up, this being their favorite kind of sex story—one accompanied by a hefty dose of horror.

Suddenly Linda was famous again. But this time, no one called her a slut or a whore (at least not openly). They called her a victim of porn.

Of course, Reagan’s neo-Puritan posse jumped on the new “Linda Lovelace: Porn Victim” bandwagon. Indeed, they took the reins. In 1986, Reagan’s Attorney General Edward Meese brought Linda before Congress to testify about the evils of porn for his Meese Commission on Pornography. The Meese Report itself was criticized greatly for its shoddy research, lurid quality and reactionary recommendations.

Nevertheless, Linda’s apotheosis as the anti-porn avenging angel was complete.

Was Linda Abused On Set of Deep Throat?

Linda never said she was abused on the set of Deep Throat, but she did say Chuck privately abused her off-set. Thanks to McKinnon and Dworkin’s (and Meese’s) spin on her tragic story, it looked—and still looks—to many who don’t know the full, complex tale, as if Deep Throat was responsible for the abuse of Linda Lovelace Boreman.

According to Gerard, Jr., who spoke at length on this subject at both of our panels, the opposite was true. Linda was a victim of “domestic violence” at the hands of her husband, including at least one harrowing night in their room at the Voyager. “From all accounts,” says Gerard, “he was a real asshole.” Chuck even admitted to hitting Linda, and both said they were in a consensual BDSM relationship (though it doesn’t seem to have been “affirmative enthusiastic consent” on Linda’s part). Chuck had also arranged for Linda to perform in some extreme film loops that included illegal acts long before the couple had even met Gerard Damiano.

However you spin it, asserts Gerard, Jr., Linda was not abused on the set of Deep Throat, and no witness has ever said that she was. He and his sister Christar should know as they were actually at the Voyager Motel during the filming, though they were never on set; they were just kids.

Based on what they did know, the Damianos feel that Linda found freedom, along with a big bounce in self-esteem, in making Deep Throat. There was no “intimacy coordinator” on set; they didn’t even have a makeup artist. Nevertheless, Linda was treated like a star with a special “talent” by the cast, crew and eventually millions around the world.

But fame is often double-edged. At the Laemmle, Gerard mused that due to Linda’s tremendous and rather sudden Deep Throat success notoriety, she was sexually shamed, even as she was showered with honors. So, she longed for a post-porn “normal” life… which turned into an anti-porn life.

Soon enough, however, her love affairs with anti-porn feminism and Born-Again Christianity cooled down. On a side note, it’s always interesting (and infuriating) to see the ways in which these two seemingly opposite movements manage to find so much in common when it comes to sex.

No longer courted or controlled by Reaganites or feminists, Linda revisited her abandoned adult entertainment career on her own terms (or tried to), posing as an erotic model and selling her signed posters at porn memorabilia shows. In our 910 WeHo panel discussion, Veronica Hart recalled that Linda’s agent called an adult video company where she worked, attempting to arrange for Linda to star in more XXX films. “Thank you, but we’re not interested,” Veronica remembered responding. “I could just see down the line that there would be a book about us. I feel bad about saying this, but some people just have to be the victims… consistently.”

Shortly after that, Linda Lovelace Boreman was killed in a terrible car accident.

Bouncing through life from abused child to battered wife to celebrated porn star to anti-porn feminist/Christian and then back to “porn-lite” modeling just before her tragic sudden death, Linda’s true story is quite complex. It deserves and receives our panels’ careful consideration during the Deep Throat talkbacks, but it does not lend itself to soundbites or memes. As a result, many people (most of whom have never seen Deep Throat) are under the erroneous impression that Linda Lovelace was abused on set and forced to perform nonconsensual sex acts in the film.

Odd and inflammatory details, like a visible bruise on Linda’s leg in a non-sex scene, seem to be smoking guns. And then there’s the actual fake “gun.” Linda alluded to Chuck pointing a “.45 automatic eight shot” at her as she talked on the phone. Based on that, some have extrapolated that he forced her at gunpoint to make Deep Throat, though the Damianos and other witnesses say that is a “baldfaced lie.”

Unfortunately, the fact that the film contains a scene where one of Dr. Young’s psychiatry patients pretends to be a “burglar,” breaks into Linda’s apartment and holds a prop gun to her head (before they fall in bed and in love), has added to this morally panicked perception. “There it is!” the conspiratorially inclined might deduce, “the gun they used to force Linda Lovelace to do Deep Throat!”

“It’s a toy gun!” exclaimed Gerard, Jr., when asked about it at 910 WeHo.

“Nowadays they would never allow a gun, even a prop gun, on a porn set,” Nina Hartley pointed out on our Laemmle panel.

Other porn star memories emerged at 910 WeHo which complicate Chuck’s role as the villain of the story. Amber Lynn recalled that shortly after Linda divorced Chuck, he married and managed the career of the second most popular porn star of the early 70s, and its most famous crossover, Marilyn Chambers. Best known as the “Ivory Snow Girl”—pictured angelically holding a baby on a detergent box, captioned “99 & 44/100s % pure”—Marilyn shocked the clean laundry-lovers when she “crossed over” to star in Behind the Green Door (released shortly after Deep Throat) and Insatiable, among many other X-rated films.

“He was a bossy, kind of ball-buster guy,” remembered Amber, “and he always seemed to have the ability to hook up with the famous legendary superstars of the day.”

“When Marilyn came to shoot with us at VCA (Video Company of America),” recalled Veronica, “the first thing she did was call up Chuck. And the first day of shooting, Chuck was on the shoot to make sure that she was treated well.”

Most #MeToo activists would say that just because a guy treated one woman well doesn’t mean he didn’t abuse another, and they wouldn’t be wrong about that. As Erin Tillman the intimacy coordinator pointed out on our WeHo panel, “people have a right to change their mind.”

“Yes, you can change your mind, but you cannot change the truth of what happened,” Amber replied. “What that person [Linda] did was reckless and it was wrong… and shame on her for doing it.”

In porn or out, relationships are never as simple as a soundbite.

Fetish performer Lux Lives reflected on how “Deep Throat and Linda’s whole journey mirrors the journey of feminism in the second half of the twentieth century…  This is a social problem, from which porn is not exempt. It’s not a porn problem. By blaming porn, you erase all of the domestic violence and consent issues happening in other areas of society, particularly in areas such as politics.”

Now, well into the 21^st century, the “social problem(s)” of feminism and sexuality, domestic violence and consent show no signs of letting up.

Uncovering *the truth* about Deep Throat is like trying to pinpoint the meaning of the universe. There are a few facts and factoids, but there are many truths, some of which conflict, which is another reason why this controversial and quirky little porno-that-could is such a durable piece of history.

When Hollywood Supported Porn

Years before I saw the movie, I heard Mike Nichols and Truman Capote joke with Johnny Carson about Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson defending Harry Reems, the star of Deep Throat, on trial in Tennessee for obscenity.

Obscenity?

Ha! The American War in Vietnam, nuclear weapons and cops killing protestors were the real obscenities to me. In comparison, a pop porno flick seemed harmless, if not chic.

Honestly, that’s how I still feel.

At the 910 WeHo screening, I reconnected with an old friend, Tony-award-winning actor Barry Miller who played Ralph in Fame and Bobby who fell (or jumped?) off the Brooklyn Bridge in Saturday Night Fever, among other great roles. Barry had just turned 18 when he talked his way into Beatty and Nicholson’s famous fundraising party for Harry Reems.

Whether they liked porn or not (and most of them liked at least some of it), Beatty, Nicholson, Miller and friends—such as Gregory Peck, Colleen Dewhurst, Mike Nichols and Ben Gazzara—were eager to defend a fellow actor, figuring it was a slippery slope, and they could be next.

After all, movies were movies. They involved actors performing roles on film, whether it was Deep Throat or Splendor in the Grass—the Oscar-winning Warren Beatty film debut that triggered another unforgettable Damiano title, Splendor in the Ass—starring Nina Hartley!

It was an odd, exciting and rather brief moment in cinematic history when porn was no longer hidden away in an adult “bookstore” and not yet banished to the bedroom, only to be watched in private on a VCR. Deep Throat and a handful of other X-rated films were playing in regular theaters, just like regular Hollywood movies. And if its star could be busted, so could they.

After all, it wasn’t long ago that all actors were considered prostitutes, at least metaphorically, if not in reality.

“Deep Throat was a monumental breakthrough in terms of censorship and sexual freedom,” recalled Herschel Savage.

Meanwhile, its all-too-shallow detractors were determined to make an example of Deep Throat that would shut everyone else’s big mouth. “This is one throat that deserves to be cut,” declared New York Judge Giudice Tyler (presaging Republican Presidential candidate Ron DeSantis’ vow to “start slitting throats” in federal bureaucracy on his first day in power), as he found the defendant guilty.

Judge Tyler’s Throat-slitting decision was soon overturned, however, and Mayor Lindsay’s foiled fantasy plan to “Clean Up Time Square” metamorphosed into fantastic free PR for Deep Throat—not just in New York, but all over the USA.

Inch by inch and town by horny town, Deep Throat began to swallow up the country. It was a family affair… the Columbo Crime Family, that is, along with its offshoot, the shadowy, shady, deadly and remarkably proficient Perraino Gang.

Then it was the FBI’s turn to step in and legally choke off Deep Throat, busting everyone from the Perrainos to the projectionist to Harry Reems, and charging almost 120 people with “conspiracy,” though later giving Damiano and Lovelace immunity in exchange for testimony.

Memphis, Tennessee’s federal prosecutor and Harry Reems sadistic persecutor, Larry Parrish, also happened to be a Born-Again preacher. Parrish cast Reems as an “evil…demon” and scared his congregation—I mean, jury—into giving him a guilty verdict. For the first time in U.S. history, an actor was convicted for playing a role on camera. Lenny Bruce had been prosecuted in the 1960s for live performances by local authorities, but this was the U.S. federal government imprisoning an actor for acting in a film.

With the otherwise odious Alan Dershowitz representing him on appeal, poor, tormented, courageous, fun-loving Harry Reems was eventually acquitted of all crimes. However, his “ordeal” took a tremendous toll on his life and career.

But the film itself had a life of its own. Legal battles were fought all the way to the Supreme Court, even as multiple raids, arrests, theater closings and bans occurred. As soon as one theater was raided, another in the next town would show the film, and the people would line up for blocks to see it.

My First Time

Almost anyone who joined those lines to see Deep Throat in a big theater in the Swinging Seventies has a tale to tell about it.  I was a little too young to see it (legally) when it was released, but thanks to the famed “Deep Throat” Watergate connection, I associated this forbidden film with the celebrated fall of Nixon and the end of the Vietnam War. Mix in my teen crushes on Nicholson, Beatty, Che Guevara and Abbie Hoffman in my maleable mind, and Deep Throat seemed to me to be a vivid part of the “make love” half of the Make-Love-Not-War demonstrations that pushed Tricky Dick into pulling out—albeit messily—from a foreign country that we had no business penetrating.

How exactly “making love” related to making peace, I wasn’t sure. Over a decade later, I found some answers from humanity’s kissing cousins, the bonobo apes, who swing through the trees as well as with each other, and have never been seen killing each other in the wild or captivity. Quite a difference from our war-making common chimpanzee cousins or infanticidal gorillas… or us militant human apes. No wonder they call bonobos the “hippie chimps.”

Bonobos would show me “the Bonobo Way” of making peace through pleasure, female empowerment, male well-being, sharing resources and a kind of ecosexuality that some human hippies were exploring back in the ‘70s. Deep Throat was no hippie movie, but it was definitely in the making love (not war) camp.

So, it was circa 1977 or 78. At the time, I didn’t know bonobos from bananas, but having just managed to graduate from that splendid, gilded jail called Yale, I yearned to swing free—erotically, psychedelically, politically and theatrically. I joined New England Commedia, a troupe of former Yalies and dropouts performing San Francisco Mime Troupe-influenced, anti-nuke, anti-capitalism takeoffs on Molière plays in parks and festivals; sometimes (depending on the festival), wearing nothing but body paint, inspired by the Living Theater. As a “day job,” I taught mime, art and revolution to “inner city” high schoolers, as part of President Jimmy Carter’s CETA jobs program (thanks Jimmy!).

Meanwhile, Vietnam Syndrome was in full flower, AIDs was as yet unknown and the sexual revolution was still swinging, when my date and I took our place in the long line snaking down Broadway and around York Street all the way to the Yale Law School from the local movie theater (the same one where we’d just seen Saturday Night Fever and Star Wars), now playing Deep Throat.

It looked like a fun date movie… and it was! Though not right away. At first, I was shocked. I’d heard about “porno movies,” but never actually viewed one before, though I’d seen some explicit scenes in an “Underground Film” class. I’d also experienced public nudity, from streaking through Freshman Campus to protest the War to acting in our local version of The Bacchae, as well as a fair amount of private sex, but that was usually in the dark, under the covers. Never before had my eyeballs been exposed to such well-lit genitalia filling a giant movie screen. And they were so hairy (except for the shaved Lovelace) and so wet—like something coming out of a jungle in a monster movie! I was flabbergasted that such beasts existed—let alone between my legs.

Soon enough, I relaxed. Some of the dialogue was funny, and the acting wasn’t horrible. The wet, hairy “beasts” turned out to be friendly, natural, human body parts enjoying themselves, and before long, I found myself enjoying this movie with its raw, *shocking* close-up sex, but also characters, jokes, a woman’s search for fulfillment and the enchanting concept of mutual sexual healing.

It wasn’t Saturday Night Fever, or Full Metal Jacket, or even the Rocky Horror Picture Show, but it was better than Star Wars, and it was kinky foreplay for my date—“shock and awe” with collateral orgasms.

And then there was the communal ecstasy. Some screenings might even include audience members spontaneously engaging in sex acts in their seats or the aisles. Lauren Boebert would have been right at home! It sounds corny if you’ve never experienced it (and even if you have), but making out with my date at Deep Throat, as other audience members made out with their dates felt like we were making a euphoric connection with our pre-Neolithic hunter/gatherer ancestors who probably shared this kind of relatively shame-free, bacchanalian activity on a regular (probably seasonal) basis, surrounded by fire-lit cave paintings that seemed to move, a precursor to motion pictures.

Devolution of Erotic Entertainment

Before Deep Throat, almost all X-rated materials were drenched in shame, consumed by the testosterone-soaked “raincoat crowd” stealthily slipping in and out of seedy “bookstores” to sneak a peek at stag films, blue movies, loops and the like.

Deep Throat brought porn out in the open for “the people,” including women and couples, to enjoy, almost shamelessly, in a big room—all together now—with popcorn!

The communal ecstasy was short-lived, however. Within a few years, almost all X-rated content was pushed out of the cinemas and onto VHS tapes, then DVDs, then the Internet. The smartphone took porn out of the public theater—the cultural “commons”—and tucked it under the covers into spaces so private, they’re like solitary confinement (physically and emotionally) and even more steeped in shame.

No more communal ecstasy for you and your neighbors to share. Also, no more art.

Soon, bare profits took precedence over artistic aims, as porn’s stories and characters receded, and the genitalia—now shaved, waxed, tattooed or bejeweled—turned into the real stars of the show.  The physical sex became more extreme, as a hot clip is easier to make and generally sells more than a well-made movie where explicit sex is just part of a larger story. Though it could always come back, Porno Cinema has become a lost art.

As time goes on, fewer of us can remember those “Golden Years” when you could go to a big neighborhood theater to see an X-rated film, and possibly run into your co-workers, your neighbors, your boss or your mother-in-law, and it would be, for the most part, okay. Even sort of cool.

The coolness factor was an issue in both of our panels. On the Deep Throat credits, Gerard Damiano called himself “Jerry Gerard” because he thought that sounded more Hollywood-cool. When Deep Throat became cooler than Hollywood, he used his real name again.

Damiano sincerely believed erotica would get cooler, that porn was part of the revolution, that society would evolve to be more open-minded and loving, and it would become less taboo to see a naked body, to see sex as it is in life—more or less—in the cinema. He felt that eventually porn (as a separate genre) would become obsolete as all adult movies with romantic themes would contain an explicit sex scene or two, kind of like real life.

Of course, that’s not how it turned out; at least, not so far.

“My father would be shocked and amazed to see where we are today,” mused Gerard, Jr. Not only is porn itself not so “cool,” let alone revolutionary; porn isn’t even movies anymore. Capitalism killed porn movies because it’s so much cheaper to slap together what Gerard called “the one-day wonders, three in a weekend, cash in and go home,” making movies which are strictly sex acts, barely movies at all.

Moreover, all sexually explicit material—whether low-budget porn or high erotic art or life-saving sex education—is increasingly demonized by the Religious Right and the Politically Correct Left. Just before the screenings, META deactivated my own Facebook and Instagram accounts without warning, reason or recourse. This is happening to more and more of us every day. I’m taking Zuck the META cuck making mega bucks off our exploitation to arbitration (stay tuned), but the fact is censorship is on the rise again.

At the Deep Throat screening in Vancouver’s Rio Theater, protestors threatened to behead the Damianos and “burn down the theater with us inside of it,” said Gerard, Jr. “Some thought it was some kind of snuff film… and none had actually seen the film.”  This is what you’re up against when you’re born into porn, and you don’t reject your porn-producing parents as Satanic.

Fortunately, the Rio Theater stood firm behind the Damianos, no one was hurt, and the show went on. Ironically, just as the original Deep Throat protests generated media interest and free publicity, so do the current protests.  

Nevertheless, the coolness factor is in remission.

Neo-Puritan Erotophobia

Repression is on the rise. Social media is censoring more and more—and it’s not just pornographic images, but also erotic words, provocative phrases, “fake news” that disturbs the corporatocracy, anything pro-Palestine, controversial opinions and whatever gets you flagged, tips the algorithms or tickles a censor-bot. Books are being banned and burned. Sex educators are being fired and defamed as “groomers.” Sex therapists are being stigmatized and suppressed. Trans people are marginalized, threatened and harmed.  Sex workers are slandered and murdered.  

On the political “other” side, the #MeToo movement, which has done a tremendous amount of good for many women—and men!—has also, in some cases, magnified the anti-porn feminists’ toxic demonization of male desire, including the kind which is depicted so juicily in Deep Throat.

“They’ve been after that movie and everything it stands for, for 50 years,” Nina Hartley observed on our Laemmle panel. “It was just too much for them… it’s called ‘erotophobia’.”  

Now “erotophobia”—an irrational obsessive fear of sex—is again in the vanguard, especially when it comes to playful, recreational sex such as we see in Deep Throat, as opposed to dutiful and even coercive procreational sex like that of The Handmaid’s Tale and Matt Walsh’s wet-nurse dreams. Meanwhile, ammosexual Christian Nationalist House Speaker Mike Johnson’s “Covenant Eyes” are watching you.

As repression rises, so go our rights, especially women’s rights. Less than a year after Deep Throat premiered, the U.S. Supreme Court’s Roe vs. Wade ruling protected Americans’ right to abortion in every state of the union. Last year, the new, “forced breeding” fetish-obsessed Supremes stole that right from us. Now American women are being imprisoned for having abortions.

Clarence Thomas & the Coke Can

Speaking of those slutty-for-the-money Supremes, there’s a scene in Deep Throat that sheds light on an odd allegation against one of America’s most corrupt and hypocritical justices; and, in a broader sense, this country’s swing to the neo-Puritanical right.

Upon my recent viewing of Deep Throat (my first time in almost 45 years), I noticed a peculiar scene where the dark, bubbly contents of a Coca Cola can are poured onto (or into) a rather hairy pubic region, and then sucked up through a long rubber tube. As I observed this bizarre, rather kinky and supremely silly activity, accompanied by a musical soundtrack very close to the actual Coke jingle—used without licensing, yet with no “cease and desist” from Coca Cola (that’s how cool Deep Throat was)—it occurred to me that U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ notorious obsession with “pubic hair on a Coke can” (as recounted by Anita Hill from her time working for Clarence in 1981-83), may well have arisen from deep within his libidinous loins upon seeing this scene in Deep Throat!

Indeed, I bet that silly vignette has tormented Clarence “Long Dong Silver” Thomas all these past 50 years; and now he and his bitter erotophobic brethren are getting their neo-Puritanical revenge.

In a sense, they’re all are taking revenge (especially the younger ones now learning history from PragerU) on Deep Throat, sex-positive feminism, the Joy of Sex, contraception, the Hippies, the Yippies, the draft-dodgers, the Flower Children, the Love-Ins, the Streakers for Peace, the Earth Day swingers, the No Nukes marchers and the whole Make-Love-Not-War Countercultural Sexual Revolution that bewildered their parents (and grandparents), enraged their priests and upset their capitalist owners who wanted them to get the hell out of bed and back to work.

And Deep Throat to You All

Damiano almost called it The Sword Swallower, and everything would have been different if he had. But it was Deep Throat that opened 50 years ago, at a time that seems so different from ours; but in basic ways, we’re just the same. We’re still human apes, we still obsess over sex, and we still need love (not war). Though now we’ve got perma war, genocide in Gaza, over 400 million guns in America, and going by the Internet, a lot more hate than love.

When Deep Throat parted its celluloid lips, America was engaged in a personal, sexual revolution that seemed—to some—intrinsically linked to the political, civil rights and anti-war revolution, when a day of protesting against the war in Vietnam might be followed by a night of erotic adventure, perhaps with fellow protesters, endeavoring to practice what we preached, to make love not war.

To paraphrase the meme misattributed to sex-positive feminist, anarchist Emma Goldman, this was a revolution we could dance to.

“Make Love Not War” may no longer be chic, but I still believe in it, as well as try to practice it. I sometimes go with one of my favorite variants like “Make Kink Not War,” “Drop Bras Not Bombs” or “Make Like Bonobos, Not Baboons.” Or, to quote the movie’s happy ending: “Deep Throat to You All.”

Chic, bleak or magnifique, Deep Throat was part of American cinematic, political and sexual history. In a world beset by perma war, murder, mayhem, apartheid and climate catastrophes, sexual history might seem trivial to some. Then again, perhaps if we had found a way to follow through on our natural human impulse to make love not war, we’d be in a very different, more livable world.

© November 22, 2023. Susan Block, Ph.D., a.k.a. “Dr. Suzy,” is a world renowned LA sexologist, author of The Bonobo Way: The Evolution of Peace through Pleasure and horny housewife, occasionally seen on HBO and other channels. For information, call 626-461-5950. Email her at drsusanblock@gmail.com and you will get a reply.

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PHOTOS: JUX LII, RICKEY MORGAN, ABRAHAM PEREZ, MOSE DE PENA, LUIS MENDEL, SUSAN BLOCK