SEXIS WRONG

a chain of retail bookstores (that did, with two of them open
and operating), and on and on.
He was the only man I ever knew who could be actively managing
half a dozen different kinds of enterprises that, eventually,
would all somehow come together, while appearing to
be bored out of his mind. But his thoughts never strayed too
far from the fruits of his Porno University manuscript mill.
Toward that end, Don insisted, he had to know what it was
about pornography that activated all the desired responses
on the part of the reader. And, could the reader continue
to read after one of his hands became occupied full-time in
more gratifying pursuits?
He talked me into participating in this study with him. He
might as well; he already had me smuggling things for his
students and things for the Salvation Army Orphanage, his—
He had to know what it was about
pornography that activated all the
desired responses on the part of
the reader.
and therefore Greenleaf’s and my—adopted charity. I knew I
could rely upon him to figure out a way to get me to pay for
things, as well.
The actual classroom for his Porno University was a conveniently
borrowed meeting room in the orphanage, set up with
desks and outlets for all those smuggled Olivettis. Leave it
to Gilmore to figure out multiple uses of facilities he could
command for free. He taught the students how to follow the
formula in the classroom, then sent them home with reams
of typing paper and their Olivettis to do the “creative” work
in private.
For years after Gilmore’s Porno University closed down,
some of the stellar alumni continued to write and sell many
novels as full-time writers. Included among them were old
western pulp hack Lee Floren (“Lisa Fanchon,” “Matt Harding”),
Leslie Gladson (“Kyle Roxbury,” “Sebastian Gray,”
“Lee Gardner,” “Genevieve St. John”), Vivien Kern (“Vivien
Blaine”), and Peggy Winters (“Marta Summers”). In addition,
Dr. Gilmore persuaded full-time professional expatriate writer
Linda DuBreuil to join the Greenleaf writers group. While she
was not one of his students, she was nevertheless the reigning
Queen of Pornography. Linda (“D. Barry Linder” and numerous
others), all by herself, wrote 300 novels during her
sleaze-book career.
Gilmore, as instantaneous President of Guadalajara’s 20,000-
member Americas Society (no mean accomplishment, that),
had all those expatriate US citizens delegated to be the
guinea pigs for his experiments. For some reason I never understood—and
there were many of them revolving around
Don—those people really were his to command. They would
do anything he asked, however improbable, like spending
hours just looking at pornography and discussing their reactions.
After all, they were practically your average Americans
anyway, weren’t they? What he wanted from me wasn’t so
much participation as financial backing. He wanted Greenleaf
Classics to pay the printing costs for his test papers, course
material, etc—everything that was involved with the studies.
The tests were divided about evenly between written pornography
and visual pornography. This was because, at the
time, Greenleaf was producing a number of photo-illustrated
novels and nonfiction books requiring lots of really close-up
and intimate color photography…so good you could smell the
action and feel the warmth it was generating
all by itself. We were also producing more than
one naked people magazine a day.
Dr. Gilmore said that he was going to sell me
most of the manuscripts that came out of his
Porno University anyway, so I might as well
help pay to get them done right. It made a sort of sense to
me at the time, so I gave him the green light and arranged the
financial backing he had requested.
At first there was a frantic period of gathering up materials to
use with the test subjects. These included numerous 8- and
16-mm hardcore films, and hundreds of still photos of naked
people alone and in doubles and in groups, and all of them
doing things most people had never seen being done before.
All kinds of books from classic pornography to the best of
the 1960s sleaze paperbacks. And I was somehow expected
to smuggle all that contraband from the point of origin to the
place of use…a frequent touch-and-go proposition.
It took two weeks to train the staff that would be conducting
the studies at Porno University. Several different elements
were crucial to the study, and it was necessary that every
staff member be prepared to cover more than one of them
if necessary. For instance, they kept running score sheets of
every test subject in the classroom. On those sheets, in code
symbols, they indicated things like facial expressions, visible
aggression, body language, etc. One very important element
was to indicate the viewpoint of the subject to see if it was
consistent or if it switched around and why. Were they bonding
through reader identification with the fucker or the fuckee?
Were they lover or beloved? Doer or done? Somewhere
in between? All those things were given value points in arriving
at Dr. Gilmore’s conclusions and recommendations.
The testing itself, involving a long line of handpicked expatri-
234 EVERYTHING YOU KNOW ABOUT SEX IS WRONG