SEXIS WRONG

• Continuously Adjustable Fastening for left or
right handed users [!?] and those with special
preferences.
• Odor resistant.
• Grease resistant.
ORDERING INSTRUCTIONS
In order to obtain your proper length, hold organ
between thumb and forefinger and stretch gently
away from the body until a slight tension is felt.
WITH A RULER, MEASURE ON TOP IN INCHES
FROM THE BODY TO THE END OF THE ORGAN.
MEASURE ORGAN IN LIMBER STATE.
Marvin understood that escalation is the key to long-term
success in hardcore porn; strong medicine to begin with, the
dosage must be regularly titrated upward to keep the reader
involved and aroused. The analogy to drug addiction, while
not entirely false, is, however, weak. The stronger analogy is
to the movie-going public’s consuming passion for increasingly
sophisticated, unusual, and elaborate…Action! Special
Effects! Wild Stunts! To
this end, in mid-1968 he
schemed to broaden his
catalogue, getting away
from novels and into nonfiction.
He told Peter Collier:
“Now your homosexual
novel isn’t what it’s
cracked to be…. In fact, I
think that the homosexual
market is highly overrated.
Take us. We put out a book
of male nudes [All Male
Nudes] in various poses
a little while ago, and its
sales took a nosedive.” 26
The fact that the production
values for that gem
of a book were excruciatingly
poor escaped him;
the most avidly horny gay
man would’ve been hardpressed
to get a hard-on looking at those lousy, grainy blackand-white
shots.
Marvin continued: “Right afterwards we put out one of females
nudes [Female Photographs] and, frankly, we can’t
keep enough in print.” 27 Marvin was out-of-the-ballpark
wrong regarding sexually explicit gay pulp fiction. It was, in
reality, a booming part of the business: More gay-sex titles
were issued and sold during the era than at any other time in
history. As for the success of Female Photographs, this only
demonstrated that most straight, middle-aged men of the era
were so desperate for a peek at the palace that they’d buy
anything. The book was sleazy (no, that gives sleazy a bum
rap; tacky and shoddy are more appropriate adjectives), one
black-and-white split-beaver photo after another. One can
only conclude that gay men in general do indeed possess a
greater aesthetic sense than their straight brothers.
To further his profits—there was an industry-wide sales
slump beginning in 1968 that apparently was the motivator
for ratcheting up the raunch—Marvin issued Intercourse,
a title that thirty years later might’ve been released under
the title Fucking for Morons, a self-help guide providing—of
course!—grainy, cheesy b&w photos of men and women
demonstrating various sexual positions. “Believe it or not,”
Professor Marvin Miller, renowned sexologist and purveyor
of the Uthaid, asserted, “some people don’t know how to
screw.” 28
In 1969 Art Kunkin, publisher and editor of the Los Angeles
Free Press, at the time the West Coast’s premiere alternative/counterculture
newspaper, was in trouble. As a public
service, he’d recently published the names and home addresses
of 80 local police and federal narcotics officers, and
the city and feds had come down on him like a pile driver. He
was being prosecuted for obstruction of justice, and his printer
was being intimidated. Included as part of the indictment
against Kunkin, the printer was offered a deal: Drop Kunkin,
we’ll drop you from the case. Kunkin became persona non
grata with his printer and every other shop around town. The
Free Press was being forced out of business. Kunkin heard
about a plant in City of Industry. He visited the owner.
Just a few days prior to Kunkin’s appointment, Marvin was
sitting at home, watching evening TV. Former LAPD Chief Ed
Davis, then a commentator on a local station’s newscast, had
recently blasted Kunkin on-air for revealing the identities of
the narcs. On this night, Kunkin was provided with the opportunity
to rebut Davis. Marvin watched Kunkin, and the seeds
for a mutual love-fest were sown, for Kunkin demonstrated to
Marvin that he was a true brother-in-arms, or rather fingers,
specifically the middle one, in the struggle against authority.
So, when Art visited Marvin and asked if he could rent his
printing plant for a few months with an option to buy (the
Free Press had, with its recent addition of sex ads, become
something of a cash cow, and Kunkin had ambitions toward a
publishing empire), Marvin—without any discussion of terms
whatsoever—reached into his pocket and tossed the keys to
the plant to Kunkin, who was stunned by Marvin’s generos-
244 EVERYTHING YOU KNOW ABOUT SEX IS WRONG