SEXIS WRONG

The Archive
Jack Boulware
“The clip we’re about to see is from a film called Make Mine
Milk,” says a film archivist named Paul Potocky. “The gal who
stars in it is lactating. It’s one of my favorites, filmed right
here in San Francisco.” He pushes “play” on a video recorder,
and the audience is treated to a grainy, five-foot image of
greasy hippies having sex.
For the next two hours, similar clips roll past, from Maxine’s
Dating Service to Miss Kinsey’s Report, Starship Eros, Hitler’s
Harlot, and Reckless Claudia. All examples from the dawn of
America’s adult-film industry, featuring the genre’s requisite
dirty feet, hairy bellies, pink faces, stoned expressions, and
wretched acting. But we’re not sitting in a sticky-floor theater
with peeling wallpaper. We’re actually in a meeting room of
San Francisco’s Cathedral Hill convention hotel. This is the
twenty-fifth anniversary gala weekend of a state-accredited
institution of higher learning. And we’ve just had lunch.
More than just retro raunch, these
skin flicks represent a tiny nugget
of pornography’s mother lode,
the world’s largest repository of
porn and erotica.
More than just retro raunch, these skin flicks represent a tiny
nugget of pornography’s mother lode, the world’s largest
repository of porn and erotica—three million items, including
hundreds of thousands of films, which fill 22 warehouses
throughout Northern California. The sex and porn industries
know about the Archive. It belongs to the Institute for the
Advanced Study of Human Sexuality. This specialized school
has been squirreling away such materials for nearly three
decades, valiantly cataloging what it refers to as America’s
“erotic heritage.” Everyone knows of it, but few have ever
seen it.
The Archive’s contents arrive at the Institute primarily in the
form of tax-deductible donations, from retired film producers,
erotica collectors, even other museums and libraries. Policy
is never to throw away anything, so warehouses fill with a
never-ending stream of porn films, books, magazines, sex
toys, virtually anything related to sex and pornography. I’m
sitting in this hotel, crashing the Institute’s anniversary weekend
celebration, to catch a glimpse of this fabled historical
repository. Which means, at the moment, a snip from the
classic title Hungry Hypnotist.
This afternoon is not without its educational side. We learn
that in the industry’s infancy, low-budget directors would flash
the lights on and off to simulate a strobe effect. To avoid prosecution,
producers often added scenes of “redeeming quality”
to their efforts, such as travel or documentary footage,
or in the case of Black Is Beautiful, an actor in a suit at a desk,
painstakingly explaining the marriage rituals of
an African family. So-called “loop carrier” films
began with a ten-minute loop of porn footage,
then plot and characters were added around it.
Soundtracks ranged from stolen rock and funk
tunes to original music recorded by Blues Project
guitarist Mike Bloomfield, who did the gigs
to finance his heroin habit.
Our host introduces another film, also one of his favorites,
he says, entitled The Rites of Uranus. We watch the footage
of guys in satanic robes, chanting, “Hail to your anus!” while
masturbating to a gyrating woman, who sports a lit candle
sticking out of her rear. After an hour or so, it all sort of blends
together in a sweaty collage of slapdash hippie lust. As I walk
out, the noisy satanic chants still echoing behind me, I notice
an elderly woman, one of the Institute’s faculty, sitting in a
wheelchair in the middle of the room, fast asleep.
84 EVERYTHING YOU KNOW ABOUT SEX IS WRONG