Page 50 - AVN June 2015

FEATURE
The Past
Imagining New York of the 1970s and
’80s isn’t easy in today’s Times Square.
I’m standing on the corner of 42nd
Street and Seventh Avenue, trying
to visualize a place Annie Sprinkle
described as once being lined with
adult theaters, porn stars’ names on
marquees and porn premieres complete
with Klieg lights. It was a place that
for all its drugs, crime and seediness,
photographer Barbara Nitke remembers
with wistful fondness as a tough but
captivating underworld.
All of that is wiped clean nowadays
by the neon glare radiating from the
Swatch Store, the M&M store and—in
perhaps the ultimate stroke of irony—
the Disney Store. The location and
name may be the same, but everything
else about today’s tourist-focused
Times Square has changed.
Walk just a few blocks in any
direction, though, and the gritty and
iconically beautiful New York of fire
escapes, walk-up apartments, quirky
bookstores, magazine stands, pizza
joints, cool cafes and colorful fabric
shops re-emerges. This is the writers’
New York, the same city that fascinated
those who worked here during the adult
film heyday.
“People were not afraid back then,”
recalls Veronica Hart, a theater arts
graduate from the University of Nevada
Las Vegas who began starring in New
York’s adult films in the early 1980s.
“There was stuff going on around us
all the time, but we weren’t aware of
it 24/7 like we are now. … It was like:
‘Hey, this is cool, you want to try this?
Let’s see what kind of trouble we can
stir up!’ And what better place to do
that than New York, where you step out
the door and you are confronted with
so many kinds of people on the street
at any time. So you step out into that
swirling mob and see what you could
shake up.”
With low rents making lower
Manhattan an accessible haven for
forward-thinking artists in the ’70s and
’80s, this volcanic creative landscape
also influenced the lives of those who
worked in the adult film industry.
Veronica Vera’s entry into New York’s
adult community didn’t begin with
movies, but with writing.
“I came to New York City to find a
job in publishing, failed all the typing
tests that were required for entry, and
took a job in Wall Street, where I did
not need to type. In 1979, my mom died and faced with my first real encounter with mortality, I decided to write or forget
my dream to be a writer,” Vera recollects.
Vera met Penthouse Variations editor V.K. McCarty at small New York sex parties, who suggested she try writing for the
magazine. Variations purchased her first piece, and so began Veronica Vera’s writing career.
“A lot more adult magazines were published in New York at that time,” recalls Vera. “Besides Penthouse publications, there
were Stag, Swan, Chic, High Society, Partner, Gallery—the list was very long. I wrote for a bunch, but my best outlet was Adam.
I had met Adam editor Jared Rutter at an orgy birthday party, and since Adam was an L.A.-based publication, I suggested to
him that I be Adam’s New York City correspondent. My column ‘Veronica Vera’s New York’ appeared every month for about
a dozen years. It became a sort of diary for me, and through it I made myself the star of my own continuing movie. I had
no problem dropping my clothes to appear in photos to illustrate my column. That column, more than movies, is really how
I established my porn star creds.”
“[In] pre-Disney New York there were so many stories and they were so easy to find,” Vera continues, referring to the
corporate “Disneyfication” of present-day Times Square. “I covered 42nd Street … Show World’s live sex shows, strip
shows of visiting porn stars, the peep shows where transsexuals worked the booths, the sex workers on street corners,
like Lexington Ave and 30th, as well as those in the Meatpacking District, the swingers at Plato’s Retreat, the Harmony
Burlesque where lap dancing was born; the S&M clubs—Hellfire (later the Vault) and Paddles, ‘the friendly S/M Club.’ I
wrote about individual artists and entrepreneurs. There were so many wonderful stories, and as a writer the stories were
irresistible treasures. As a sexual adventurer and exhibitionist, I’d found an amazing playland, and since I wrote the articles,
I could make my own interpretations, sort of my own scripts. I carried a tape recorder and was often accompanied by a
photographer. Sometimes the photographer was Annie [Sprinkle], and there were others. My articles are a good part of the
research material used to plan New York’s Museum of Sex.”
Vera made her first adult film, Consenting Adults, through her connection with Annie Sprinkle, whose enthusiasm for New
York persists to this day.
“I had a big love affair with New York,” says Sprinkle, “and went there when I was eighteen to be with Gerard Damiano,
the director of Deep Throat. I lived there for twenty-two years from ’73 to ’95. I was from California, and I remember coming
over through JFK [airport] at eighteen years old and I fell in love at first sight.”
“We shot on film, and I was really interested in exploring sex and film together. So of course I ended up in porn,”
Sprinkle recounts. “My parents were activists in civil rights and anti-war [movements], and I came from a political activist
background. My parents were educators—so I’m very interested in sex education, and the arts. So between art, education,
and the politics [New York] was made for me. New York was the capital. It was the center. It was the place.”
In describing Times Square Sprinkle says, “I had the big premiere of Deep Inside Annie Sprinkle there. We had Klieg lights
I ended up going into
fetish porn, and then
I ended up going into
the BDSM world.
So I found a different
underground.
—Barbara Nitke
50 | AVN.com | 6.15