Phil Andros

THE DIM AND SHROUDED PAST

It may come as a shock to some of the younger members of the homosexual community to realize that the freedom of expression obtainable in any adult bookstore (read “pornography”) was not always there— that, as a matter of fact, such emporiums of wickedness and lust are only about 14 years old.

Before that time, what happened? We were all hunters, looking on every page for expressions that would be meaningful to us, relishing the hidden allusion, the double-meaning. The college students of the 1920s delighted in the works of James Branch Cabell, who was for that generation what Tolkien was for the 1960s— except that Cabell was juicier, and when the candles went out and the fair ladies began to comment on the length of Jurgen’s sword or his staff—or he to praise the lovely scabbards which they had— well, we all tittered like schoolgirls and slyly underlined the passages or made a page-reference note in the back of the book so that we could find the hot-spot again.

There was some homosexual writing done in the ’20s and ’30s—you can find it laid out for you in a book such as Roger Austen’s Playing the Game. But oh, what a sad and sorry thing. A firm named Greenberg published much of that early stuff—mostly novels, all of which ended unhappily, with the homosexual “hero” committing suicide or being killed in some way. Thus, sin was punished, middle-class virtue triumphed, and America could go happily on its hypocritical puritan way.

AUCTORIAL AND AMBROSIAL PROBLEMS

Early in life I had dabbled in writing. A book of Cabellian sketches, full of double-tenders quite homosexual in tone, was published in 1930 under the title Pan and the Firebird; only a reviewer in Texas mentioned the homosexual angle and commented on the “Libation to a Dead God”—who was obviously Valentino. And about six years later a campus novel, Angels on the Bough, appeared, gaining the approbation and praise of Gertrude Stein, Thornton Wilder and Carl Van Vechten. It contained a heavily concealed homosexual character, but all the necessary hints to uncover him were there.

Gertrude, however, was right. “You can’t write and teach, you know,” she said fiercely. “The worst thing to do if you want to write is to teach, and here’s why. You teach all day and then that word-finding part of your brain is worn out and you can’t find any words to put down because that part of you is exhausted. It would be better—yes, much better—to be a butcher.”

Not only did I spend the next 15 years teaching—and thus diminishing the urge to write—but for many of those years I was lost in the bottle, and no man can write while he’s smashed. You can’t even see the keys, let alone hit them.

THE GRAND CLIMACTIC

At the end of those years, university teaching in Chicago had become so loathsome that I decided to quit. I wanted to get as far away from Akademia as possible, and to that end I quit drinking and took up tattooing (see Issue 301). Then for ten years all was roses and beauty. The most handsome young men in the world came into the shop wanting tattoos—the blue-eyed Germans, the stalwart Poles, the dark and erotic Italians, the long-limbed Scandinavians—all the lovely stereotypes and lots of uglies, too. My sex life discreetly flourished, but my social life was ruined—long shop hours, few free evenings. Moreover, there was never any intellectual conversation; still, I listened to the customers and piled up a lot of stories.

Dimly, through it all—the excitement, the crowds of young sailors on first “liberty”— but evermore receding, was the ideal of writing. True, in the long empty hours when no one came into the shop for servicing, there was a lot of reading done. Dr. Kinsey, for whom I was keeping a journal on the sexual implications of tattooing, was a frequent visitor; and at one point he gave me the name and address of Der Kreis (Le Cercle, The Circle), a tri-lingual homosexual magazine published in Zurich, to which I subscribed. In the United States, One magazine did not come into existence until 1952, 30 years after the inception of Der Kreis.

DER KREIS –

Let me tell you about Der Kreis, which through the ’30s and ’40s was the only homosexual magazine available. It began as a small direction of a lesbian, fondly known as Mammina, who founded the “Swiss Friendship Bond.” In 1937 both club and magazine were renamed “Human Rights,” and in 1942 Mammina handed leadership over to Rolf, a well-known actor; the following year the club became all-male and changed the name to Der Kreis. When I first knew it, it was a thin little thing of 36 to 52 pages, the first half in German, the latter half split between French and English—English being added only in 1952. In each issue there were at least four pages of half-tone photographs on slick, good quality paper—handsome young men, all discreetly covered, no frontal nudity allowed. And yet approximately every fourth issue of the magazine was withheld by U.S. Customs on the grounds that it was obscene—one of the most perverse and scandalous homophobic judgments ever made, solely on the ground that the publication was homosexual.

And what stories they were, those little vignettes! Sweet and sloppy, with lots of hand-holding and sidelong glances and deep heartfelt sighs. Most of them had sad and sentimental endings; sometimes everything worked out right, but the stories, ended before anyone got into bed or did much except sigh romantically and grin at each other. Yet as an effort was made to attract American subscribers, the work of a few notable Americans began to appear in the English section. Paul Cadmus sent photographs of his paintings and drawings, and George Platt Lynes sent his “non-profit-making-ventures” as he called them—his excellently lighted, inventive and beautiful photographs of extraordinarily handsome young men—at first allowing them to appear under his real name and finally switching to the name of Roberto Rolf. Of writers, James Barr (Fugate), author of Quatrefoil and Derricks, was the best-known American.

In 1958 the “English” editor—a roly-poly bilingual German living in Zurich—made his way to America to try to uncover new contributors and to introduce himself to those he had known only through correspondence. In Chicago he communicated with a photographic studio which had sent him pictures, largely to advertise its own name, as the Athletic Model Guild on the West Coast had done. It was inevitable that one evening, returning from dinner, I should find this chubby little man sitting on my tattoo shop doorstep.

I must say that Rolf Jung—or Burkhardt, as he sometimes called himself— was an expert in the spreading of honey. Flattery is a potent weapon, and he knew how to handle it perfectly. The result was that he teased me into composing— “at least an essay, if you don’t feel like writing fiction”—for his magazine.

THE CLOSED AND CLOSETED CIRCLE

So began an alliance with Der Kreis which lasted until its demise in 1967. Rudolf drew me deeper and deeper into its workings, wheedling out of me not only stories but drawings, although I was never any good at those. Soon he was asking me to help him rewrite some of his own things. Unfortunately, although he had a good critical mind, he could not produce fiction; it all sounded as if it has been written by Bret Harte, a narration about an event—no conversation or dialogue, an old-fashioned 19th-century technique of synopsis that read like a combination of Dickens and Trollope. There were no vivid sensory images, nothing to stimulate the imagination. “Help me rewrite this?” came more and more frequently from him—and in each case it meant re-composing the entire thing from beginning to end.

The era of pen-names began, since there were never enough contributors. For Der Kreis I had several: “Donald Bishop,” for sociological things such as “The Bull Market in America” (on hustling) and “What’s New in Sodom?” (on how the new law removing penalties tor homosexuality was working in Illinois.) Some stories were written under “Ward Starnes,” a simple anagram of my real name. For poetry in the manner of Housman I became “John McAndrews.” “Thomas Cave” produced more thoughtful and reflective stories, sometimes in the Thomas Mann manner. Phil Andros was not yet born.

CIRCULAR LIMITS AND CRISES

Perhaps nothing could more clearly indicate the restriction of Der Kreis and the times which were the matrix for it than the quoting of a couple of passages from its pages. In the first example, two men are saying goodbye, after (evidently) an evening of love. One of them, Sesto, is an Italian sailor:

Then Sesto puts both our cigarettes into the ashtray on my bedside table. He bends slightly over while putting them out. Instead of straightening up again, he leans over me. We look at each other—there is a silent question in his eyes. My answer is to draw him down until our cheeks touch. With a quick movement of his hand Sesto switches off the bedside lamp, and the very next instant he is lying next to me while the heat from his strong young body creeps slowly towards me.

Much later—it as though hours have passed in the dark—his arms circle vise-like around my shoulders. Only a deep sigh breaks the silence of the room. Afterwards I free myself from his embrace. He is sleeping peacefully, not aware of my hands caressing his silken skin before I’m off to sleep myself…

Rudolf Jung wrote it, signing it with one of his favorite pen-names (for he had a tremendous infatuation lasting from his youth for the actor) Richard Arlen.

The second example involves a minor crisis. In 1961 Rudolf wanted to print a chapter from an unpublished novel by Raymond Loring, entitled Dawn at Naples. Briefly, a young American sailor named Dan on leave in Naples visits the ruins of Pompeii, meeting by chance an Air Force officer named Jack. The scene opens with Dan’s trying to remember, after an evening of many drinks, what had happened the night before. The long chapter was very well written, and the sailor’s personality superbly revealed as he clawed his way up through the cotton layers of memory—had he had sex with Jack or not? Then Jack summons him to bed again, this time sober, in the early morning.

What followed at that point was one page that to a typesetter of 1980 would seem mild enough. But the year was 1961, and the magazine Der Kreis—and there were the Swiss censors and the U.S. Customs to fret about. Rudolf sent me the manuscript with a somewhat hysterical request asking me to rewrite it.

I noted some of the phrases: “… his fingers trembled on the hot smooth organ… and then Dan had taken the penis deep, sucking strongly on it… he let his tongue run over the erection… the liquid curl out of the cock…” All the verboten words were there: cock, erection, hard-on, cocksucker…and so on.

So what was the final version? We decided to use the old cosmic-birth idea:

And then, oddly strange, half nightmare and half dream, his hand finding and holding a precious jewel, with the universe whirling around him and the stars shuddering towards birth, Dan felt himself descending towards the center of the cosmic maelstrom, with pressures upon him, his head, his neck—and within the fierce expanding joy, the shyness conquered, the desperate desire for withdrawal fading into the far corners of the nebula. And steadily, within the island universe, the great dog-star drawing upon him, and he—a hound of heaven—pursuing, reaching, groping, with words reaching him from far away, warning, a presage of the cosmic wave like a swollen tide sweeping the heavens clear behind it; or like the second flood, lifting, rising, drowning the lights: and red stars flickering briefly at the back of his eyes. Always the pressures, until— heaving like an untamed Pegasus—the galaxy arched itself, a great drawn bow, taut against the shock of creation, and whipped with its whirling a new hot star into existence.

At this late date, considering the mixed metaphors and extravagant language, we must extend to “Raymond Loring”— whoever or wherever he may be—our profoundest apologias for the butchering and bowdlerizing of his sensitive writing. But he was ahead of his time.

Since I was going to Europe every Christmas to visit the ailing Alice B. Toklas, I managed to be present at quite a few of the Circle’s New Year’s Eve parties. Men danced together (horrors!) and held hands and kissed and drank champagne. That was wild enough in those years; orgy backrooms had not yet been invented.

All in all, however, it was a rather grim group making up the leadership of the Circle. Most of the men were far along in years. Their attitudes were not keeping pace with the times, and those in control never found out or even wanted to find out how to bring young people into responsible positions. The Club and the magazine had lavishly supported a half-dozen old men, although contributors never received a penny. When Der Kreis died in 1967, the reasons were given that as a movement it no longer had any purpose, the whole picture having been altered until there was no need for further reform. The truth was threefold: the leaders could not keep up with the very changes they had helped to bring about, there was a lack of money and subscribers, and Rolf went completely senile.

The death of Der Kreis, incidentally, is reported under the headline Der Kreis Kaput in volume 2, number 1 (January 1968) of an American publication called (The Los Angeles} ADVOCATE, a small newspaper of about 16 pages.

I LONG FOR FREEDOM

The confinements and restrictions of the Kreis policies developed great feelings of claustrophobia in me. Anything explicitly or even tacitly sexual had to be removed because of the danger of prurience or obscenity. The hand-holdings and the sighs and glances were unreal in a world where sucking and fucking were going on.

I had rather delicately expressed similar feelings to Rudolf. Now I was firmer.

“This is the gah-damnedest crap I ever laid eyes on,” I said, shaking a recent issue under his nose.

“Ah yes,” he said. “I felt you were growing a little restless.”

“I wanna write about real life,” I said.

“Well,” said Rudolf, “there’s Kim Kent in Copenhagen. He’s got two magazines— eos and amigo—in Danish, German and English. Why don’t you send him something? I haven’t told you about him because I don’t want to lose you. If I give you his address, will you still write for us?”

“Yeah, yeah,” I said. And so I sent Kim Kent a story called “The Sergeant with the Rose Tattoo,” which he entered in a short story contest he was having at the moment, and it won $50 first prize. Big deal. Kim was as adept at flattery as Rudolf was—the sure mark of a skilled operator who wants contributors for nothing.

MEANWHILE, BACK AT THE RAUNCH…

In Chicago, tattooing was about to be closed down. Well, not closed entirely—but the age limit for it was being raised to 21. This was happening at the same time that the penalties for homosexual encounters were being lifted in Illinois, and the “age of consent” for male-male sex set down to 18, all this through the single-handed efforts of Kinsey. Tattoo buffs commented about the law raising the age-limit to 21— which cut out all the boot sailors from Great Lakes. They felt that the mark on the psyche of an early homosexual experience might be more damaging than an anchor tattooed on the arm. I avoided the argument, but I sensed the closing of the doors and began to think of doing other things.

The owner of the photo studio whom I had known since Rudolf’s visit in 1958—a matter of five years—was in the shop one day. We had always had a very amicable arrangement. Since I had to be discreet about whom I propositioned, I sent him the beauties whom he would photograph in a posing strap, selling the pictures to his considerable nationwide clientele. In turn, he sent me handsome hustlers who were not reluctant to earn a few bucks to add to their rifling of the poorer boxes.

To this guy, then, I was idly turning over in conversation various flaky possibilities about what I might do when I closed my shop at the end of 1962.

“I might move the tattooing business to Paris,” I said, remembering that in that first story for Kim Kent, I had already done so. “Or to San Francisco. Or I might go back to writing,” I added wistfully.

“Nuts,” said he. “You’re too fuckin’ old to write.”

Well!

I was galvanized. Spurred to action. Nothing that anyone could say would have sent me more quickly to a typewriter. Forgotten were the years of listening to my internal critic who had been whispering daily that I was burned out, that I had nothing more, to say, that everything had been said already. And to hell with even the question of money—I’d write just to please myself— and Kim Kent and Rudolf—and (as I have said a thousand times) lonely old men in hotel rooms at night. It is amazing how a chance remark, forgotten by the maker, can move one to violent and long-lasting activity.

I’d had a lot of experience with hustlers, and in 1963 I’d read John Rechy’s City of Night. It was a stunning book for those years, but at the same time Rechy’s waffling attitude about his nameless hustler was annoying; I had the feeling he was holding back, afraid to reveal himself, carefully cultivating the icy center of his being and saving it for—what or whom? I didn’t know.

I’d always liked the name “Phil,” having chosen it for my needle-name along with “Sparrow,” borrowed from John Skelton’s 15th-century poem, The Boke of Phyllyp Sparowe. As one who had once taught semantics, it was easy to return the word “philander”—grossly altered from its original meaning into a heterosexual matrix—to its pristine form: “Philos”—to love, and “andros” man- thus “Phil Andros” might be taken either as “lover-man” or “man-lover.” In a sense, my friend the pimp had been midwife to the birthing of Phil Andros.

The tattoo shop was closed, and with a friend whom I had helped to start in tattooing I went to Milwaukee on weekends, where the age limit for swabbies was still 18. Every Friday afternoon I boarded the old North Shore electric, bearing a tablet of yellow legal paper, and began to write. The hour’s trip gave me a good start on a Phil Andros story- all tailored for Kim Kent. For most of 1963-64 I sent him a story each month, and occasionally, I still sent one to Rudolf. Once I even sent one to Der Kreis under the name of Phil Andros. Old Rolf, the chief editor, nearly had apoplexy: “I will not have that beast’s name appearing in our pages!” was his gentle way of rejecting me.

Very early I considered the different ways of telling a story and decided—for verisimilitude—to narrate them in the first person. According to critical analyses, Edgar Allan Poe had realized the advantages of the “I” method—you gained belief more easily. And to that technique I added the “eponymous”—of having the narrator-hustler’s name of Andros appear also as that of author.

The method seemed to work. I stumbled around with two or three inconsequential stories at first—and then finally with one I hit on what was evidently an archetypal theme: how a white guy (not Phil) submitted himself as slave to a black, in order to atone for all the past sins of whites against blacks.

Sometimes Kim Kent got five or six letters a month commenting about his magazine. Imagine his surprise when “The Blacks and Mr. Bennett” brought him over 100 letters! Phil Andros was thus “established,” and the readers even clamored for a sequel to that story, which they got in “Color Him Black.”

I wanted Phil to be as honest with himself as he was with his clients—and to progress and develop, so that in the earlier stories he was not sure of his own sexual identity, only gradually becoming completely homosexual. He was the anti-hero turned hero by a curious twisting of fate—his Greek good looks joined to an educated brain in a macho body, the whole overlaid with an ability to empathize and feel compassion. And so he began his wanderings, like those of Ulysses, through a world peopled with a diversity of “clients”—bank presidents, young gangsters, college boys and professors, weightlifters and policemen, fetishists and motorcyclists, millionaires and narcissists, factory workers and interior decorators—something for everyone. I tried to give Phil an advantage over the other hustlers I had known—to make him observant and literate, able to relate what he saw and experienced with wryness and sometimes venom, with an unconcealed pleasure in the things belonging to passion, and gentleness for things of the intelligence and the spirit. About 85 per cent of Phil’s adventures had a basis in fact—out of my own experience or that of acquaintances.

The success of Phil Andros in the Danish magazines was astonishing. He was called the “American Jean Genet” (although that certainly was wrong!) He was complimented in letters for a kind of writing that was new and different in plot and style, far removed from the well-worn patterns of the unhappy homosexual novels of the 1930s and ’40s, before the Great Explosion of Pornography beginning about 1966.

… AND WAS IT HARDCORE OR SOFT.

Despite the comparative freedom of expression allowed in the Danish magazines, the early Andros stories were not hard-core. Nearly every one of them was preceded by a “cautionary” note from Kim Kent: “… warn our more sensitive readers against reading this story… for grown-up readers only… our firm belief in our readers’ maturity the only justification for having printed this… no pleasant children’s tale…” and so forth. The stories really weren’t all that extreme, but Kim Kent was protecting himself against possible repercussions even though Denmark had relaxed its antiporn laws almost to the vanishing point.

Certainly Phil had much more freedom than in Der Kreis, yet there was hardly any use of four-letters words. It is amazing how powerful the imagination can be without them. Consider this passage, from the story, “Once in a Blue Moon” wherein Phil is screwing a farmboy, Kenny:

The technique I used on Kenny was almost my own invention—or let’s say the method came to me one day when I was reading an old text on mechanics, and came across a chapter about Archimedes and the lever and the fulcrum. There are several kinds of variations possible with levers and fulcrums—but I decided that if you used a circular fulcrum, the lever movements would be capable of a helluva lot of variety. It was more trouble, I suppose, but it paid off. Kenny—moaning and gasping, caught up in the silken nets and whirlpools of sensation and pleasure—began to melt and run… towards me, of course. But even at the very peak of his enjoyment, he did not forget his duties as… host. If I taught him the wonders of lovers and levers and circular fulcrums, he gave me short and unforgettable course in tensors, torsion and just plain downright clutch-and-clamp. At one stage I thought I’d lost the lever completely—that it had been pinched clear off.

All of which perhaps conveys a vivid enough picture to be partly effective.

DECIDING WHAT’S DIRTY

In the mid-1960s a case came before the Supreme Court, one intended to try to settle the question of obscenity. It ended in the famous Roth decision, in which the nine quarrelsome old men came to the conclusion that obscenity had three criteria: 1) it had to appeal to the prurient interest of the average man; 2) it had to violate contemporary community standards; and 3) it had to be utterly without any redeeming social value.

Whammo! There was thoughtful pause whilst the country digested that and came to the conclusion that “community” meant the U.S. as a whole, and that, of course, there was a revelatory and redeeming social value to even the lousiest suckee-fuckee books.

The gates were opened. The flood began. Suddenly all the four-letter words appeared in print, almost overnight. Publishers no longer had to write prefatory notes condemning what they were printing; now, they could merely suggest the social significance of books by and about queers, and lol all was satisfied. The decision had more holes in it than a colander—and publishing houses sprang up like mushrooms after rain.

One of the older homosexual presses which had been weaseling its way carefully between the markers was presided over by a jolly rotundity who had been in trouble with the law before and had even voluntarily committed himself—it was alleged—to the mental ward at St. Elizabeth’s hospital in Washington, D.C., whence he ran his press with the insouciance that Leigh Hunt had shown a century and a half before, when he continued his literary career from prison.

A New York bookseller put me in touch with this Jolly Roger about 1965, suggesting that if he wanted to upgrade the reputation of his press by adding some soft-core hardcover literature, he ought to consider putting Andros on his list.

And so $tud was born—18 connected stories from eos-amigo gathered together and called a novel. A contract was signed over a pittance of $250, galleys were typeset and read in 1966, and Phil—now in California—waited breathlessly for the book to appear.

It didn’t. Dead silence from the Jolly Roger in Washington. No response to a dozen letters, the run-around on phone calls, no communication at all. Three years went by. Phil later learned that the J.R. had run out of money and couldn’t pay the binder.

There were many confusions over the book. Jay Brian in San Francisco brought out a paperback of it; then the hardcover finally appeared and was remaindered at once, and a sleazy three-volume paperback illustrated with dreadful porn photos was produced by J.R., without Phil’s name anywhere to be seen.

Naturally, that was the end of any dealings with J.R.

IN THE INTERIM

In 1966 Richard Amory’s Song of the Loon appeared, followed the next year by Song of Aaron, and in 1968 Listen, the Loon Sings. For this trilogy-purchased one might estimate by at least 30 per cent of the adult male homosexual population of America—Amory received a total of about $2,500, more or less. How many hundreds of thousands the publisher, Greenleaf, cleaned up on that immensely popular trilogy will never be known. Pornography makes no one but its publisher rich.

Literally scores of “houses” began to publish pornography exclusively, with Greenleaf of San Diego gradually moving ahead to lead the list, largely because of the Loon success. In San Francisco, the leading figure was the “Dirty Old Frenchman” as he called himself. Since I was a novice in such matters, knowing nothing about markets, I took Phil Andros’ first three novels to the Gay Parisian Press, as Frenchy called his line. He published them all: My Brother the Hustler (1970), San Francisco Hustler (1970), and When in Rome, Do… (1971). I made $400 each, a flat-out payment, no royalties. A “hands-around” collection of Phil’s stories was published by a dishonest confederate of Frenchy’s. The title was The Joy Spot, for which Phil never received a cent. Kim Kent, however, brought out the same stories in a handsome hardcover, tri-lingual edition of Danish, German and English—a gesture which pleased Phil a good deal. And in 1972 Greenleaf published Renegade Hustler, doubling the remuneration.

Then the Nine Old Men decided to take another whack at obscenity, not satisfied with the tumult and the shouting their first decision had caused. This time they added a few nasties: they said that “community standards” could be those of any or all communities (cities, towns, villages, hamlets, states, localities, or counties); thus San Francisco’s liberal standards might allow the unlimited circulation of porn—but what about neighboring Daly City or Pacifica? What’s exciting and pleasurable in one place may be anathema and apoplexy-inducing in the other. Furthermore, to “redeeming social value” they added “literary and artistic.” Confusion—devastating and complete. Alexander Pope’s line describes it best:

Thy hand, Great Anarch, lets the curtain fall,

And universal darkness buries all.

Greenleaf—holding a quasi-sequel to Phil’s Renegade Hustler (titled by them The Greek Way)—shut its doors for three years and then finally in 1975 published the thing. Since that time Phil’s writing has been confined to magazine pieces here and abroad.

Pirating goes on in the porn-fields just as in the movie and music business. One of Phil’s novels, San Francisco Hustler, was pirated almost word for word by a firm in Thousand Oaks calling itself Cameo Library. Only the characters’ names were altered. It appeared in 1974 as Gay in San Francisco by “Biff Thomas.” Phil was not really flattered by such a theft, but was not overly annoyed either. The contacts with both big and small-time operators in the field had left him singularly illusion-free.

THE SCENE AHEAD:

A THEORY OF PORN

In Denmark ten years after the laws regarding pornography were cancelled, over half of the purveyors and publishers had gone out of business for financial reasons. The same thing has happened in the United States. All novelty has worn off, and the reading public for porn has dropped considerably. This is not to say that there is no market for it, but only that interest has somewhat diminished. In the adult book stores you will still find the aisles crowded with voyeurs with hard-ons, leafing through the magazines which have not been sealed in cellophane.

One of the reasons for this decline is the insistence of many, of the publishers that a certain “percentage of pages” be devoted to sexual scenes graphically described. Greenleaf sent Phil’s The Greek Way back to him, saying there was only 36 percent sex in it, whereas they were now asking for 50 per cent. Instead of creating new scenes, Phil merely amplified the ones already there and hit the mark the editor demanded.

Another reason is the language used. All of us are familiar with the techniques of the sob-sister in journalism or on TV, who with her crude accounts seeks to get her effects (or donations) by setting up a superficial excitement with highly colored descriptions. In the same way, the porn-writer attempts to affect his readers by using lots of four-letter words, thus cutting away all chance for the imagination to be activated and to build up its powers. After you have read a thousand sentences such as “He fucked him hard and jacked him off at the same time” there is very little stimulus left in the picture. The ordinary porn-writer seems to have hardly any imagination himself; he does not give the reader a map to direct his fantasies, but instead hauls him into a rubberneck sightseeing bus—and shouts to him through a megaphone what to look at and what to feel about it. Reading most modern porn is like reading graffiti on toilet walls: the designs and dirty words may be stimulating at first, but suppose you had to read every single line on a 10 by 40 wall all black with tiny writing, each sentence containing ten words, of which three were cock, fuck and suck.

The sob-sister’s phrases are in a sense “false alarms” and so are the porn-writer’s. Their appeal is to “stock responses.” And finally, they wear out their punch very quickly. The man who says “motherfucker” every third word soon becomes drearily ineffective, but the bishop who once inserts a “damn” into a sentence is not quickly forgotten. The porn-writer uses words and phrases that are emphatic and exaggerated and tries to appeal immediately to the sexual emotions. The “stock response” is simply getting an erection; a touch of the hand will bring it about quicker than reading “fuck” three times. And finally, the porn-writer is too devoted to cliches in such things as his descriptions of semen and the shrieks of the hero as ejaculation arrives. His phrases by constant use and misuse have been robbed of freshness and originality and—let’s face it—the power to stimulate. They show no real and sharp perception; there is no indication the writer has carefully observed or felt anything about which he is writing.

How then to write porn in the most effective way? Phil Andros can give no lessons, but merely say that he has always approached a scene slowly, never plunging into the action too fast; that he has attempted to use vivid and vital sensory images from all the senses, neglecting none—sight, sound, smell taste, and touch, thereby drawing the reader along with him into the sexual encounter; that he has always put his trust into an accumulation of details, knowing that each one plucks at a harp-string somewhere inside a person and that those stimuli compel the imagination to emerge slowly— tremblingly alive—causing the corpus cavernosum to be gradually inflated and pumped full of blood. Then—if Phil has taken his own advice and been a diligent little boy—perhaps the ultimate reward will follow: the sudden involuntary clutch of the vesicle muscles around their contents, the convulsive shudder, the thrusting spurt through the urethra and the deposit of literally billions of tiny invisible tadpole-things upon the silken ribbing of the pouch of one’s athletic supporter.*

(*Alternate readings: “He came in his pants” or “He creamed his jeans.”)