MY LONG SLIDE INTO THE WORLD OF PORNOCOPIA

After all these years, it’s kind of heartwarming to see smut dumped back in the gutter where it belongs.

It’s really not much fun anywhere else.

For all practical purposes, filth and degradation began to lose appeal when they threatened to become some sort of First Amendment privilege, harmless in the home and only a vague danger to society when practiced in public in your neighborhood, but not mine. Thanks to the Meese Commission and the Supreme Court, however, matters are once again looking up. Or down, as the case may be.

I speak as something of an authority, having frequently appeared on the evening news with one of those tacky identifications superimposed over my cleanest shirt, donned especially for the occasion. Usually, they say something like, “JIM HARWOOD, Adult Film Reviewer,” or even worse, “Pornography Expert.”

Granted, this was not exactly a goal when I started out as a Methodist minister and has certainly been a career surprise to a one-time White House reporter for the Wall Street Journal. But the long slide has qualified me with historical perspective, twisted and sick though it may seem to both censors and libertines alike.

As we all know, and as several Supreme Court justices have confirmed, nobody knows what obscenity is, but most people recognize it when they see it. Liberal minds often argue that pornography is something they want to look at that conservatives don’t like. But this isn’t true. A lot of conservatives love to look at pornography, too, but want to keep most of it for themselves.

Remember, we’re not talking art here. I speak of the unspeakable, the worst words, the ugly closeups, outlandish couplings and combinations thereof. Whips, rope, chains--unimaginable vain attempts at acting--all the good stuff that’s so readily available in the video section of the respectable neighborhood store whose stockholders include the usual moral business folk.

Very proper people have been able to get their hands on any of this at little mom & pop video stores nestled between dry cleaners and one-hour film developers on every corner. Though they won’t admit it publicly, this acceptance has become a matter of concern to the pornography industry. While welcoming the expanded marketplace, the purveyors (as they are called) have been leery of their new association with members of the local Kiwanis and Rotary clubs.

To be fully effective, a porno clerk should have a beard, at least one rotten front tooth, two tattoos from Tijuana and the distinct smell of the jail cell where he spent last night. Under no realistic circumstances should a smut peddler be a sweet young couple trying to get their start in the American mercantile system, or adorable, jolly retirees who chose the video business after a failed attempt at selling mother’s shortcake. Neither should a true porno fan feel comfortable plopping a copy of “Bodacious Ta-Tas” down on the counter in front of an innocent teen-age clerk under the watchful eye of her father. If she doesn’t giggle and the father doesn’t frown, then what’s the point of pornography? At any time in history, the greatest threat to the health of the trash trade has been respectability. It was lawyers who came up with the idea that pornography should have some “redeeming social importance.” Customers never thought so at all.

But we need not fear that the commissioners and their ilk really want to get rid of pornography. To believe that, you would have to believe that pornographers really want to get rid of censors. The two need each other; it’s perfect symbiosis.

A while back, during the Johnson Administration if memory serves, there was one of those Big Government cutbacks and the Justice Department was forced to choke off the money it had been supplying to various censor groups. Well, as you might imagine, the effect was devastating--porno magazines all across the country were forced to fold, having regretfully discovered that most of their subscribers were censors who could no longer afford the high cost of keeping current on the vile and disgusting. Fortunately, the government eventually came up with more money and the magazines were soon back in business.

Like most folks, I could have gone a lifetime without knowing, much less understanding, any of this. In my innocent childhood in Texas, there was no pornography. At least if there was, it all belonged to the police department or somebody equally important. Preachers were a lot more excited by pool halls, honky-tonks, comic books and rock ‘n’ roll (in that respect, some things never change). Movies were still chaste. On occasion, however, the drive-in at the edge of town would play one of those wonderfully edifying “documentaries,” about bare-breasted native girls or the birthing of a baby. Then all heck would break loose.

Now, I would concede that a really innocent lad should have been able to ignore all this hubbub and concentrate on football and bicycles. Even then, however, I was showing signs of character defects that would last a lifetime, and getting a first-hand look at the cause of all this concern became an urgent priority. But getting into an adults-only movie at a drive-in is a problem when you’re not only too young for the movie, but also too young to drive.

In this instance, the solution was to swim the Trinity River in the dead of winter--actually, it was more of a muddy wade--and sneak into the drive-in from the rear. And there on the back row, huddled in wet, freezing clothes around a speaker post, I got my first exposure to the mysteries of sex. Equally important, I found that others at school were much impressed by the knowledge I had dared to acquire.

This perversion was obviously still lurking years later during a reportorial stint covering the mighty U.S. Supreme Court. As it happened, this was the term in which several landmark obscenity cases were under consideration, mostly arguing whether certain printed materials should be available for the public to read. In those early days, one of the court’s problems was how to print official opinions about the unprintable and the justices struggled at great length sometimes to avoid writing the very words they had decided were impolite to write. Fortunately, this no longer bothers censors and the Meese Commission’s voluminous pornography report is one of the filthiest documents the dirty-minded could ever hope to get their hands on. That could explain why it’s become a runaway best seller.

After such earnest training, I obviously knew more about moral wickedness than the average person, which may or may not have drawn me to San Francisco some years later. Fortunately, I arrived at the height of the legal feud over naked dancers, and a socially significant issue was quickly followed by the debut of hard-core films.

The films themselves were simple affairs, usually accomplished with one 400-foot reel of film and a couple in motel room. If there was a plot, it usually began and ended with, “Hi, I’m here to clean your windows.” Exteriors and traveling shots, sets, songs and character development--these were all distractions that interfered with the audience’s simple enjoyment of unfettered action. Came a time, though, when the first fully plotted porno film arrived to play the North Beach Theatre, managed by a rather dour, humorless fellow named John who greatly feared that his usual crowd of regulars weren’t ready for this artistic breakthrough. “They don’t get too excited over pictures of trees,” John ventured.

The morning after opening night, I checked on John to see how the film had gone over with his audience. “I don’t think they liked it,” he grumbled.

“How could you tell?”

“One of them spit on the cashier.”

That remains the single greatest line of film criticism I’ve ever encountered.

Eventually, thanks to “Deep Throat” and other so-called porno chic pictures, these fundamental fans were forced to surrender their theaters to couples and others insistent on surrounding sex scenes with what passed for creative endeavor. Unfortunately, at some point in this process, I got the idea that it might be funny to write a satirical film review about one of these epics. I had never written a review, but I figured it would be a good place to practice the kind of words that critics use, like “new genre.” It turned out to be a great idea and my phony review was quite humorous. But not everybody realized it was a joke, and I ended up in some textbook as the first American film critic to give adult films serious recognition.

Suddenly, I was an expert, much in demand for artsy university discussions and various legal proceedings. At one point, a prosecutor in a small jurisdiction in Upstate New York called, inquiring about a certain picture playing in his area. He wanted to know whether the film had been successfully prosecuted in San Francisco and was obviously disappointed to learn that it was too mild to even bother with in that den of iniquity by the bay. As a matter of fact, he was advised, although more than a score of porno films had been busted by then, only one was found obscene by a jury.

His hopes picked up. “Tell me about that one,” he insisted, hinting that I might soon be getting an all-expense paid trip to New York as an expert witness on his behalf.

“Well, I don’t remember all the details,” I replied, “but it had something to do with a girl who has sex with a pig.”

At the other end of the line, there was a guttural gasp and the sound of a snapping pencil. Then he hung up. I had apparently talked my way out of a trip to New York.

Eventually, the district attorney pretty much gave up and even the police decided that the citizens at large were much more concerned over other aspects of law enforcement, such as murder and burglary, than what their neighbors were doing.

But censors, bless ‘em, never have abandoned their quest, working the vile vineyards tirelessly in our behalf. For effort alone, they deserve a salute and let’s trust they never surrender completely.

But one final word of advice to the vigilant as they pursue their eternal goal of protecting us from our worst instincts:

Remember, no matter what the provocation, it’s really not very nice to spit on the cashier.