Internet Eroticist Feels Exposed

The soft-core pornographer was looking a little blue as he swiped his bagel with cream cheese at a Studio City deli.

He used to sleep easy, he said, when he was merely a promoter of strip clubs and a vendor of sexy photos.

But now that it appears that the federal government might consider his work indecent, Gary Horn goes to bed fearing the rap-tap-tap of a midnight visit from the FBI at his modest North Hollywood home.

“I thought I drew the line at obscenity,” he said, “but now the government is drawing the line right to my door.”

The entrepreneur and father of two is representative of many people in the nation’s sex-entertainment industry, much of whose estimated $20 billion in revenues is generated here in the San Fernando Valley.

On one flank, the creators of pay-to-view Internet sites featuring images of naked women and men wonder whether restrictions of online expression contained in the 2-month-old U.S. Communications Decency Act will put them out of business or in prison.

And on the other, they worry about being squeezed by amateur exhibitionists who are using the Internet’s World Wide Web to become wildcat publishers of free, anything-goes, homemade pornography.

Hearings in a federal suit seeking to overturn the federal law--which makes it a crime to transmit indecent material over computer networks without ensuring that children cannot see it--began in Philadelphia last week.

While awaiting the judges’ decision, Horn and other sex-entertainment pros try to protect their Web sites from minors by using entry screens that warn kids to scram. They say they agree that children lack the maturity to handle their material and that there is no place for clearly obscene material, such as child pornography or bestiality.

“If it’s wrong in your neighborhood . . . then it ought not be on the Internet,” said Horn’s business partner, Terry Woodward.

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Still, Woodward and Horn believe “eroticists”--the term they prefer to “pornographers”--are front-line warriors in the battle against censorship on the Net, just as they say they were at the advent of motion pictures, videocassettes and CD-ROMs.

“Porn is the big blocking lineman in this game and the mass media go through the holes and score the touchdowns,” said Horn’s attorney, John Weston of Beverly Hills. “We’re seeing a reprise of what we’ve seen in this century with the development of each communications technology.”

Here’s Weston’s take: The early operators of nickelodeons packed in their first wave of customers by exhibiting naked women. Then in the early years of silent films, there was remarkable nudity in such movies as “Cleopatra.”

Fast-forwarding to the VCR, Weston contends that fans of his clients’ Valley-made X-rated tapes virtually created the prerecorded videocassette market and “dragged the majors along kicking and screaming into that marketplace.” Even in the late 1970s, he said, nearly all prerecorded tapes were erotic--a booming market that triggered the steep decline in the price of home VCRs.

Likewise, Weston claims that the early computer CD-ROMs were “almost entirely erotic,” but have become a mainstream medium. And now, he said, the same is happening with the Internet. The First Amendment specialist claims that up to 40% of Internet users access adult-oriented sites--a figure that most experts in the online industry consider high.

Still, Weston believes people like Gary Horn are pioneers and should be applauded rather than vilified.

“It seems pretty clear that in our lifetime, erotic expression has been the engine that pulls new technology into the cultural mainstream,” he said.

As a practical matter, Horn’s endeavor doesn’t seem quite so exotic.

A soft-spoken man who walks with the aid of a cane, he typically works out of the house he shares with his grown daughter. A rock musician by training, he got his first taste of burlesque in the 1960s as a teenager, when his band played at a topless bar in Chatsworth.

Later he suffered a severe back injury in a car crash and has spent the last 20 years in and out of surgery, and pain. He’s finally feeling great again and says that computers helped save his life because he could earn money coordinating X-rated content for a CompuServe bulletin board while he was disabled.

The West Coast office of his Florida-based operation certainly didn’t look like Sodom West. Its most prurient element was a couple of posters on the wall of partially clad women advertising Adult America, his erotic World Wide Web site.

At a subscription rate of $10 per month for access to 9,000 images, business is pretty good, he said, though he and his partners have not yet broken even on the $300,000 that investors sank into computers and high-speed telephone switching equipment.

Their busiest time of day: 9:15 a.m. in each U.S. time zone, as businessmen sign onto corporate Internet accounts, check their e-mail, then click in to see if any new photos or videos have been posted since the day before. The firm prides itself on refusing to carry the most graphic of hard-core images despite demands from customers who can see such shots at the free Web sites of the amateurs.

Horn believes that computer porn serves a socially useful purpose. Although it’s sure to be scoffed at by critics, his rationale goes like this: Many women only have sex in erotic films to get famous enough to become featured dancers at strip clubs, where the industry’s real money is made. The Internet, he figures, offers these women a way to promote themselves that is less sexually dangerous or even debasing.

Some people think Horn is just plain wrong.

Dr. Victor B. Cline, a Utah psychotherapist specializing in sexuality, says most child molesters trace their deviant behavior to pornography addiction as adolescents. And the Santa Ana-based group Enough Is Enough has organized “pornbuster” posses to rub out X-rated material wherever children might find it.

But the North Hollywood businessman has company in the American Civil Liberties Union, major software companies like Microsoft--and Adam Fontana.

Fontana, a New Jersey 18-year-old who lives at home, has organized one of the nation’s most forceful Web sites dedicated to the ad-hoc Blue Ribbon Campaign against the Communications Decency Act. He thinks grown-ups ought to leave of Horn, and others, alone.

“Our generation learned about sex earlier than the generation that’s making these decisions,” he said. “My friends and I know it’s out there on the Net if we want it, but we aren’t obsessed about it like a lot of the politicians are.”

Of course, a new, sexually unobsessed generation might not be the best news in the world for Horn, either.