Privacy: Fights and Gongs (conclusion)

All will be explained at last

I have been lately battling various zeitgeist monsters, so we’ll finish without comment on tardies or TARDISes. This will, however, conclude the intentionally misnumbered trilogy:

• Privacy: Rights and Wrongs (part i.)  23 June 2011

• Privacy: Writes and Sarongs (part 2) 26 June 2011

If you don’t have time to catch up, or have forgotten, here is a brief recap: In a crystal tower in a sunset city a famous writer gave me some advice above the clouds: Always write as if your name were on the piece, because, sooner or later, it will be. [There: you're caught up.]

For several years after that, I took his advice, and, realizing that I might have a future beyond the boundaries of pornographic dollars, I put my own name (this one) on anything I wrote, except for involuntary situations (explained in part i.) In fact, I made it my policy, as of January 1, 1984 to do this. I continued in The Industry for another few years, writing articles, screenplays, short stories, “real” letters, interviews, trade articles on sales, bestsellers, etcetera.

Fade Out. Fade In.

And, in the odd hours of 1985, I was transported by Westphalia van — sharing a seat with two porn starlets and a couple of random teddy bears — with my roommate and a publicist to Upland, California, where an event was being put on in an adult bookstore there — a place that I would never be again, but would, ironically, design their new logo, gratis, when I pasted up an ad in a magazine that I founded in that year, taken from their business card.

Now, you should know this: people who work in the adult industry in Los Angeles, California, do not, as a rule, ever show up at the point of sale of any of the products they produce. There was a short flurry of “premieres” in the late 70s and early 80s, but film was already on its way out, and the adult movie palaces were doomed, even as they became, grudgingly, legal. A former adult film theater on Santa Monica Boulevard (which TIME Magazine had identified as the epicenter of the American porn industry in 1976) still has the hand, foot, and other prints of former porn stars in its cement. When last I was there, it was a gay adult theater, but the concrete extrusion of porn’s cinematic past had been preserved in all its Ozymandian irony.

At some point on this journey into the heart of darkness of suburban porn, a young woman was picked up, and sat with the publicist in the front seat.

She was an utter anomaly: dressed in a pale robin’s egg blue polyester dress with a high neck and frill, she wore sensible white heels and pantyhose, and clutched a purse, which was, if not white patent leather (simulated), might as well have been. There were faux-pearl faux-buttons down the front of the pale robin’s-egg blue dress at the neck. It was an ensemble utterly appropriate to business, or to the coffeeklatsch after Sunday services at the church or synagogue of your choice, but it was NOT in any wise appropriate for our Final Destination.

She did not speak much during the ride to the trans-Suburban wilderness of Upland, California, which is a community that isn’t quite San Bernardino, but is so far from central Los Angeles proper that you can’t really call it a suburb. At that time, it was a piece of Indianapolis, Indiana which had become somehow detached and acquired palm trees.

My roommate and I and the two porn starlets, however, had a wealth of shared experience, which we contented ourselves with, gossiping all the way to far Upland. (Again, you should understand that there was NOT a lot of socializing in the Business, and one had to be very careful about speaking with “outsiders” about one’s secret life, so, when in a non-sexual context with people you know in the fraternal sense of “the Biz” and not in the biblical sense of prurient fantasies, there are all kinds of things to talk about with the only people who have any idea how fundamentally weird your Secret Identity life is.

Whoever the church secretary in the front seat was, she seemed content to be as far away from we, the unwashed, in the back seat as possible. We eventually arrived in Far Upland, in twilight, about twenty minutes after its last gleaming.

The adult store was sort of a large, dingy barn, with endless racks of hard core books, magazines, videos, and the requisite supply of sex toys, emoluments and ephemera.

The attendees were a faintly tragic lot, frankly. Middle-aged bachelors and, seemingly, exclusively solitary practitioners of the erotic arts, they were NOT the ravening hordes feared by the porn starlets. It was sort of like the old “amateur photo” shoots that Betty Page got her start in, where middle aged “camera enthusiasts” would pay for a bikini model to pose for them, usually in a large studio, or outdoors in a secluded part of a park. Where the desire remained a screaming silence, never to be expressed or acknowledged, even though that was the entire reason for the “photo shoot.”

Kind of like strip clubs, come to think of it.

In America, we are so frightened of sexuality that the closer one comes to it, the more paranoid the regulations, and the thicker the silent tension becomes, until you can, as they say, almost cut it with a knife.

It was a very odd thing to be in attendance at.

My roommate and I amused ourselves by counting up how many individual video and film titles we could find on the shelves. The porn actresses found safe port at the cash register with the owner, who was adjudged cool. The “fans” stood bewilderedly, unwilling to socialize with their brethren about their shared hobby, and the publicist did his carnival barker’s schtick, and Emceed the festivities.

The Sunday School teacher stood icily alone. All respected her zone of privacy: fans, actresses, writers we.

It was not what you’d call a rousing success. But, in years to come, this would become ubiquitous. Several times, people that I knew have passed through the barn-sized adult video emporium out at the Great Mall. Tasteful ads have appeared in local newspapers to this effect, at least.

Then, as now, the notion of going to an adult store or a strip club is just a busman’s holiday. When you’ve put together the magazines and made the movies (not in front of the camera) it’s not an adventure; it’s a job.

The next hours were the myth of the punishment of Tantalus made flesh, as an icy formality solidified in the porn palace. Photos were taken. Autographs were signed. The obligatory boor went too far in trying to make his rich inner life a clumsy outer life and was politely shown the door. Both sides left the pow-wow with a grudging new respect for the humanity of the opposite camp, and time and tide rescued all and sundry.

When the extremely tedious couple of hours were ended, we piled back into the brown Westphalia VW van and drove back to Hollyweird; stopping somewhere along the trans-suburban wilderness to eat at a Viking-themed smorgasboard. We ate our meal of industrial fried chicken, industrial mashed potatoes and industrial brown gravy in silence. It had not been any sort of “meet the fans” mutual admiration society. It had been seriously, silently weird.

At some point the publicist had explained that the sunday school teacher was thinking of “getting into the business.”

As we piled back into the brown Westphalia, our meal concluded, thee captive porn writers and actresses agreed privately in the back seat that this notion was as feasible as building a suspension bridge to the moon.

Fade Out. Fade In.

We were, of course, completely wrong, as popular informed opinion so often is.

I was out of the industry, but I heard that the Sunday School teacher HAD, in fact, entered the business. Later, she and I talked by phone several times, now gifted with that same shared experience that had separated her from the writers and actresses at Upland. She told me that she was unappreciated, but worked steadily because she always showed up on time.

Which is true for porn actors as it is true for writers and other artists: people give less of a damn how “gifted” you are or how prodigiously talented you might be than they give a damn that you’re reliable. If you provably hit your deadlines, magazines will continue to give you assignments. If you show up on time for porn shoots, they will reliably cast you. Deadlines matter more than dazzle.

She did not remember the journey to The Far Uplands.

Fade Out. Fade In.

The Sunday School teacher had been an “executive secretary,” became a porn star, returned to being an executive secretary. Only the punctuality never changed, evidently.

And sometime in the middle of the 90′s the internet appeared, beginning with the “training wheels” of a certain hellish national internet community.

And on the sex movies group, I ran into the Sunday School teacher again.

The burgeoning internet had given her a new lease on fame. Unappreciated in her day, as the predictable porn mogul fixation on artificially inflated mammary glands swept the small-breasted actresses aside.

[* Criminally so. As a male of the 'Seventies, we sealed into our biological notions of "attractive" the notions of small-breasted, lithe women, who retained their secondary sex characteristics in the area of the groin, rather than appreciating any topiary. These things are a matter of social fashion, and in any given age, seemingly, some different notion of "attractive" holds sway -- as evidenced by centuries of  corsets, and the style of fainting couches that predominated, because corsets made women prone to fainting from a lack of oxygen due to the corsets. Each generation of males has certain notions sealed into their autonomic nervous systems and, while I can admit to the attractiveness of a professionally unclothed female with absolute depiliation of her mons pubis, I, who changed my little sisters' diapers, cannot be attracted to it. The opposite, in fact. But, in America, big tits have always dominated the commercial fantasy industry, an odd synchronicity for a nation born in the astrological sign of the Mother, Cancer the Crab. Or, if you're astrologically PeeCee, "Moon Children."]

But now, with the rise of the anonymous internet, the “secret name” of the porn actress could be the “Real Name” of the internet star.

I will not detail the long years of ugliness that ensued, but suffice it to say that the Secret Name alter ego from pornland became somewhat of a virago on the hellish computer service and thence to the usenet and interwebs and where we are today.

It always seemed a strange irony that the “secret” name would now become the “real name” of the actress (who was pursuing her real life under her “real” name — a term that seemingly has less and less meaning).

But this much should be told.

When I first espied her on the hellish computer network, I wrote a “howdy!” letter and was met with an astonishingly h0stile response.

Then, going to the old publicity agent, she came back with “Oh, you’re SUCH AND SO!” e.g. I’m not Hart Williams. I’m some fraud masquerading under this name. (I’ve detailed precisely the falsehood of this notion, elsewhere. For now, just take my word for it.)

Now, you have to take a moment to really appreciate the bizarre pot-kettle nature of that accusation: that I am inauthentic because someone claims I’m REALLY so-and-so, and therefore it’s some kind of con, and the revelation of the “secret” name is supposed to shut my mouf and put me in my place. Having always copped to my real name, I was now accused of my real name being my fake name. Sometimes you just can’t win for losing.  The attack never much went anywhere, but it was oddly ironic, as we shall see.

This attack on my “name” was coming from someone who had not only assumed a porn and internet life under an admittedly fictitious name, but has ALSO gone to the legal trouble to patent or trademark it or legally protect it as a commercial entity — just as Sarah and Bristol Palin recently trademarked THEIR names.

Fade Out. Fade In.

The flame war continued for years. Massive casualties piled up on both sides. Competing newsgroups were formed. Eventually, the Sunday School teacher pissed off the wrong denizen of the interwebs — probably Andrew Breitbart, come to think of it, masquerading as BGDK4U or some other internet handle.

And BGDK4U proceeded to “out” the real, Identity Name of our erstwhile Sunday School teacher turned pornstar. And got that information to her employer — a prominent business engaged in an industry steeped, inundated and inured in propriety and decorum.

Thus was the famous internet actress fired and then a lawsuit, an undisclosed settlement and a hejira from Pornville, USA to the hinterlands, where, one presumes, her life was reconstituted along executive secretary lines, and her public presence on the internet all but vanished.

Thus is fame, and thus is the price of that fame, as we moved seamlessly from the “Me” Generation to the “Look At Me” Generation under whose despotic hand we all now toil.

I saw Paris Hilton on the Craig Ferguson show the other night: a woman whose entire fame of the past FIFTEEN YEARS is predicated on her video fellation of her then-boyfriend in an internet sensation that still sells well. Kim Kardashian can lay claim to the same lay fame, and, in both cases, they are raking in millions of dollars selling products to clothe and adorn one’s body, even though their original claim to fame was that their bodies were adorned only with the tangible desire of their thespic male partners in the production of their porn films.

The irony here is that the Sunday School teacher was driven from fame when her “real” name was revealed to her employer. But the aforementioned (porn) actresses FOUND fame, employers and business opportunities by ALWAYS using their real names and never a pseudonym.

And, of course, I was impressed by what a mannequin Paris Hilton has become: a painfully defensive, unresponsive, anti-human clothes-horse that had better be pleasing to look at, because she is positively painful to listen to, when, rarely, she deigns to utter actual words, all the way up to an actual sentence. Filmically, her silent orations are much preferred to her internet perorations.

Abrasive though the Sunday School teacher turned out to be, she was gifted with a mind, wit and some semblance of an education. The same cannot be said for our reality porn stars, Mlles H & K.

Fade Out. Fade In.

It is the early fall of 2006.

A certain Eastern enterprise was running a ballot scam in dozens of states, from Maine to California, from Florida to Washington State.

And I had found documents which linked them all together, along with certain billionaire brothers who are now much in the news.

Following the airing of a news piece on a certain quasi-public broadcasting outlet, a “smear” campaign was launched, admitting that I’d been effective, but … gasp! …

I was a … pornographer!

The anonymous “outer” even proceeded to quote a review of my one and only directorial effort, taking the worst portions of the review from a major adult news magazine devoted to videos.

And, suggested darkly, that I was an exploiter and hater of women.

This was — and remains — a standard rightie tactic –although this group were not Republicans at all, but ideologically and historically allied to ANOTHER sort of conservatism, the sort which were seen in certain demonstrations styling themselves after certain colonial beverage protesters in New England several years ago.

To the first accusation, I made commentary in an influential home-state blog, which had broken the story, including some of the GOOD reviews of the same film, noted that I had never made any secret of my past, and suggested to the anonymous poster that I was not the only correspondent with whom the Sunday School teacher had crossed swords.

Two very interesting developments occurred rather suddenly. First, the influential blog took down the “smear” post (The entire story encapsulated in two paragraphs and a bad sentence, the latter added a day or two later):

WARNING: the following material contains content that may be offensive to some individuals. If you find issues of pornography particularly offensive as well as bad language you may not want to read any further.

In case folks did not notice, I have delted (sic) the copied content in this post. The reason? It was just too tawdry for me. You can go visit Citizen Activist if you would like to discuss it over there. Or you can read it there and discuss it over here.

So, call me a prude.

To which I responded:

A strange prudery: to first post the smear in its entirety with glee, and THEN to take down the post claiming it was too salacious for the readership. If it was so awful, why post it? And, having posted it, why suddenly withdraw it?

A prudery that gleefully posts material that offends its own sensibilities … or perhaps which failed to achieve its own objectives.

And, the second thing that happened was that the anonymous smearer/outer rather sheepishly withdrew her assertions about my interactions with the Sunday School teacher, after Googling just a wee tad more. Whoops!

The attempt (ironic, since the writer merely wanted to anger “liberal women” and probably was not, herself, in any wise offended) died a-borning, and, another irony in a tale of mangles, actually cemented my credibility as an investigator for the remainder of the political season.

And yet, in both cases — Sunday School on the Internet, and Son of Sunday School blog smearage — the “outing” of the supposedly “secret” identity was meant as the coup de grace, the killing stroke.

Which is not that far from Andrew Breitbart’s recent behavior, you might note.

Fade Out. Fade In.

Again, we return to the writer in the crystal tower: Sooner or later what you write will have your name attached to it. The Balloteers of the Crypto-West believed that they could pull a Breitbart, and it turned to ashes in their hands. Why? Because I had always taken responsibility for my words, and realized that I would eventually HAVE no privacy.

Which brings us almost to the present day. Sunday School and the Anonymous Outer had been trapped by their own dependence on “secret identities.” In the former case, it damned near ruined her life when she, herself was “outed.”

But she had GIVEN that power to her eventual destroyer.

Ditto Anthony Weiner.

In a month in which two competing stories formed such a combination of matter/antimatter that the blogosphere OUGHT to have exploded, no one seems to have noticed the “Casey Jones” nature of these two memes: everybody’s moving to “The Cloud” — which is, in essence, shared computing — and massive and potentially disastrous “hacking” of company after company, and of the military and of the congress.

As more and more about you becomes part of the permanent record, your privacy vanishes. So, you might as well face the music up front and when they hit you with your “secret” life, you can say, with me: my life is an open book. I try to never write anything that I’m ashamed of, nor be ashamed of anything that I write.

That keeps ME honest, which is about all the sway I’ve got. Here’s another attempt that was made to publicly destroy me, but, again, since I’m not a closed book, it only gave me this blog’s tagline (in a few days): Terrifying Ted Nugent for One Twenty-Fifth of a Century.

Hannity began his first (of two) jeremiad(s) against me, railing (courtesy of MediaMatters):

HANNITY: Hart Williams is a liberal blogger who went from porn to politics and is now threatening some of our good friends … You know, I know there’s a lot of hatred now towards conservatives, Brent [Bozell]. Where could this go legally? And what if it was a conservative that said this, either a blogger or a talk-show host?

And so forth. My relatives — the ones who watch this swill — were appalled, but, of course, they’ve always been appalled with me, so there’s no net negative there.

My friends who know me and those who read the original column were angry but, like me, there was no way to answer or fight back.

Unlike the Balloteer Smear of the previous year, neither Hannity, nor Faux Nooz™, nor Free Republic, nor any of a dozen other conservative blogs would allow me to speak or defend myself in any wise. My comments were expunged, and the hate mail rose like the currently flooding Missouri river above Omaha.

Nothing I can do about that. In a fair fight, I can beat ‘em because I play fair, and my work is honest. There’s no “secret” me to out.

On the other hand … well, you catch my drift. Like Breitbart, they really ought to hope that karma is a fantasy and there’s nothing to the old saying “what comes around goes around.”

But those are two different ways of dealing with internet privacy.

Being new to the “anonymous” game (by comparison) I would advise that you take the advice of the legendary writer in the crystal tower and write everything as though your real name were attached to it. You’ll save yourself a lot of grief up the line, I assure you.

And the flying girl of Tokyo?

From the story: “Behind Natsumi Hayashi’s
‘Levitating Girl’ Photos – How does she fly?

Uh, she jumps.

Courage.