"My Early Porn Years", my true account of the chain of events leading up to my stint as a porn actor, was originally published in Richard Freeman's
Batteries Not Included, September 1998 issue. For online reading, please see the account at
My Early Porn Years. As explained in the account, I lost my S&M cherry at a club for members of the S&M community called Chateau 19, held on Thursday nights at a swing club in Manhattan, in the late 1970s. Although my heterosexual bottom-oriented fetish fantasies go back to puberty, I played with dominant women for the first time at Chateau 19 during that period.
Networking at Chateau 19 lead to my first "job" in the adult entertainment industry, modeling as a male submissive with three dominant women, for Richard Shore and Sandy York of Esoteric Press, editors of a tabloid titled
Corporal, and several glossy fetish magazines distributed to adult book stores. The location of the shoot was a loft called The Project at 127 Grand Street. I met Lisa Baumgardner for the first time on the shoot. She was one of the dominant women whom I posed with for photos. One shot in particular, showing Lisa riding me like a horse, was repeatedly used in Esoteric Press publications:
The residents of The Project, Chip Durgom and Leil Lowndes, were doing a show there called "Another Way to Love," a therapeutic dramatization of sex fantasies to increase public awareness and acceptance of unusual sexual desires. Soon after the Esoteric Press shoot, I went to see the show.
I chatted with Chip and Leil after the show, and told them about my aspirations. They told me about Dorothy Palmer, a talent agent serving the porn industry. Dorothy eventually got me some work, which lead to my stint as a porn actor.
