Linda Lovelace dies

We don't discuss sexual politics much on this list, and I know it might not
be people's top priority right now (yeh, right), but perhaps this might
afford the occasion to discuss it.

I think I remember someone on this list saying that Nina Hartley (or one of
Hartley's partners) was a member of DSA -- which isn't terribly surprising,
since I'd read elsewhere that Hartley is the granddaughter of an Alabama
college professor who joined the Communist Party after being captivated by
Stalin's *Problems of Leninism* (I think he may make a cameo appearance in
Robin Kelley's *Hammer and Hoe*, though without reference to his
famous/notorious granddaughter).  Hartley, of course, was the porn
industry's most high-profile feminist critic of MacKinnon, Dworkin, et. al.

Anyway, re the death of Linda Lovelace, I've included an interesting
commentary from The Guardian following the NYT obit.

John Lacny

**********

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/24/obituaries/24BORE.html

The New York Times, April 24, 2002

Linda Boreman, 53, Known for 1972 Film 'Deep Throat,' Dies

by Douglas Martin


Linda Boreman, the woman once known as Linda Lovelace, who starred in one of
the first feature-length pornography movies, "Deep Throat," and who later
denounced it as depicting her "rape," died on Monday in Denver. She was 53.

The cause was injuries from a car accident on April 3, her family said.

The 62-minute film, released in 1972, made money so fast that its producers
joked they had to weigh their receipts each day; by many estimates it earned
more than $600 million. It cost just $30,000 to make, according to Variety.
Ms. Boreman said she was paid nothing.

"Deep Throat" and Linda Lovelace became household words and figured in three
dozen books and 18 published songs. During Watergate, Washington Post
reporters called their secret source Deep Throat.

But Ms. Boreman testified about the dangers of pornography before Congress,
courts and city councils in the 1980's, and became a poster child for
feminists like Gloria Steinem, who wrote an introduction to her 1986 book
with Mike McGrady, "Out of Bondage."

Ms. Boreman insisted that she had made the movie only because her husband at
the time, Chuck Traynor, threatened her with violence. "I knew the feeling
of a gun to my back and hearing the click, never knowing when there was
going to be a real bullet," she said in her 1980 autobiography, "Ordeal,"
written with Mr. McGrady.

Linda Boreman was born in the Bronx on Jan. 10, 1949, and moved to Yonkers
when she was 3. Her father was a police officer, and her mother held
Tupperware parties.

"How does she do it?" Vincent Canby asked in an article in The New York
Times. "The film has less to do with the manifold pleasures of sex than with
physical engineering."

She told of literally escaping from Mr. Traynor, who was already seeing his
second wife, Marilyn Chambers, another pornography star. She hid out in
different hotels for weeks, then began appearing in Las Vegas and London in
skimpy costumes, drawing a smattering of publicity. The movie career for
which she had hoped never materialized.

She later married Larry Marchiano. They divorced in 1996. She is survived by
their children, a daughter, Lindsay, and a son, Dominic; a sister, Barbara
Boreman; and three grandchildren.

The family lived on welfare when Mr. Marchiano was unemployed, and Ms.
Boreman had a liver transplant in 1987. After they moved to Denver in 1990,
she worked at low-paying jobs.

In recent years, she enjoyed the reception she received at memorabilia
shows, said Eric Danville, author of "The Complete Linda Lovelace" (Power
Process Publishing, 2001). "People would tell her how much they loved her
100 times a day," he said.

Mr. Danville also recalled watching "Deep Throat" with her nine months ago.
It was the first time she had seen it from start to finish.

"I don't see what the big deal was," she said.


**********

http://www.guardian.co.uk/women/story/0,3604,690050,00.html

The Guardian (London), April 25, 2002

Lovely Linda 

by Petra Boynton 


Deep Throat, as most people - certainly most men - know, is a movie about a
woman whose clitoris is in the back of her throat. Brilliantly, of course,
this means that to obtain sexual satisfaction she needs to perform oral sex
on men. No need for any awkward fiddling down below for Linda Lovelace, its
star. 

When Deep Throat was released in 1972, it caused a sensation. The film was
seen as groundbreaking as (unusually for porn films) it had a semblance of a
plot, and was shown in mainstream cinemas. People who would never have been
caught dead in a porn cinema flocked to see it, and a film made for £15,000
ended up grossing £500m and counting. Even certain members of the women's
movement welcomed the film as sexually liberating. And everyone wanted to
know about its star.

Linda, a slight, dark-haired prostitute turned porn actor, appeared on
chatshows, endorsed sex products, featured in Playboy, and wrote a book; all
the while maintaining that she was highly sexed - a nymphomaniac in fact.
The press, public, and porn industry loved her. She became the world's first
porn star. 

But it wasn't long before the buzz around Deep Throat and Linda Lovelace
began to take on a rather sinister tone. Sex manuals began teaching women
that they should learn to "deep throat" their partner in order to please
him. Some even endorsed a training programme in which women pushed their
fingers down their throat while suppressing their gagging reflex, in order
to perfect their deep-throating skills. As with much contemporary sex advice
for women, the message was that you have to learn to like it, just like
Linda. 

And then, in 1980, she revealed that she had learned to like and do things,
not for money or pleasure, but because her very survival depended on it. In
her autobiography, Ordeal, written under the name Linda Marchiano, she said
that she had been an unwilling participant in the film and the subsequent
publicity campaign, and that she was not the sex maniac she had been made
out to be, and although the movie grossed millions, she had not seen a penny
of it. Worse still, she had been beaten and humiliated by her first husband
and manager, Chuck Traynor, who had forced her at the point of a gun to
perform sexual acts - including her porn appearances, and prostitution.

And so Linda was reborn, this time as the heroine of the growing
anti-pornography movement. She went about the country talking to women's
groups and giving evidence to congressional committees investigating
pornography. 

But once again, all was not quite as simple as it seemed. Sadly, as with so
many women in the sex industry, Linda was never really listened to. The
world's first porn star was effectively hijacked by elements of the
anti-porn movement. She ended up endorsing statements, books and films she
didn't necessarily agree with; latterly her words were used and
misrepresented by groups supposedly helping sex workers.

Ordeal was held up by anti-pornography groups as a guide to the evils of the
sex industry, and it appeared on the recommended reading lists of several UK
and US anti-porn groups, where readers with little or no experience of the
industry could learn what it was "really like" to be a porn star. The groups
regularly quoted from the book, in debates, protest flyers, and even in
academic texts, to show how her life was threatened to ensure her
cooperation in Deep Throat.

Katherine MacKinnon, Andrea Dworkin, and Diana Russell in particular used
Linda's testimony to suggest that all women in porn could expect to be
forced into prostitution or raped at gunpoint. This meant we did not get to
hear about the women doing sex work who had experiences that were positive,
or even mundane. All porn was bad, and here was Linda to prove it.

Delighted by the fame of its new supporter, the anti-pornography lobby
conveniently overlooked the fact that Linda's testimony was one of a
battered wife, not a critique of the sex industry. Linda was encouraged to
campaign against porn, but most of her problems were to do with an abusive
partner. It is worth noting that while the abuse Linda suffered was
horrific, in Ordeal she notes that the only time she was treated
respectfully and professionally was when she was making Deep Throat. It was
outside of this setting that her then husband abused and harmed her.

Those in the porn industry chose to overlook this as any negative publicity
detracted from Lovelace the sex star, and so they are on some level
culpable. But that doesn't excuse the claims of the anti-porn camp that the
negative experiences Linda suffered were solely due to the sex industry,
rather than an abusive husband.

Of course there is more to Linda - who was born Linda Boreman - than these
twin roles of nympho and victim, and the fact that she was used and abused
by both the porn industry and the anti-porn industry. So often those who
work with sex workers hear them talking about the fact that being a sex
worker is only a part of what they do; cliched as it may sound, they are
also mothers, sisters, lovers, housewives, or whatever it may be. Well, it
was true of Linda too. When she died on Monday, aged just 53, from injuries
sustained in a road accident, she left behind two children and her second
husband, Larry Marchiano.

They divorced five years ago, after 22 years of marriage, but were still
"the best of friends", and he and the children, now both adults, were there
when she was taken off her life support machine. "Everyone might know her as
something else, but we knew her as mom and as Linda," said Larry.

Despite her notoriety, and despite being dogged by ill-health from dodgy
breast implants and a tainted blood transfusion (which led to hepatitis and
then chronic liver problems), Linda had put together some semblance of a
normal life. 

So how should we remember her? Linda brought porn out into the open, where
everyone could get a good look at it. Without her we wouldn't know what we
know today about the sex industry, and although she may not have approved,
her appearance in and criticisms of porn have led to women making porn by
and for each other, in improved working conditions (the most famous is
Candida Royalle, who is currently celebrating 10 years of making erotic
movies for women). 

There is so much to say about Linda, but we should remember her for her two
most radical actions. First, she wrote a compelling book about spousal abuse
at a time when people were not paying attention to domestic violence. And
second, she was a survivor - a woman who escaped an abusive marriage, who
coped with the emotional and physical scars it left, who managed to form a
happy relationship and raise a family, and coped with serious health
problems. 

And we should remember Linda in her own voice. In 1997 she said: "I look in
the mirror and I look the happiest I've ever looked in my entire life. I'm
not ashamed of my past or sad about it. And what people might think of me,
well, that's not real. I look in the mirror and I know that I've survived."

· Dr Petra Boynton is a psychologist specialising in sex, media and
relationships.


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