George Mavety was not a snob, but his great wealth (which was launched with porn but was added to considerably via real estate) led him into ritzy social circles, which in turn made him covet the idea of legitimacy. When he was dining with a New York state senator—he was a 300-pound foodie, so dining with him was an experience—he couldn’t tell the story of how he, a former Canadian Sunday school teacher, had launched North America’s first gay porn mag out of the trunk of his car; he wanted to have more mainstream accomplishments under his Humpty Dumpty-sized belt. So when Mr. Mavety heard I was an author with one non-fiction book and a new novel that had just been positively reviewed in
The New York Times
, I became Cinderella and my boss the wicked stepmother and both ugly stepsisters rolled into one.
I sat in a cubicle with the editor of
Juggs
in front of me and another gay editor, Gordon, behind me. Gordon worked more on
Inches
, a magazine that displayed horse-dicks on horse-faces. The editor of
Juggs
was a nice guy, but had a naturally sleazy voice, insinuating. When he was on the phone, we’d laugh because he’d say things like, “New York, New York, the city so nice they named it twice,” but it would sound like he was talking about anal sex or something.
Gordon was a good-looking guy about 15 years older than me, a survivor of the Great Plains who had come of age in San Francisco and had many more experiences (sexual and otherwise) than myself. The first time I met him, I detected some alienation at my boss’s ideas, which were presented to us at every turn. Gordon was so detached from our boss’s rants about kink that I at first wondered if he was a little flaky. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Even though he and the boss had a history of close friendship (that was coming to a close), it was Gordon and I who bonded. Gordon would become my gay best friend. Having a “gay best friend” is not the same thing as thinking of “Jimmy” as your “Jewish friend,” which Grandpa scolded that kid for doing in those Department of Health, Education, and Welfare TV spots from the ‘70s. When a gay boy finds his best friend, who is also gay, it is a powerful teaming up of histories, outlooks, humor, and support. It’s a miracle because you don’t want to fuck each other or fuck each other over.
Most colorfully, I also worked very near the lair of Dian Hanson, a porn legend.
“You look like a cornhusker!” she shouted out as I passed her office. “Are you from the Midwest?”
Dian, who can read anybody right down to their lust for nuns, for being spanked, or for being challenged by multiple BBCs, edited
Leg Show
and oversaw
Juggs
and all the other girlie titles Mavety published from that location, ensconced in her office with its elliptical machine and stacked costumes, fetish gear, and feather boas. Dian was and is a knock-out, but her cerebral and bitingly funny editor’s letters in the magazine would always be accompanied by photos in which she flashed her infinity legs while simultaneously shielding her face behind her long, blonde hair. It was a nice face, to be sure, but I think she wisely figured it wouldn’t behoove her to be instantly recognizable to her legion of scary-loner, sexually fucked up fans. Dian was the kind of person who could strike up a conversation with you and within seconds be talking about why some men enjoy cross-dressing yet are the furthest thing from gay. She is a sexual encyclopedia, and she appeared in the documentary
Crumb
, about cult-favorite comic illustrator Robert Crumb; they’d once dated, which made sense considering her was in love with riding around on the backs of Amazonian babes.
The cast of characters at the porn company also contained a hulk of a man who had trouble walking and whose bum heart led him to hang a “Do Not Resuscitate” sign on his desk. A paralegal (at best), he became the company’s in-house legal counsel, his opinions not much better than semi-educated guesses, but his main avocation was sex with black men he found around Port Authority. An ass man like me, he proved one
could
take it too far the day he told all within earshot, “I’d eat a mile of shit to get to that ass.”
The funniest people in the office to me were the ladies who seemed embarrassed to be working around pornography. The Christians were so uptight they could not possibly have been doing a good job—a woman responsible for selling ads candidly admitted she never looked inside the magazines, which she considered the devil’s playground. When she was advised that we could not accept any explicit ads that contained “wet shots,” she took the directive literally, refusing ads picturing female models taking bubble baths.
Nobody black could be fired for fear of a racial-discrimination suit, a fear which in itself was racist.
There was a cultured secretary who preferred talking about the theater to arguments over whether incest should be considered obscene. While considering distasteful subjects, she would concentrate, moving her firmly pursed lips in and out. It looked like she was using them as insects use their antennae, to gather information. I lost some of my affection for her when she told me that there was no difference between Al Gore and George W. Bush—hilariously, a significant number of people working in the porn industry vote Republican, even though that’s the ticket that would like to make what they do illegal.
The woman with whom we all seemed to have the most difficulty was a white-haired spinster with the pushiness of “Alice” the housekeeper’s bossy cousin “Sergeant Emma” from
The Brady Bunch
. This gargoyle in stockings was charged with chasing down unnecessary expenses and poring over each and every issue’s “blues” (advance samples of what would actually be printed, generated for last-second proofing) in order to call out the editors on any risks we were taking. She would question whether a man’s hand resting on his penis looked too much like masturbation, whether a duo shot could be construed as intercourse in Alabama, whether an illustration showing a man dressed as a priest with a cock sticking through the confessional was unnecessarily provocative. She was kind of in charge of making sure none of us greenlit anything that might put Mr. Mavety into a wheelchair or federal prison, but as with so many small people in positions of medium power, she was a huge pain in the ass. She caught me early in my tenure mailing out review copies of my novel
Boy Culture
using office postage which, to be fair, I should not have been doing. The way she figured it out was she would monitor the mailroom daily and tear open any package that didn’t look like it was a magazine. I pretended I hadn’t known any better but it almost got me fired and she never stopped looking for the next good reason to have me canned.
But out of a cast of characters worthy of any Christopher Guest film, one of the undeniable villains in the piece always seemed to me to be Mr. Mavety’s second in command, a no-nonsense fire hydrant of a woman who closely resembled the then new Supreme Leader of North Korea, Kim Jong-il. She micromanaged the office, made whatever deals needed to be made with whomever they needed to be made in order for each month’s hundreds of thousands of magazines to be printed and shipped, and she both influenced and carried out Mr. Mavety’s wishes. She had so much power it was scary, and yet because I was young and felt like I could get fired and do anything else in the world, I didn’t let her intimidate me. She liked that and me to a certain extent, but a little of my sass went a long way with her.
One time, everyone in the New York branch was called into Mr. Mavety’s office, which doubled as a conference room (and God knows what else when the door was closed). We were treated to a long list of infractions that suggested we were costing the company all of its profits due to our wasteful ways. She furiously repeated Mr. Mavety’s belief that we used Federal Express like toilet paper, which was odd since we dealt with photographic slides that were, in many cases, originals and irreplaceable. By the time she got to the phone bill, she was pounding the desk with her fist.
I asked her. “How much is the phone bill for the New York office?”
I don’t recall the exact amount, but it was something like $170. I could not believe it.
“You’re upset that the monthly bill for an entire office is $170 when most of the people we deal with are in California? My own personal monthly bill is probably $100.”
She was fuming but couldn’t reply, at least not coherently. Everyone suspected she may have a secret reason for caring so much about how much cash was lying around, but she was so trusted by Mr. Mavety—they called each other and anyone else they were comfortable with “dahling”—that she was above reproach, if beneath contempt.
Oh, and it was said she’d had a gay guy fired on the spot for implying that she might be a lesbian. The glass-closeted have glass jaws.
There are lots of things they don’t tell you when you’re about to work for a gay porn conglomerate in the ‘90s.
Just like when you work in a donut store and either gorge yourself on donuts and get fat or quickly get sick of the very mention donuts, you might very well become hypersexual or give it up altogether once you work for a porn mag. For me, I spent lots of my early days there hard as a rock in my jeans while editing dirty fiction and writing fake model copy in order to make naked guys sound as sexy as they looked. But I was frustrated in my personal life because I wasn’t having the kind or amount of sex I wanted at home, nor did I have much privacy to masturbate. The donut-store analogy becomes especially relevant here, because it turns out Mavety would often supply us with a tray of free Danish in the mornings. I wound up tipping the scales at 248 pounds. As the editor of a magazine called
Torso
. It was like promoting a Dalmatian to edit
Cat Fancy
.
You also might not realize that trying to go pee would become an issue, because someone might be doing a Polaroid photo shoot in there or might be whiffing the urinal because a sexy straight designer had just been in there. (I always thought a porn company would be a hard place to prove sexual harassment, but at least one woman did just that, when a higher-up apparently told her, “I’d fuck your tits, if you had any.” I’ve heard she won that case.)
You also won’t realize how sedate the workplace will be in comparison to your imagination. Yes, Dian had dildos lying around her office, and yes, the art department was decorated with sexy covers on the walls and littered with fully nude layouts on color boards everywhere you looked. But things were otherwise about as raunchy as the last season of
The Office
. I almost never saw models. My boss would have clandestine meetings with eager 20-year-olds looking to get paid to show off their beer-can appendages, but those were always held in his office behind closed doors. He rarely even showed me the Polaroids that were at least one of the by-products of such encounters. I was never invited to a photo shoot. I would be handed sheets of slides only after they’d been shot by a freelancer (and usually bought outright), then edited by my boss. I would then use them to write a story, including things like, “I tell everyone I’m straight and just posing naked for the money, but I’m really obsessed with sitting on big dicks every chance I get.” It was all stuff the models had agreed to in writing, and yet they never really appreciated our handiwork once the issues came out since a lot of them really
were
straight.
I did get to do phoners with models occasionally, which was maddening because most of them had not become nude models and/or porn actors because of their sterling conversational abilities. The smart ones were even harder to interview, since they were working under assumed names and identities. “Where are you from?” was a loaded question. They couldn’t really talk much about their real sexual tastes, either, especially if they were making movies—why alienate a portion of your audience by confiding that you’re a huge bottom who never tops except for money? Or why, in the case of many straight-for-real, gay-for-pay pornstars, would you want to admit that you found gay people to be predatory and gay sex repulsive?
The truth was not good for business. The truth was not good for boners.
Speaking of boners, Mr. Mavety was never far from one. He was insatiable. That he got into the sex industry was no mere accident, he had followed what he loved—sex, sex, sex, and the kinkier the better. There is almost nothing I could learn now about what he got up to that would shock me, especially not after overhearing him recounting the time he was in Asia and had a girl lowered onto his penis from a rope on the ceiling. He was such a lothario he put the moves on my very first hire when I later started a teen magazine at his company (yes…a teen magazine). I’d brought aboard this virginal new college grad who was the epitome of a boy band fan, only to find out that Mr. Mavety wanted her and me to get into his limo and ride out to the New Jersey office with him so we could have a look around and meet the sales staff. Seated in the back of his limo with him—he was so big that it was crowded with even just the three of us—I had to hold my breath that my new hire wouldn’t quit after the line of questioning he pursued, which started with, “Were the showers co-ed at your university, my dear?”
I do credit the overall Mavety experience with opening my mind sexually. I was very conservative prior to understanding the broad array of freaks out there. Now I’m one of them.
Even if the biggest freak was Mavety himself, I did like the guy—a lot. He was like Sydney Greenstreet on Spanish fly. Always immaculately groomed and in an expensive—and expansive—suit, he would get on the intercom and demand that we get away from the water cooler and back to work or that we “clear the lines” because he was too cheap to have enough phone lines so that more than a handful of his employees could be on the horn at any given time. He was also given to strolling the halls of the New York office and scaring the hell out of us by appearing out of nowhere to ask us pointed questions, the correct answers to which we were never sure we were giving.