I grew up in southern California during the late '60s and early '70s, so I got to experience the great Golden Age of porn. My initial exposure was through some genuine imported Swedish porn books (yeah, books!), borrowed from this 30-something swinger cat I worked landscaping for in the early '70s. Later, I hooked up with an ex-girlfriend (several years older than me) of my older brother, who also had some imported porn books, this time from Germany, I think: filthy Teutonic stuff with lots of incredibly hairy, sweat-slickened gyno close-ups. I was hooked! (She was a dirty whore too, who was more than happy to show me directly some of the stuff in those pages. God bless her.) My intro to actual porn vids was in '73 (I have the date demarcated clearly in my mind), at a bachelor party for one of my high-school friends—three years older than me—who was among the first of my contemporaries to get hitched, at the just-turned age of 18. Dumb bastard. For the party, we had bought and sneaked a shitload of cheap mescal across the Tijuana border, and everybody there got fully faced and pukin. From the same older swinger cat with the fuck books, we had borrowed a couple of coveted porn tapes. The first VHS movie was one of the earliest featuring the infamous "Johnny Wadd", John Holmes, but I don't remember its title. I do vividly remember being awed by his freakishly huge cock, the image of which could have pinned any average, freshly pubescent 15-year-old in the grip of inadequacy for years to come. Wadd thoroughly violated two cookie-selling Girl Scouts in the main scene, and finished by filling their waiting mouths with a humongous load, which the two would-be Scouts then proceeded to trade back and forth. We all watched this vision in stunned amazement at its perfect illicit debauchery, an act we could barely have imagined ever happening in real life. It filled my masturbatory fantasies for a long time.

From that night forward, my sexuality was wholly shaped by the hand of pornography. From the Penthouse mags of Bob Guccione's glory days, to Oui magazine (way nastier and better than the fatherly softcore of its parent, Playboy), and on to the groundbreaking porno trash of Hustler and numerous others, both domestic and foreign, video and print (alas, now pretty much a thing of the past) - porn has been my life-long cultural companion.

I wouldn't have it any other way.