Guest Commentary: Tim Evanson

Google the term "porn chic." When "Deep Throat" came out, Linda Lovelace was escorted around Hollywood by none other than Sammy Davis, Jr. Joe Dallesandro was "Time" magazine's "sexiest man of the decade" in 1969, and on the cover of that magazine despite doing hard-core straight and bisexual porn for Andy Warhol. The hard-core gay porn film "Boys in the Sand" was the #1 movie in the country the weekend it debuted (and that was based on just one theater!) Wade Nichols, a gay and straight porn star, was on "Edge of Night" for many years as an actor. Major stars like Lyle Waggoner did full nude spreads in "Playgirl." But "porn chic" did not last. By the mid-1970s, the backlash against the '60s was in full swing and porn was seen as sleazy and immoral again. "Porn chic" was just ahead of itself. By the mid-1990s, porn stars were back on television and not hiding their porn past. Sure, most of these people were "Vanna Whites" on various game shows (pretty-boys and pretty-girls turning cards over on "Card Sharks" or hitting the whammy button on "Press Your Luck"). But a few were getting real acting jobs. The ground had been pretty well plowed, hoed, weeded, fertilized, planted and watered by the time Jenna Jameson came around and blossomed into a household name in 2000. That the Jack Wrangler biopic (and the Peter Berlin one before it and "Beefcake" -- a semi-documentary about gay physique photographers before that) is accepted and popular is just one more nail in the coffin of intolerance and judgmentalism.The NY Times piece ((on on PG Porn) raises a serious question, however: If porn (any kind of porn) is based on the thrill of transgression, isn't this really the death-knell of porn?