“The crime, the arrest, the taking down of names and numbers, the emptying of pockets, the one allotted phone call, the fingertips smeared in ink, and finally, the booking photo: the mug shot. Culled from and ferreted out of police departments from all over the country, here are the mug shots of dozens of America’s celebrities who have been arrested. Suzanne Somers, Tim Allen, Larry King, Jane Fonda, Christian Slater—all have blinked in the flash of the police photographer’s camera. With great difficulty, George Seminara has compiled a startling rogues’ gallery of dozens of well-known public figures.”

Publisher: St. Martin's
Paperback: 100 pages
Illustrated

“Men have considered her one of the most exciting women alive, a glamorous love goddess. Now she has written a totally revealing and enthralling book about her loves and life, including revelations about Frank Sinatra, Jerry Lewis, Sylvester Stallone, and many many more.”

Publisher: Barricade
Hardback

“Kern is the punk of bondage photographers. His hardcore photographs of New York girls are created by a practiced Peeping Tom. They show girlie sex, splatter scenes, girls with guns (bang-bang), girls trussed up like chickens, manacled, tattooed and pierced; but above all they show girls looking back at the camera in a way that makes us wonder who is in control. These challenging, beautiful and mysterious photographs grew out of Kern’s performance and film work… his photographs document the dark side of the American dream where narcissistic fantasies, aggressive phobias and powerful desires come under the transgressive scrutiny of Kern’s eye.”

Publisher: Taschen
Paperback: 260 pages
Illustrated

“What makes Ken’s work so remarkable is the sense that these squashed lives are not just isolated bugs on the windshield, but parallel worlds of hermetic secrets… they had an identity and a place; that this was their kingdom with its own rules and stories and lice.”—William T. Vollman, from the introduction.
This is a photo book, somewhat in the tradition of Diane Arbus, where the photographer develops a sense of intimacy and trust with a variety of social outcasts and creates intimate portraits of them. The subjects include skinheads, electroshock patients, prostitutes and addicts. There is something decidedly unsavory about getting this close to these subjects, especially the skinheads, whose ugliest aspects seem self-determined. However, their juxtaposition here with everything that they claim to hate makes for an interesting exercise in contextualization. The life here is just plain low and not “deliciously low.” Each photo is accompanied by text from a Vollman work that either provides a narrative or a counterpoint. SA

Publisher: Overlook
Hardback: 118 pages
Illustrated

“An insider’s account, based on three years of research, discusses the near-epidemic proportions of prostitution in Asia, noting that 8 percent of Thailand’s prostitutes are HIV positive and pinpointing its sources to political corruption and parental dysfunction.”

Publisher: Little, Brown
Paperback: 320 pages
Illustrated

“He was young, ambitious and blessed with a superior IQ. He spent 25 years of his life in Hell. Other pimps died in prison, or in insane asylums, or were shot down in the street. But Iceberg Slim escaped death and the drug habit to live in the square world and write… about his people and his life.”

Publisher: Holloway House
Paperback: 320 pages

In his pioneering sexual ethnography, the late Robert Stoller was always careful to qualify his perceptions with the acknowledgment of his own limitations as a perceiver. Under the circumstances, this reviewer can do no less. I was a participant in Stoller’s investigation of the lives and souls of those who make porn and am quoted in this book at some length under the pseudonym “Ron.” I went on to co-author a second book on the subject with Stoller, Coming Attractions, which was published just after his tragic death in an automobile accident.
Like most of his later work, Porn consists mainly of interviews—interlaced with the author’s questions and comments of the performers, directors, writers and associated hangers-on who make their livings cranking out sexually explicit videos. While carefully avoiding political or moral judgments, Stoller nonetheless paints a picture from a definite perspective. By dedicating so many pages to voluble porn industry spokesperson and self-styled moral iconoclast Bill Margold, Stoller makes his case for porn as a refuge of talented misfits and sexual nonconformists. As the author puts it, “The motivating sentiment of porn is less ‘Let’s fuck’ than ‘Fuck you.’” Certainly, by encouraging his informants to share their often-troubled personal histories, elicited with a master psychoanalyst’s seeming effortlessness, he gives plenty of reasons why porn people might be angry and rebellious. Abandonment, abuse and molestation are recurring themes in the narratives of performers and off-camera industry personalities alike. Even interviewees like Nina Hartley, who profess to enjoy their work and disdain the sympathies of those who regard them as exploited, have their share of resentments to unload at anti-porn feminists and younger performers.
Though Stoller’s investigations don’t contribute additional ammo to porn-bashers, they give little comfort to those who prefer to imagine sex work as an endless toga party. Much of the evidence Stoller educes seems to corroborate his much-misunderstood and widely castigated theorem that “the erotic imagination is energized by the element of harm.” It is the angry edge of porn and the people who make it that gives it its vitality. Porn is a tribute to the memory of a scientist who shunned easy polemics in favor of uncomfortable paradoxes. IL

Publisher: Yale University
Hardback: 228 pages

Readers nurturing the illusion that Stalinism vanished from the world in the brick dust of the Berlin Wall owe themselves this package tour of the totalitarian mind, a veritable Baedeker to the P.C.-paranoid brain. To her credit, Barry (author of Female Sexual Slavery, of which this book is an update) does not pretend to be objective in her broad, shallow survey of sexual enslavement throughout the modern world. In her introduction, she identifies herself as an early supporter of what she calls “The Dworkin-Mackinnon Ordinance,” and lambastes her opponents in the “Feminist” Anti-Censorship Task Force (quotations hers) as “lesbian sadomasochists and heterosexual women hiding behind their own pornographic lives.”
A self-described “abolitionist” in regard to all forms of sex-for-hire, Barry no longer believes there to be any meaningful difference between “free” and “forced” prostitution. “Challenging that distinction,” she declares, “is central to my work today.” Lifting off from this position, the author takes the reader on a quick helicopter trip over the sad and sorry lives of female sex workers around the planet. Mail-order brides from the Philippines, child slaves in Bangkok brothels, police-registered prostitutes in the legal red-light districts of Germany, and American porn stars blur past as dark patches on Barry’s map of worldwide villainy, individual circumstances dismissed as mere distractions from the broad reality that unites them: “prostitution—the cornerstone of all female exploitation.”
In her view, prostitution exists neither to satisfy the sexual needs of men nor the financial needs of women, but rather to facilitate class enslavement by gender through the use of economic coercion and physical force. She dismisses the contrary opinions of women who consider themselves to be voluntary participants in the sex industry as “expressions of hopelessness.” That out of the way, Barry quickly moves on to join battle with her new classes of enemies: pro-prostitution “sex workers” and “sexual liberals who promote pornography as free speech and prostitution as consensual sex.” These individuals, she asserts without a blink, belong on the same list with “pimps… pornography purveyors, wife-beaters, child molesters, incest perpetrators, johns (tricks) and rapists.” Though the inductive leap from sexual liberals to rapists would seem breathtaking to many, it clearly doesn’t faze an author who finds much to admire in postwar Vietnam’s brutal anti-sex work campaign, which subjects recidivist female prostitutes to forcible “re-education.” And you thought I was joking about the Stalinism thing.
It’s easy enough to dismiss this book as additional mad rantings from a radical fringe of the feminist movement, more embarrassing to its friends than effective against its foes. Unfortunately, in her haste to indict intellectual heretics, Barry further obscures the very real evil she so vividly identified in her previous book. By falsely conflating the real experiences of San Fernando Valley porn stars and children abducted from Indian villages, she insults the dignity of the former while trivializing the desperation of the latter. Like the collectivist regimes for which she feels such nostalgia, Barry endangers her own cause by looking for enemies where none exist while overlooking the real ones nearby. IL

Publisher: NYU
Paperback: 381 pages

“At night she was a loving wife and mother. During the day she’d pack her sequined G-strings and leave for New York City—to take her place in the world of Times Square as the Queen of Burlesque.’ This unusual woman successfully reconciled family life with her career as the most sought-after striptease performer in New York… A journey through the world of strip joints, peeps shows, gogo bars and for-men-only magazines. This story explodes many of the myths about exotic dancing and shows that it really is possible to be an old-fashioned woman in an X-rated world.”

Publisher: Prometheus
Hardback: 188 pages
Illustrated

“Meet the women of sex flicks, the producers, the directors—and Jerry Butler, by far the wittiest and most charismatic of all adult-film actors. From his middle-class childhood in Brooklyn, to his early career as a hockey star, to the beginning of his acting career in Greenwich Village, to the making of his first X-rated film and his years of starring in sex videos, Jerry bares his soul more completely than he’s ever bared his body!”

Publisher: Prometheus
Paperback: 323 pages
Illustrated