Smut Peddler!

By Peter Landau

Gil Reavill used to make his living by making people sick. After all, he worked for Screw magazine, which billed itself as "The World's Greatest Newspaper" but was just publisher Al Goldstein's money train fueled by hooker ads and naked hippies in stock shots that illustrated articles with bad dirty puns for titles.

He remembers sitting around the editorial bullpen struggling to come up with the foulest coverlines to scream from the X-rated cartoon cover of the inky tabloid. Staff members imagined the typical outer-borough secretarial-type coming up from the subway after a long commute and discovering their offensive language on the newsstand. Success was marked by making this poor drone puke.

After much brainstorming Reavill and the rest stopped the presses with a "Special Sex and Diarrhea Issue!" They earned their paychecks that week. But later spying at the corner newsstand they saw no one even blanching at the hardworking Screw team's labor. No one cared what Screw printed on its cover.

"I thought I was a First Amendment crusader," says Reavill, now married with a teenage daughter, living in the suburbs of New York and talking about the publication of his new book, Smut: A Sex Industry Insider (and Concerned Father) Says Enough Is Enough (Sentinel).

Pedestrians may have passed by the distastefully comic coverlines of Screw, but society embraced them. That embrace came slowly, to be sure, after many headline-grabbing court cases that opened the floodgates to even filthier copy from Hustler and a burgeoning adult film industry.

Pornography is now the new rock 'n' roll--it's got a beat and the kids can beat-off to it. Teenagers are no longer finding their fathers' Playboys but logging on to hardcore pornography sites online. Advertising has been fast to take advantage of the porning of America, as has primetime television and the Billboard Top 10. The world is a dirty place nowadays.

No one is more aware of this evolution, or devolution, than Reavill. He worked for years as Goldstein's ghostwriter, responsible for his weekly "Screw You" column and countless articles and op-ed pieces that ran in publications from Playboy to The New York Times. His tenure at the magazine during the '80s opened the rancid oyster that was New York City in those idyllic pre-AIDS days.

"It was a sexual circus," he recalls. "I loved it. I was in my twenties and my head was really turned by it. I'm not a prude. I'm not a Puritan. Yet I'm offended when I walk through an airport, for example, and I see a whole wall of Maxim magazine displays. I'm offended for my daughter who's walking by and didn't choose to look at those magazine covers. I'm offended for religious people who have scriptures against this type of material. And to tell you the truth, I'm offended for myself because there are just some times I'm not in the mood."

Reavill has worked for Maxim, as a consulting editor and regular contributor, but that ended when he sent an advance copy of his new book to his friends working there. "The day they got it they called me back, spiked a story I was right in the middle of," he says. "They said, 'We're getting enough heat for our display policies. We don't need somebody from the inside talking about that.' I don't think I'll be invited back to write there."

Smut has dropped like a stink bomb on the insular community of the sex industry. Writer/musician Josh Alan Friedman, Reavill's friend and coworker from back in the Screw days, is quoted on Luke Ford's website, LukeIsBack.com, as saying, "It was dreamed up at an editorial board meeting. Some editor got a hot idea. Let's get some writer to turncoat in the porn industry, offer them a lot of money, and get them to do a book for the Christian Right, just what they wanted to hear. It's a cheap marketing idea that will probably pay off."

"I won't deny that the fact that I worked at Maxim and that I wrote a parenting book called Raising Our Athletic Daughters--that profile, really got me in the door to my publishing house," admits Reavill. "They loved the idea of somebody who embraced both sides of the coin. That's natural, that's marketing, that's where publishing lives and where it should live. I didn't really expect a huge round of applause from people. This is a book I had to write."

Recently, outside the quaint setting of his local library, Reavill overheard a three-year-old child singing the 50 Cent song "Candy Shop". "I'll take you to the candy shop / I'll let you lick the lollipop," sang the toddler, hopefully unaware of the hit's sexual innuendo.

"In some sense, I believe the culture that we've created here at the turn of the millennium in America really amounts to a form of sexual abuse of children," he says, exposing one of the main themes of his book. "Not physically, and I'm not even talking about teenagers now, but kids younger than ten say, are exposed to forms of adult sexuality. Just as a matter of course, and I don't think that should happen."

These are strong words coming from a man who cashes a regular paycheck from Penthouse magazine, where he recently penned a glowing profile of Mr. Skin. Is Reavill biting the hand that has fed him and kept his daughter in all that soccer equipment?

"Mr. Skin is directing consenting adults to places where they can see something that they choose to see," he explains. "And I have no problem with that. Now, if Mr. Skin was throwing up billboards or doing any sort of public display, I would have to say, 'Well, maybe that's not a good idea.' But adult material, I have very liberal parameters for something like that. I've been called consistently over the past couple of weeks a hypocrite, and that's the gentlest I've been called. But I just believe in different standards for public and private expression. I don't think that makes me a censor, doesn't make me a hypocrite. It makes me civilized."

Reavill's daughter just wishes he'd write about something normal. His next book is coming out in the summer of 2006 from Gotham and is called Aftermath, about a Chicago company that cleans up after crimes. Reavill will be spending the next couple of months working for them. It should be a more pleasant experience than defending Smut from the First Amendment extremists on the Left and the anti-porn extremists on the Right.

"This is a tremendously polarizing issue," he says. "I did not want to be polarized on either side of it. I wanted to fit into that gray area in the middle, and to a great degree I'm not allowed to be there. I've done a lot of interviews where I've been insulted from the right and a lot of interviews where I've been insulted from the left. The way the question is framed in this country is which scares you more: the excesses of pornography or the specter of censorship? To me that's a false choice. It's a reductive choice. It just reduces the question down to a simple black-and-white thing. What I'm interested in saying is that I don't want censorship. I fully back the rights of consenting adults to enjoy any kind of material that they want to. But there's a whole lot of non-consenting adults out there and a whole host of children whose apprentice of consent isn't even developed yet."

Even (some of) Reavill's detractors are quick to say that they agree with much of what's put across in the book: that society's public commons need not be saturated by adult sexual material, that there should be boundaries, that not everyone wants a Girl Gone Wild shoving her tits in their face. Then they turn around and call Reavill an asshole. "This one's on me," he responds cheerfully. "I can be an asshole and get this message out. I'll be the sacrificial goat here."Counters SexWrecks.com guru Selwyn Harris: "Jesus fucking Christ, Gil, you used to be groovy. Even if the only thing in your book that truly, profoundly offends me is your presentation of U2's Bono as 'cool'--and might I note, that's a repeated presentation--that alone ought to be enough for you to gaze at your silver-fox visage in the mirror each day and think, Look at me! I'm Bozo! I'm BOZO!"