From the Librarian- Fake Sex Books and Novel Takes on Porn Movies

This is new series on the latest physical editions to the library of the Center for Sexual Expression and Education. While there is a large digital library catalog, which you can explore in detail through the Erotic University Virtual Campus, we had never really cataloged the physical library of actual bound books. That is now my job, and we will have that catalog up online when it is finished.

New books are constantly coming in. The new hot off the presses books get full reviews, but many older books, including rare and collectible items, also come in. Most of these can be found through a used book search on Amazon. In this continuing series, I will write here a little about the most interesting of the older books that come into the library.

One of the more interesting categories of sex books that come in to the collection are what I refer to as imposters. Dozens of these were written in the 1960s, usually with the author represented as a doctor, psychiatrist, or someone with a Ph.D. They typically recite case studies or interviews with actual patients. In reality, these books are entirely fiction, and the stories by the so-called patients are exactly that- stories, intended for sexual arousal of the reader. The writers use pseudonyms and have no medical or professional background on the subject at all.

A classic of this type of literature is now in our collection – Cunnilingus and Fellatio by John F. Trimble, Ph.D. It was also published as Cunnilingus and Fellation. The authors real name is Roger Blake. Under his own name he wrote books such as Sodomite Practices, Passion Pix, and Swappers. These were stroke books, but books like these were more likely to be seized as pornography and destroyed. Books by doctors were not.

That is why the genre of imposter sex books developed- to avoid prosecution on obscenity charges. Other books that Blake wrote under the Trumble name include Auto-Erotic Activities, Female Bestiality, Incest Experiences, and The Group Sex Scene, and the very collectible 5,000 Adult Sex Words & Phrases.

Cunnilingus and Fellatio, published in 1967 by Monogram Books, is billed as the “first complete study of the subjects at popular prices.” It is an illustrated edition complete with color plates. I suspect that some purchasers were a bit disappointed that the few illustrations are not titillating nor explicit, and that the two color plates depict a color drawing by Felicien Rops of a girl blowing a penis shaped bubble pipe, and another by Fragonard titled the Flute Player that is one of the few images in the book that depicts the topic- a satyr giving oral sex to a nymph.

The book has a little researched information about oral sex in the beginning, much of it from sources that we give little credibility to today, including Freud. He then goes on to cover many case histories. These are all made up. Complete fiction. The whole idea was to give some scientific credibility to what is in actuality just a stroke book.

D. M. Perkins also wrote Defianace!, a novelization of the adult movie Defiance! (the official title was The Defiance of Good). Reading the novelization is as close as you will get to seeing the movie. The star, Jean Jennings (Cindy Jean Jackson), lied about her age. She was just 17 when the film was made in 1974, so it was never released on video. This was her second adult movie. The first was The Case of the Full Moon Murders when she was 16,  although it was not hardcore. She also appeared nude in the 1974 mainstream film There is No 13.

At the time it was the first successful adult film with an S&M theme. The poster even won an award from New York University. Amazingly, her being 17 at the time was not as big a deal, and they even got newspaper articles about the movie which interviewed her about being just 17. She made a few more adult films as an adult, including the successful Autobiography of a Flea, and eventually retired from acting and went into nursing. She passed away in 2011.

Defiance! has an interesting history in that it was financed in the same way that Springtime for Hitler was financed in The Producers. This producer got $150,000 from ten dentists. They never saw a dime, even though the movie made a lot of money.  When the film was distributed, it was not the violent gang rape scene that was cut by censors, but the scene where she has sex with a black orderly.

Lest you think that doing a novelization of a porn movie is a fluke, not so. There was Deep Throat the novel of the classic 1970s porn film Deep Throat, a copy of which we have just added to the library. Written by D. M. Perkins, we have the Dell edition. It was republished two years later by Tandem. It is comically badly written, but so was the original movie.

Perkins wrote a number of erotic titles in the 1960s and 70s, some of which have been rereleased recently, including Jennifer on Tour (along with Jennifer and Jennifer and Nikki). His Evil Companions (as Michael Perkins) was banned in England, and was considered quite controversial. They can be found on Amazon at the included links.

He also wrote the book based on the sequel to Deep Throat, cleverly titled Deep Throat II, considered among the worst films of all time. You can find an ebook version of it on Amazon at the link. Lovelace returned for the extremely low budget R rated feature. Deep Throat II had all of the trappings of really bad porn, but without the actual sex.

Deep Throat II also featured porn star Andrea True, who had a single hit song in 1976, “More, More, More.” It is about falling in love on a porn set, although few listeners in the 70s would have known that. In the song she is telling him that she loves him, and will give him more, more, more, but if he wants to see how she really feels about him, he will have to wait for the cameras to roll so that she can show him. You can listen to it by clicking here.

What is interesting to me is that many of these books were written by young writers who later became quite famous. They include a number of science fiction authors, including multi Hugo and Nebula award winning Robert Silverberg. They wrote enormous numbers of sleaze paperbacks, and we have new exhibits every month about these types of books in the Magnus Hirschfeld Library on the Erotic University Virtual Campus. They also wrote books as just plain sex books under a variety of pen names, but would use one of their doctor pen names to write an introduction to give the book a little more credibility.

And this brings me to one of the more unique new entries into our collection: Different Strokes – How I (Gulp) Wrote, Directed, and Starred in an X-rated Movie by John Warren Wells. This was right after the huge success of Deep Throat. The actual author was award winning mystery writer Lawrence Block. It is a supposedly true account of what it was like to work on creating a porn film, but of course, every word of it is fiction. Block writing as Wells did a number of imposter books, case studies from the field of human sexual behavior. Many of these are now available in new Kindle Editions from Amazon.

Block gave creative birth to John Warren Wells in the mid 60s, right after Block lost his lucrative job writing sex books for Nightstand Books churning out a book a month. Many of the Wells books are now available in new Kindle editions from Amazon, including The Wife-Swap Report originally published by Dell, Versatile Ladies: the Bisexual Option, Sex Without Strings: A Handbook for Consenting Adults, 3 is Not a Crowd, The Taboo Breakers: Shock Troops of the Sexual Revolution, Wide Open: New Modes of Marriage, and Tricks of the Trade: A Hooker’s Handbook of Sexual Technique. They run around $3.00 and some are available free if you have Kindle Unlimited. Take any of the sexual advice contained in them as intended- for masturbation purposes only.