Porn-again Christian

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Porn-again Christian

He was a jobbing actor whose energetic role in the most infamous porn movie ever made turned him into a cause celebre and an unwitting spokesman against censorship. It also nearly cost him his life. As a candid documentary is released, Harry Reems tells David A Keeps about his struggle to survive Deep Throat

Sunday May 22, 2005
The Observer

The man sitting on the edge of the bed and making love to the camera is arousing nothing but suspicion. Could this avuncular chap with the beetle brows and a shock of grey hair - who looks like what they used to call a 'silver fox' 30 years ago - actually be Harry Reems, the first male porn star and one of the few genuine survivors of the 1972 adult film Deep Throat?
Yes, and then again, no. This fellow, born Herbert Streicher in New York City in 1947, sitting here in his bucolic Park City, Utah, mountainside home in a plaid shirt and neatly pressed khakis, has the smile, the voice and the disposition of a breakfast DJ. It is easy to see the ghost of a cocksure rake, the role he played in silly skin flicks with such brio three decades ago, when Harry Reems was one of many noms de porn that stuck. It is even more apparent, however, that he is no longer the firebrand freedom-of-expression spokesperson - and, later, more sadly, the wasted sot - on display in Inside Deep Throat, the wildly entertaining new documentary about the most profitable porno film ever made. It is 15:01 on the celebrity clock for Harry Reems, or, as he puts it, 'I've had my 15 minutes of fame, now I would like my 15 years of retirement.'

Though the film casts him as a tragic hero, Harry isn't the least bit sucked in. 'Nobody under the age of 50,' he says with great joviality, 'even knows who I am.'

A quick reminder: after making dozens of stag movies in the late Sixties and early Seventies, Streicher, a young and promising stage actor who discovered he could make $100 a day having sex on film, was hired to be the lighting director for a film about a woman, played by Linda Lovelace, who cannot achieve orgasm because her clitoris is located in her oesophagus. When an actor failed to show up, Streicher stepped in as the doctor who unravels the medical mystery that leads to the happy ending. Save for the titular talents of the lead actress, the film would have been a forgettable goof. Instead, zealous obscenity prosecutors intent on shutting the film down made it a hipness litmus test and a huge financial success. In a perverse twist of justice, Harry Reems would be brought to trial with Mafiosi who were involved in the distribution of the film and convicted for conspiracy to transport obscene material across state lines.

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/magazine/story/0,11913,1487624,00.html