Jared Stearns
It was 1995. A VHS tape labeled Marilyn Chambers’ Private Fantasies #2 was clutched in my trembling hands. It had been discovered in my grandfather’s dresser drawer. At fourteen years old, curiosity led me to it, knowing its likely contents. Why else would my grandfather hide it beneath a pile of sweaters? Alone at home, I popped it into the VCR. I had never seen a pornographic film. This would be my first. And you never forget your first time.
When she appeared on the screen, Marilyn Chambers’ magnetism was palpable, even through a videotape, to a young gay teenager. I revisited that tape often and eventually kept it. If my grandfather ever noticed it was missing, he said nothing.
About fifteen years later, while living in San Francisco, I went to see an X-rated film called Resurrection of Eve. Marilyn starred in it. I’m not entirely sure what happened in that theater, but the experience was similar to when I first saw her on that worn, grainy VHS. It felt like my first time all over again. And an inner voice told me I needed to learn everything I could about Marilyn Chambers. Finally, her extraordinary life story is told for the first time in my book, Pure: The Sexual Revolutions of Marilyn Chambers (Headpress).
In the twenty-first century, fame and celebrity are quantifiable. Popularity is measured in followers, likes, clicks, and views. We’re so conditioned to it that it can be challenging to grasp how prominent and prevalent Marilyn Chambers was. She was so recognizable in the seventies and eighties that one needn’t have seen one of her films to know her name. Until her untimely death in 2009, her life and career were reported like those of any other movie star.
After starring in the 1972 X-rated feature Behind the Green Door, Marilyn was thrust into the public eye when it was discovered that she was also the model holding a smiling baby on the boxes of Ivory Snow laundry detergent. It may seem quaint now, but in the early seventies the idea that a symbol of young American motherhood was also engaging in sex acts on the big screen was a massive controversy. It made Green Door one of the most profitable films of the decade, and it turned Marilyn Chambers into a star.
Her career was much more varied than people realized. She starred in theater, a Broadway musical, and her own dramatic television series. She performed a successful cabaret act, cut a disco single, and landed the lead role in David Cronenberg’s 1977 film Rabid. However, her extensive work in show business has been boiled down to the handful of hardcore films she made. She was and remains a “porn star.”
Marilyn was a formidable presence, an industrious, sexually forthright, intelligent woman. This type of strength in sexuality, an outspokenness coupled with glamor, beauty, and talent, often attracts many gay men. She has many hallmarks associated with diva worship. It’s a wonder why Marilyn Chambers isn’t as prominently revered in the gay community as Madonna, Mae West, or Mamie Van Doren.
As Daniel Harris wrote in his book The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture:
Homosexuals’ involvement with Hollywood movies was not only more intense but fundamentally different from that of the rest of the American public. For us, film served a deeply psychological and physical function. At the very heart of gay diva worship is not the diva herself, but the almost universal homosexual experience of ostracism and insecurity, which ultimately led to what might be called the aestheticism of maladjustment, the gay man’s exploitation of cinematic visions of Hollywood grandeur to elevate himself above his antagonistic surroundings and simultaneously express membership in a secret society of upper-class aesthetes.
Straight men tend to objectify, Harris tells us, and straight women are often intimidated by other women’s expressive sexuality. Through a “fiercely fetishistic involvement with diva worship,” Harris wrote, “the star even in a sense traded places with her gay audience.” Gay men projected their frustrations, sexual or otherwise, onto the diva. In turn, the diva is “voided of both her gender and femininity, and [becomes] the homosexual’s proxy.” One critic, Robert Ashfield (1980), even observed that Marilyn’s “lithe boyish figure and muscular shoulders and thighs…appeals to the hidden homosexual elements in all men and the bisexual element in everybody.”
During her lifetime, Marilyn craved approval more than anything—as a woman, a mother, an entertainer, and a human being. We all seek approval in some form. In the gay community, the need for approval feels more acute. Societal, cultural, political, and religious beliefs often reinforce ideas that the LGBTQIA+ community is somehow lesser than everyone else. For decades, we’ve had to defend ourselves from such beliefs and fight for equality, visibility, and acceptance.
Marilyn, who identified as bisexual, was no different. During interviews, she spent most of her time defending herself—her choices, profession, marriages, and very existence—because she was a beautiful, wealthy woman who made no apologies for being a sexually adventurous and celebrated luminary. (One has to wonder if such defenses would have been necessary if she were a straight, white man.)
Maybe it was her unapologetic attitude, coupled with her undeniable star quality, that made her so appealing to me as a young teenager discovering his sexuality. The more I learned about her while researching my book, the more I realized how radical she was. She wasn’t simply a “porn star,” she was an outlaw.
Susie Bright, a sex-positive feminist and writer, pointed to traditional top-bottom roles often found in gay relationships when she wrote that Marilyn “could bottom on camera like few others. So much cinematic power from an ironically-labeled ‘submissive’ position.” Bright added, “Marilyn inhabited an unyielding, butch, yet feminine mojo—where you might imagine [her] taking on the entire [Navy] SEALS and then taunting them for more. She was Pelé-esque, but with the endgame of vulnerability and ecstasy. Her bonhomie about what was possible—it was infectious. She was so warm, witty, [and] accepting of you as you were.”
Marilyn Chambers, as a gay icon, is perhaps overdue for consideration.
Jared Stearns is a San Francisco-based writer. He has written about Marilyn Chambers for publications including Cineaste, The Dark Side, and The San Franciscan. His work has also appeared in The Boston Globe and the San Francisco Chronicle. Pure: The Sexual Revolutions of Marilyn Chambers is his first book.
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