Who can look at these In Touch covers and not agree that pornographers are great artists, every benighted one of them. I speak perhaps immodestly; I was a pornographer myself, an editor during the Golden Age of Skin Mags, the pre-VCR 1980s. Hard to believe now, but that was a spectacularly vulgar career path at the time. Toulouse Lautrec's circle of can-can dancers and disinherited fops had nothing on the odd ducks who turned up daily on the doorstep of In Touch Magazine, where I worked. To the naked eye, they were what the world might generously call losers: ill-kept, out-of-shape, awfully amiable letches with flash cameras and but one burning desire: to get every boy in Hollywood out of his pants.

No matter that a few of these boys would go on to TV fame for, oh, 7-11 robberies and the occasional murder spree. Beautiful people make their own rules, Tennessee Williams observed, and our bowling-pin-shaped shutterbugs were nothing if not slaves to beauty, trawling the shirtless hustler strips from Selma Avenue to Santa Monica Boulevard.

Innocent of history, innocent of TV and movies and popular culture -- let alone anything approaching art -- these amateur photographers made their livings through X-rated mail order. It worked like this: They gave the magazine lurid homemade spreads, and we gave them photo credits and large ads for their "studios": mail-order operations that promised even more revealing glimpses of Josh, Kyle, or Scooter. (Cum shots and penetration were forbidden in nationally distributed magazines.) One guy even employed his mother to stuff envelopes. There was a boutique trade, as well, in soiled, preferably sticky underwear.

Southern California was, as it still is, the capitol of the porn film industry. Yet In Touch was the only magazine in the area providing a venue for gay 8-millimeter reels. So the film houses occasionally came courting as well, with their lush, sunshiney, utterly pedestrian product. When this happened, the publisher decreed that they get the cover and the centerfold. He was an unpretentious bar owner from the San Fernando Valley, and his taste reflected that of our paying customers. Mercifully, these antiseptic compositions were outnumbered by the raw efforts supplying the bulk of the issue and whose reckless, slam-bang style I preferred.

To our office then, they flocked, these dedicated Enthusiasts of Nekkid Trailer Trash. At times it was like dealing with 101 clones of Weegee, the New York Daily News photographer who'd push his way into the middle of car crashes and fires to take ruthless, riveting photos. Our office, beside being a clubhouse for these Sharpshooters of the Lower Depths, was also a magnet for their discarded models to whom I'd have to explain that magazines did not pay "royalties."

Way too accessible to the street, with no security and a glass door seldom locked, the In Touch office was no more than a re-purposed garage off Western Avenue, at the top of a low-rent side street that was seamed with tarred-over earthquake cracks and cars on cinderblocks. By reputation, we drew in tumbleweed hitchhikers looking for "any kind" of work -- felons, temporarily between prison sentences, who had scary neck tattoos and announced they were available for "parties," and confused oldsters that had escaped the lax nursing home down the block and could be found drifting dreamily into our entrance lobby in hospital gowns. Particularly arresting was the occasional Silverlake detective flashing a badge: apparently one or another of our Shutterbugs in Residence was being tracked down for the sort of minor indiscretions that hobble the Lives of the Great -- check fraud, mail fraud, cop fondling.

It was a breathtaking education, my life among the masters -- for they were -- they are -- Masters. Granted, a horndog with a camera may or may not intend -- or even understand -- the terrible harmonies he assembles in his viewfinder. But, oddly, that turns out to be irrelevant. I realized that our crew of eager beavers belonged to a tradition of the Artist as Idiot Savant (spoofed so relentlessly by Andy the beloved Warhol). The more modest the intention (Get it hard, Joey, and for Chrissake stop smirking) and the more unschooled the technique, the more available our shutterbugs were to channel the zeitgeist.

At first, it's true, I was thrown by the brain-dead artlessness of the setups: Boy by Pool Presenting his Asshole. Shaggy Trade Unzipped in Photog's Parlor (with Photog's busy window treatments and Greco-Roman statuettes as jarring background static.) In time though, like our current president, the Great and Powerful Oz, I grew in The Office.

I made the decision that lots of 20th Century art was itself a form of calculated artlessness: the skewed horizons, interrupted symmetry, prosaic content in lockstep service to style. The only difference -- well okay the gigantic difference -- was that it was premeditated. Still, why blind myself to the masterworks under my blue pencil just because my local enthusiasts happened to be more idiot than savant?

I was helped along in this by unseen forces. Next door to our citrus-colored garage/office was a modest Russian Orthodox church, all white wood frame and a sorry little Byzantine cupola. The inside however housed an icon of the Virgin that was purported to weep Real Tears. My art director and I checked it out one afternoon. Unfortunately, the Virgin was having a good day, but the art director claimed he could detect the tiniest balls of condensation on the inside of the glass. I told him it was Windex residue. He told me I was blind.

Perhaps he was right.

Months later, after I had my revelation about art, the 20th Century and the fact that it had all been, let's face it, One Hundred Years of Meaninglessness, I visited the church again. The Virgin looked undeniably more disconcerted but she was still not delivering that flood of sentiment which, surely, had thrilled Czar Nicolas and his Czarina.

Perhaps I hadn't prepared myself correctly. If all art was meaningless, then any meaning you derived from a picture was as true as any other. I leaned over the icon-pedestal and really put my back into it. Wait! The dark face seemed to be changing beneath my eyes. Yes, no doubt about it. Set deep within her cloak of gold, she was becoming absolutely, fabulishously morose! I closed my eyes, looked again. A positive scowl! I left the church that day with a glow about me I had last seen on Jennifer Jones in Song of Bernadette.

The same photographers were crowding around my desk when I returned, each with his needs, desires and handsy amiability. Still shaken and, of course, glowing, I set down to view the new slides under the loupe when all at once it hit me that here at In Touch, in this hive of commerce and -- oh boy! -- Trade, I had finally learned how to see.





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John Calendo has written for or edited every skin magazine in creation, from Playboy to Playgirl and back again. His articles have appeared in Interview, Fashion Weekly, The New York Observer, Oui, Hustler, Penthouse, Drummer, The Advocate, Blueboy and In Touch (the culty skin mag that is the subject of this, his return to writing). Eight years ago, John put aside his career to work with the less fortunate: adults returning to college at a major University in an Eastern City (Oh hell, it was NYU!) This 6-foot blue-eyed Capricorn likes long walks on the beach (oops, wrong resume!) John currently lives in New Jersey. Alone.

All photographs © 2002 In Touch.
Trade shots by Mr. Starr for Mr. Starr Productions
In Touch Cover with "CROTCH" banner: photography by Guy International
In Touch Cover of blond with open plaid shirt: photography by Fox.
In Touch cover with "SAILORS" banner: photography by Zak Drummer for College Station

All contents © 2002 Nighthcharm, Inc. and John Calendo. All Rights Reserved.