Ashley West
Explicit content warning
04/13/18 • 89 min
Ashley West is the host of the most successful porn podcast of them all, The Rialto Report. The Rialto Report explores the history of the “golden age” of porn in the 1960s, 70s & 80s by interviewing the actors, directors, producers, and distributors from that era. The most remarkable aspect of the show is his amazing ability to find these long-lost people, some of whom haven’t spoken publicly in over 40 years! He gets them to not only talk about their time in the industry, but their childhood, their love life, their adventures and their passions outside of porn. In this way, Ashley paints a broad picture of these people’s lives and reveals their human complexity that shows them as typical people rather than as criminal or sadistic smut-peddlers that anti-porn activists make them out to be. In this interview we talk about his childhood growing up in Italy, and how sexploitation and pornographic movies were shown and written about in the same theaters and magazines as mainstream movies. We talk about his first porn crush, his interview style, why he keeps his identity a secret, and his work as a consultant on the HBO show The Duce. We also get into this concerns about the academic work being done on pornography and his worries that academia is being too insulated in terms of not making enough of an effort to get its work out to the public. Ashely has only done two interviews to celebrate The Rialto Report’s 5-year anniversary, so you’re not going to want to miss this rare opportunity to get a behind-the-scenes peek into how the podcast comes together.
Ginger Lynn: The Girl Next Door
Al Goldstein’s rant about Donald Trump: An Edifice Complex
More, More, More: The Search for Andrea True
Ashley West is the host of the most successful porn podcast of them all, The Rialto Report. The Rialto Report explores the history of the “golden age” of porn in the 1960s, 70s & 80s by interviewing the actors, directors, producers, and distributors from that era. The most remarkable aspect of the show is his amazing ability to find these long-lost people, some of whom haven’t spoken publicly in over 40 years! He gets them to not only talk about their time in the industry, but their childhood, their love life, their adventures and their passions outside of porn. In this way, Ashley paints a broad picture of these people’s lives and reveals their human complexity that shows them as typical people rather than as criminal or sadistic smut-peddlers that anti-porn activists make them out to be. In this interview we talk about his childhood growing up in Italy, and how sexploitation and pornographic movies were shown and written about in the same theaters and magazines as mainstream movies. We talk about his first porn crush, his interview style, why he keeps his identity a secret, and his work as a consultant on the HBO show The Duce. We also get into this concerns about the academic work being done on pornography and his worries that academia is being too insulated in terms of not making enough of an effort to get its work out to the public. Ashely has only done two interviews to celebrate The Rialto Report’s 5-year anniversary, so you’re not going to want to miss this rare opportunity to get a behind-the-scenes peek into how the podcast comes together.
Ginger Lynn: The Girl Next Door
Al Goldstein’s rant about Donald Trump: An Edifice Complex
More, More, More: The Search for Andrea True
Previous Episode
Rebecca Sullivan
Professor Rebecca Sullivan joins us to talk about her role as the chair of the steering committee for the Sexuality Studies Association of Canada, and her book on the infamous second-wave feminist anti-porn documentary Not a Love Story: A Film About Pornography (1982). The film is directed by Bonnie Sherr Klein, a feminist filmmaker who was an important part of the National Film Board’s Studio D, a project focused on providing female directors the chance to make their own documentaries. The film is co-directed by stripper/activist Lindalee Tracey. And while the film seemed to have started out with the intention of being a progressive analysis of feminist sexual exploration, it eventually turned into the iconic anti-porn landmark that we know it as today. Over the last couple of decades, the film has been lambasted within porn studies circles due to its uncritical adoption of the views of anti-porn feminists like Susan Griffin and Robin Morgan. Interestingly, pornography/feminist scholar Rebecca Sullivan’s book: Bonnie Sherr Klein’s “Not a Love Story” (2014) is a reparative reading of the film that argues that in fact, the documentary’s importance is in offering a platform for sex workers to speak in their own voice throughout the film. While the film is best remembered for its anti-porn second half, Sullivan’s extensive interviews with Klein herself reveal an original intention to give voice and respect to the marginalized sex worker. And ultimately, Sullivan’s book is a cautionary tale of how a director’s intentions can radically change once the footage is turned over to an editor. This is a bold argument to make considering how much bad will the film has garnered over the years from sex-positive feminists. And in this interview, Professor Sullivan answers all the tough questions we ask regarding her alternative reading of the film. It’s a very enlightening conversation!
You can watch Not a Love Story on YouTube
More info about Bonnie Sherr Klein’s “Not a Love Story”
More info about Rebecca Sullivan
“The Evolution of Porn Studies”
Info about Sullivan’s book with Alan McKee: Pornography: Structures, Agency and Performance (2015)
Next Episode
Zachary Sire
Zachary Sire is the editor of the essential gay porn blog Str8UpGayPorn. Str8UpGayPorn is the primary news and gossip site of the gay porn industry. If you’re a porn star and you’ve done something naughty, it’s likely to become a headline on the site sooner rather than later. Zachary started out as a features writer for magazines like Unzipped, Men and Freshmen before becoming a blogger for TheSword in 2010. It’s during his tenure at TheSword where he made a name for himself and became perhaps became the industry’s most notable personality who has never taken off his clothing in front of a camera! His humorous wit, coupled with is biting sarcasm, make his takedowns of hypocritical politicians, racist performers, and reckless studio bosses equally funny and informative. In 2013 he left TheSword to start his own blog about the industry, Str8UpGayPorn. Str8UpGayPorn’s layout intentionally mimics (and mocks) one of the internet’s most well-known sites, TheDrudgeReport. And just like Drudge, Str8UpGayPorn emphasizes how the gossip around gay pornography interacts with our wider pop-cultural world by providing links to news stories related to the pornographic focus of the site. By doing this, Zachary makes the intersection of porn and pop culture evident. In this interview we talk about his rise through the industry, he explains how one of his blog posts was taken down as a result of business pressure, the state of racial diversity within the industry, and we recap highlights from the first-ever Str8UpGayPorn Awards, which took place in June of 2017 in New York City.
“Koering Tells Gay Porn Rag That He Opposes Gay Marriage”
“Will Social-Media Pressure Stop the Gay Porn Industry from Hiring Racists?” (Vice, 2016)
Just some of the reasons why Michael Lucas of Lucas Entertainment is so awful!
The inaugural Str8UpGayPorn Awards
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