The Secret Women’s Club That Rocked the Porn World

On a chilly February afternoon in 1983, the baby shower guests made their way into Annie Sprinkle’s Lexington Avenue apartment in Manhattan. Inside, a couple dozen people mingled around the “Sprinkle Salon,” as Annie, an adult film star, called it. Her home was a sort of Andy Warhol factory of the porn and underground art worlds, a place where she’d hosted sex world luminaries alongside artists and celebrities like the singer Tiny Tim.

At the shower, scholars, lawyers and gynecologists noshed next to dominatrixes and phone sex operators, escorts, and porn stars. A hunky bodybuilder named Roger Koch, who was one of famed photographer Robert Mapplethorpe’s favorite models, served cocktails and nipple cupcakes in a speedo and apron. A life-size cardboard cutout of a garter-and-stockings-clad Annie in a corset, licking her finger, stood in a corner of her apartment: promotional material for a recent film. The black-and-white glossies of porn stills on the walls were interspersed with blue and pink decorations in honor of the soon-to-be born child.

It was a pivotal time for porn. The once completely taboo industry had begun to be treated as somewhat legitimate in the 1970s, when celebrities embraced “porno chic” and big-budget adult films came complete with red carpet premieres. It was a time when Jack Nicholson and Jackie Kennedy went to see Deep Throat. Porn was booming. Yet many states still had laws criminalizing pornography, and many political and religious leaders were on missions to stop the rise of porn in its tracks. Movie theater owners who screened porn still risked prosecution. The female actors who worked in the industry, where nearly all producers and directors were men, had little to no workplace regulations or safety protections—in an era when the AIDS epidemic was just starting to spiral out of control.

Five of the women at the baby shower that day had no idea they were about to form a pornography sorority of sorts—a sisterhood that would change their careers, their lives and eventually, the way much of the public viewed people who work in porn.

The guest of honor, pregnant porn star Jane Hamilton, navigated the icy steps up to the front door. Jane, who went by Veronica Hart on screen, was at a crossroads. The 26-year-old, classically beautiful with high cheekbones, a ski-slope nose and lustrous brown hair, had arrived in New York in the ’70s after earning her bachelor’s in theater, ready to become a mainstream movie star. A casting director lured her to the city, but his creepiness turned her off. Jane ended up renting a room from a man who worked in the adult industry. They slept together, and she told him about her modeling and acting work. He suggested that Jane work in adult movies. “No, no, no. I’m an actress,” Jane recalled saying (in an interview with Rachel Arieff years later). She strolled to 54th Street to check out a porn film anyway. The movie Jane saw had real acting in it. She changed her mind. She began starring in porn films in the 1970s and by the ’80s had become one of the biggest stars within that world.

Now, Jane was newly married and about to be a mom. She had stopped performing sex in adult movies before she got married. She knew her porn past wouldn’t help her quest to make it in mainstream acting. But she also wasn’t sure if she wanted to leave the adult world entirely. She liked the work that she did and many of the people. Perhaps she could give up performing sex in movies but still strip? Could a woman really have it all? A career in the adult industry, a loving husband and a kid?

Annie Sprinkle opened the door of her 11th floor apartment to warmly greet Jane.

With a lion’s mane of wavy black hair and a wicked sense of humor, Annie too was at a crossroads. A photographer and artist studying at the School of Visual Arts, Annie was torn between continuing to pursue a career in sex, or opting for a conventional life of marriage and children. And, on the cusp of 30 in an industry known for prizing youth, she didn’t know how many more years she’d have in the career that had brought her so much creative and sexual satisfaction—and also a bit of pain.

Her new musician boyfriend, Tommy, whom the ethnically Jewish Annie attended church with, didn’t want Annie to continue in the business. “My friends didn’t like him because he was a very, very monogamous kind of guy,” Annie said.

Annie, neé Ellen Steinberg, grew up mostly in Los Angeles, though she went to high school in Central America. Both her parents were teachers, and she aspired to be an art teacher herself. “Annie” was a persona she’d developed to express the confidence she didn’t feel growing up.

“I wasn’t really happy with myself. I was excruciatingly shy and insecure,” Annie said during a 1984 theater performance. “So, around the age of 18, I invented Annie Sprinkle. She was the kind of person that Ellen could never be. Ellen was really very dull and plain. But Annie, on the other hand, was well, she was kind of exciting… and Ellen was really fat and ugly. And Annie, she was voluptuous and sexy.”

Around that time, she worked as a ticket taker at an adult movie theater in Arizona. One day, the theater owners were arrested for screening Deep Throat and charged with violating the state’s obscenity laws. Annie was ordered to appear in court as a witness because she had been there selling popcorn. (The manager of the theater, who was also a part owner, was sentenced to six months in jail and a $5,000 fine; the other owner was acquitted.) It was in court that Annie met Deep Throat’s director, Gerard Damiano, and asked him to teach her how to, well—deep throat. In his hotel room, he gamely obliged. Annie was attracted to this world. She loved both sex and filmmaking. “Should I go into porn or become an art teacher?” she mused. She chose porn, working for several porn film companies for six months behind the scenes, including as a fluffer, a person who preps men before their big scenes so they are sufficiently erect. Then she moved in front of the cameras. After several years in the business, she decided that what she really wanted to do was direct porn movies—a revolutionary idea at the time. Nearly every director and producer in porn was male.

Annie and Jane weren’t exactly friends, but they knew each other from red carpets and film shoots. Jane’s husband was a mainstream cameraman who was the lighting director on one adult movie—he and Jane had met on that set. They mingled at the party, where guests’ baby pictures were passed around during a guessing game, they played “pin the baby on the booby” and Jane opened her gifts. Then, one by one, the non-porn industry people trickled out and only a few women were left.

Along with Annie and Jane, there was fellow porn star and former Girl Scout Candida Royalle, an aspiring actress and ballerina who was exiled from ballet at age 15 because she was too curvaceous. Candida, neé Candice Marion Vadala, had long brown hair parted in the middle, full lips, and a lithe dancer’s body. She had been abandoned by her mother as a baby and said she was not treated well by her father growing up. She came to porn after starring as the daughter of Divine (the drag queen performer of Pink Flamingos fame) in a theater production called Heartbreak of Psoriasis. The show was critically panned and closed after just one day. Candida was devastated. She met a porn director who suggested she take her career in a different direction. She was at first horrified, but she needed money. Because she’d never seen a porn film, she went to the set of one to check it out. Candida watched the actors have sex on screen. It wasn’t what she expected. It seemed loving and consensual, so she signed up. And besides, porn gave her a way to have sex without guilt because it wasn’t Candice having sex, it was Candida, her persona.

By the time of the baby shower, eight years after getting her start, Candida was feeling ambivalent about the porn industry. A longtime feminist who had married a man a decade younger than her three years earlier, she’d quit the porn industry shortly after getting hitched because, as she said, “I’m very romantic and very monogamous,” and her husband, who sometimes worked in the industry as well, “would always leave the room when I did a sex scene,” as she told an interviewer for a 1982 edition of Porn Stars magazine.

Candida bounced back and forth between feeling bitter that she’d abandoned her mainstream acting dreams for porn, and feeling drawn back to the industry, with a zeal to revolutionize it.

She dreamed of unionizing the exploited workers, and maybe directing films herself so she could provide an alternative to the male gaze-dominated pornos that flooded the market.

At the shower, Candida mingled with Jane and another guest, Veronica Vera. With thick black hair, a strong jawline and a sly smile, Veronica, neé Mary Veronica Antonakos, came to the porn world after a strict Catholic upbringing that was paired with an exuberant sexual curiosity. She had cycled through a variety of jobs, including drilling for oil in Utah, trading stocks and serving as a model for Robert Mapplethorpe a year earlier. But she always dreamed of being a writer. She soon scored a regular column in a porn magazine, where she sometimes also appeared topless. And after spending time writing about her adventures in the sex industry, she was offered roles in films, which she’d just begun to accept.

Veronica had recently returned to New York after an 80-day world trip with her gay best friend, Australia-born Robert Maxwell Lock. They called their trip “around the world with a faggot and a slut.” Veronica and Robert lived next door to each other, she in apartment 3B and he in 3C. “The apartments shared a balcony and we [would] often run across, to enter through the back doors,” Veronica said, “sometimes even interrupting each other during sex.”

Veronica was quieter than the others at the baby shower, partly because she was newer to the porn world and worried she wouldn’t be accepted by the stars she was mingling with. As Annie, Jane and Candida were contemplating changing their careers, Veronica was just beginning hers.

They all chatted with Gloria Leonard, a thrice-married former stockbroker who became a porn actress at the late-blooming age of 35. Gloria was raised as Gayle Klinetsky in the Bronx to be “a nice Jewish girl,” as she put it. She had acted and modeled in the vanilla world, was a ghost writer for famed advice columnist Dr. Joyce Brothers and had worked as an executive secretary for Elektra Records in PR. When looking for film production work, an agent suggested she try a porn role.

Before taking that first role, Gloria, then a single mother, had someone she needed to confer with: her 12-year-old daughter, Robin. Gloria was sitting next to her daughter at the tiny kitchen table in their fifth-floor walkup apartment in Greenwich Village when she turned to her and said, “Robin, there are films that are comedies, musicals and Westerns. And there are films depicting people having sex. I’m thinking about being in a film where I will be having sex. What do you think about that?”

Robin thought for a moment, and then spoke. “I trust you, and if it’s something that you want to do, that you feel comfortable doing, then I support you,” she told her mom.

In 1976, Gloria starred in the porno chic classic, The Opening of Misty Beethoven. She gained quite a bit of notoriety in New York as the host of two late-night, adult-themed television shows on Manhattan Cable Television, and in 1977 took the helm as publisher of High Society magazine. Misty was soon followed by another film called All About Gloria Leonard, with posters plastered throughout New York City. “She was a true dichotomy—a porn star by day and a Jewish mother at home,” Robin said.

Robin and her mother appeared together on a popular local New York City television talk show, and it didn’t take long for the kids at school to see the interview or the posters. “Your mother’s a porn star,” Robin recalled kids saying as they snickered at her in the hallways of her Manhattan junior high school in the mid-1970s. “Yeah, well, your mom couldn’t give it away for free,” she’d snap back.

In Annie’s apartment that day, Gloria, Annie, Jane, Veronica, Candida and two other stars began dishing on the directors in the industry: who was easy to work with, who was a hemorrhoid. “We weren’t in our porn personas,” Annie said. “We were in our natural selves and there was no competition, just love and compassion.”

All of the women realized they’d had similar struggles in the industry and had no one to talk to. (Aside from the therapist four of them shared: the chain-smoking, brilliant Linda Hirsch, a former drug addict and sex worker.) But until the baby shower, they hadn’t really articulated their struggles to each other. While female porn performers earned slightly more than their male co-stars, it was the men behind the scenes raking in the real money. Because the business operated in a gray area of legality, they had little power to advocate for fair wages.

Gloria’s daughter, Robin Leonardi, said, “Men continued to make money off of her ass, literally. Even though she broke the glass ceiling for women in the industry on several different fronts, she never really reaped the financial benefits of that because it was still a male-dominated industry.”

And women in porn were not in control of their own stories on screen. The movies usually centered on male sexual pleasure. “When I got in porn, there was no focus on women’s orgasms,” Annie said. “I remember being shocked that women had orgasms myself, because it just wasn’t even talked about.”

Even when it appeared as if female porn stars were telling their own stories, it was sometimes a ruse. The columns in adult magazines with porn stars bylines were secretly penned by others. “It was all men writing under our name in the ’70s,” Annie said. “It was all made-up bullshit.”

And while all of these issues—a patriarchal industry, unequal pay, exploitation—were feminist issues, the mainstream feminist movement shunned the women of porn. In fact, most liberal feminists had a shared goal with Reagan-era Christian conservatives: banning porn.

“All of the contact I’ve had with feminists was anti-porn,” Jane told leftist journal Jump Cut in 1987. This was the era of feminist groups like Women Against Violence in Pornography and Media (WAVPM), who picketed in front of adult movie theaters chanting “Porn teaches rape / Women are the victims / of organized hate.” Two leading feminists and legal scholars, Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon, claimed women in porn were being sexually assaulted, and if porn stars claimed otherwise, they were victims of false consciousness.

A few years before the baby shower, Ms. magazine published a cover story titled “Erotica and Pornography,” that condemned the porn industry. Annie and Gloria protested in front of the Ms. office, Annie with the sign, “I Am Not A Female Captive,” and Gloria with one reading, “Porno Power.”

“We were all feminists and we were all really socially conscious,” Jane said. But they felt shut out of, even villainized by, most in the feminist movement. MacKinnon and Dworkin were so opposed to porn that they fought to pass laws that would allow women to sue pornographers for damages, on the grounds that pornography was a form of sex discrimination because it depicted women as sex objects who enjoyed being sexually abused.

That day at the baby shower, someone put on the West Side Story soundtrack and Candida began singing along to “I Feel Pretty.” The other women joined in and danced. They realized they’d all gone to dancing school and had dreams of mainstream acting success. Eventually, most of the guests left and just a small group remained: Annie, Jane, Candida, Gloria, and Veronica, along with a few others.

They felt a sense of joy and unity in their shared contradictory feelings about porn. They felt empowered, yet exploited; freed from the strictures of gender roles, yet constricted by new stereotypes.

“We should do this more often,” Candida recounted telling the other women in an interview for Legs McNeil and Jennifer Osborne’s book, The Other Hollywood.

Gloria came to a realization, which she later recalled in an interview for the book. “Women in this business have problems that are truly unique unto this occupation,” she thought.

“So we decided to start meeting regularly,” Candida said. The support group would be held right there in Annie Sprinkle’s apartment, and they would call it Club 90, in honor of Annie’s 90 Lexington Ave. address.

Club 90 would become a lifeline for these five women and many others, as they navigated all the complexities of working in this widely demonized industry. Or, as Gloria put it in her unpublished memoir, “Fucking and sucking on-screen, it turned out, produced some real complex issues.”

A few months after the baby shower, the women arrived at Annie’s apartment for what was to be the first meeting of Club 90. Annie and Veronica were already BFFs, but the others barely knew each other. Kelly Nichols and Sue Nero, two porn stars both still actively involved in the business, also attended some of those early meetings.

While new age music played in the background, the women sipped Annie’s homemade miso soup and gabbed about their cats. Jane rocked her new baby on her lap. An outsider could’ve mistaken the scene for a bridge club. That is, until they got down to business, which involved sharing stories about their time in the industry and warning each other about dangerous people. “I didn’t get paid from this guy—what should I do?” one woman asked. Others proffered advice. It was a place to talk about things they couldn’t talk about anywhere else. “You couldn’t make small talk at the beauty salon about the fact that you’re a porn star, and how your husband feels about it, and how you feel about it,” Robin said.

There was only one ground rule, which Gloria laid down: What happens in Club 90, stays in Club 90. Not even husbands were supposed to know. “[My mom’s husband at the time] was a little bit jealous of it,” Robin said. “It allowed my mother to vent some of her frustration in her relationship… she would have had no other outlet with which to do so.”

The meetings continued every three weeks, and as they did, the women got stronger by being able to discuss their industry in a way they never had before. They’d go around in a circle, each woman saying what was on her mind and in her heart, sharing personal problems, or opening up about business issues, like saying how much money they’d been paid for a film. When those who were still working in porn realized they were being underpaid, “We gave the courage to ask for more,” Annie said.

Looming over all the issues they faced at work was the fact that AIDS was becoming a greater threat in their industry, and many of them had already lost friends to the disease. “There was a real kind of survivor’s guilt,” Jane said. Club 90 allowed the woman to share their grief at seeing their close friends, including many gay men, succumb to the terrible disease. Epidemiologists were realizing AIDS wasn’t just “a gay disease,” and besides, even if it had been, some members of Club 90 were sleeping with gay men, Annie, in particular, who had multiple gay and bisexual male lovers. So she decided she needed to find different ways to have sex.

“I was really studying Tantra and different sex techniques from ancient cultures,” Annie said. “And I got to where I could have huge full-body energy orgasms, and I was really into yoga and sex for hours without intercourse. And I got real spiritual. That was my way of coping with AIDS. I had to adjust the kind of sex I was having.”

Because she was having less genital sex, she learned more advanced self-stimulation techniques. At one Club 90 meeting, Annie shared her new safe-sex orgasm techniques. “I had a Kundalini kind of spontaneous mega-orgasm, like a full-body extreme energy orgasm… This one was particularly emotional… just a huge energy rush,” Annie said. “I was on the floor and the four of them were around me. They were really concerned I was having some kind of flip-out or psychic break or something.” Annie assured them she was fine.

Club 90’s soirees were so secretive, that no minutes were taken. But gradually, people heard about them, and usually they wanted to know more.

“People in the business had heard about Club 90. And everybody was curious about it,” Jane recalled. “Especially the men… they all wanted to be a fly on the wall. And so we thought, ‘Well, we’ll give them a little bit of a look.’”

One day, Candida spotted a flier: Franklin Furnace theater in New York City was seeking performance artists who could answer the question, “Is there a feminist pornography?”

Candida brought the flier to a Club 90 meeting, and asked the other women if they wanted to recreate a typical meeting for the show. They were hesitant at first to violate the first and only real rule of Club 90. But it was a chance to share their stories with the world, a chance they’d never really been given before.

On Jan. 26, 1984, less than a year after founding Club 90, the members took the stage as part of “The Second Coming,” a month-long program at Franklin Furnace, the avant-garde art world hotbed. It was organized by the Carnival Knowledge group, which was created by feminists in response to the Christian right Moral Majority movement. Other nights featured an erotic puppet show inspired by Anaïs Nin’s writing, a mud wrestling event and a “street hassling” dance performance.

Their performance piece, “Deep Inside Porn Stars,” which Annie said was only lightly fictionalized, gave insight into the clandestine meetings. It opened with Annie in a sparkly chartreuse dress striding through a re-creation of her New York apartment, past an off-white couch and purple easy chair. Then Gloria, her hair in a dark bob, entered in a flowing purple boa and shiny floor-length mauve dress, and Annie offered her tea. Gloria stood up, turned behind her, her dangling white earrings moving with her, and gazed at a screen onto which slides were projected.

“We’re a group of women who, having fought numerous battles on the frontiers of the sexual revolution, now find ourselves licking the wounds that have been inflicted on our self-esteem and lifestyle,” Gloria said.

Later in the scene, Jane, harried, hair piled up on her head, clad in a drapey, shiny moss green shirt and shredded jeans, came in pushing her young son, Christopher, in a stroller. She picked up Christopher, portrayed by a floppy Cabbage Patch Kid, and bounced him up and down.

“Guess it’s not what you expected, a porn star with a baby,” Jane said, then launched into her story. “My whole family knows about the sexual business… and they haven’t disowned me,” she told the audience. “I was getting paid for the two things I love to do: act and have sex,” she said. “So, the big question is: Would I ever be able to work in mainstream projects with big producers and mega-buck films? Can America really accept a girl like me who’s honest about what she’s been through and where she’s been?”

Later they talked shop. Gloria and Candida stared raptly at porn star Kelly Nichols, who was also starring in the show. “I went on set and a producer told me because I was having sex with a girl, I wasn’t gonna get paid that day for a sex scene,” Kelly said. Candida and Gloria sighed knowingly.

“That’s amazing, because I thought that only happened to me… [A producer once] said, ‘Well, a scene between girls is not sex,’” Gloria relayed before taking a puff of her joint.

Kelly told a story about a Hustler magazine shoot where she was asked to go down on a woman using her teeth while fake blood spilled out of the woman’s vagina. Even though they hadn’t mentioned this scene before the shoot, she felt she couldn’t say no. So she did it—and felt horrible throughout. She contemplated leaving. “I’m going to lose these people’s jobs if I walk off the set,” she thought. “I don’t want to lose the money. They flew me all the way out there. I feel like a jerk.”

Sue Nero kept her story simple. “Dancing and Bobby are the loves of my life,” she said, before dancing and stripping in front of a projection of her boyfriend’s face.

Candida moved to center stage and told her story: an unstable childhood in New York, being a popular, but insecure, girl in high school. Mid-monologue, Candida pulled a sweatshirt dress over her bare shoulders. “With the help of a wonderful shrink, I’ve really grown to understand what porn has done for me, as well as how it’s hurting me. It’s only after all this time that I can begin to really experience the pain and humiliation that I’ve had to block out to do the films and make my money… but nothing is black and white,” she said.

“And I made the choice. Sometimes I feel very bitter and I feel like I gave up a lot of my dreams to do porn,” she continued. “And I feel like just running away and never having anything to do with our film industry ever again… But at times, I’m able to be more objective and I see myself as a revolutionary of sorts, maybe one day making women’s films to replace the tired old men’s films that still exploit women and promote archaic sexuality.”

After the monologue, Candida retired to the on-stage couch next to Annie. “Sex was not my favorite part [of porn] anyway. I mean, I used to [drink] a glass of wine before I could do the sex scenes,” she said.

“I’ve had to smoke a joint or two before a sex scene,” Gloria added.

“As a business, pornography is like any other in which I might choose to make my living,” Veronica said in her performance. “At one moment, it’s full of opportunities for growth. At another, it’s dangerously limiting. And, like any other business, if I don’t watch my ass, somebody’s going to stick a cock in it, and that’s gonna hurt.”

“Standing up for myself, it’s not easy,” Gloria continues. “Usually, it’s downright scary. That’s why I joined a gang,” she said, gesturing back to the other members of Club 90.

For some, the show bonded Club 90 even tighter. It wasn’t for everyone—Kelly and Sue soon left the group—but the remaining five grew even closer.

The response to the show was overwhelming. Soon they had an agent at International Creative Management and two top producers interested in expanding the show and taking it off Broadway.

Veronica hoped they could create “a strong play that will push us toward mainstream acceptance.” But, in order for that to happen, they’d have to work together to write a play that everyone was happy with.

In June 1984, about five months after “Deep Inside Porn Stars,” Club 90 convened at a week-long writing retreat. They all traveled to a house with a pool in Libertyville, New York, north of New York City. Jane brought her son, Christopher. A babysitter who was four months pregnant came along, too.

Candida had interrupted a porn shoot to be there. “I had my doubts about leaving in pre-production for Femme 2, but how wonderful to have a week to spend in the mountains in a lovely, airy house with a sunny deck to work on, and a fireplace for the cool nights, and a big pool on the tip of the mountain,” she wrote in her diary. They’d sit on the wooden deck, pens in hand, sipping cans of Miller Lite, or go inside and bang on typewriters.

Days were spent working from morning till night, with swim breaks. As they worked on scenes, most of the times were idyllic. At other times, though, there was a struggle to get “five strong egos to create one art piece,” Candida wrote in her diary.

At times, Candida glimpsed Jane playing with Christopher and had deep pangs of sadness. “I look at Jane and Christopher and I know she’d fight to her dieing [sic] day to keeping him safe and at her side,” she wrote in her diary. “How come my mother was able to just never look for me again?”

Their husbands and partners all briefly visited, but Candida was happy when they left. “It’s nice not to have the men around. They were a terrible disruption,” she wrote on June 18 at 2 a.m. Her husband, Per, who was collaborating with her on Femme 2, felt differently. He was angry with her, believing that her retreat had interfered with their work.

Finally, they finished writing the script. It began with the Club 90 members strutting down the red carpet for an adult movie premier as a sleazy emcee named Dick interrogated them.

“Is there any fetish or fantasy that you haven’t tried, or is the rumor true that you’ve done everything?” he asked Annie, who was dressed as a dominatrix and walking a man on a leash.

“Dick, there are actually three things I have never done,” she replied. “I’ve never made it with a horse or a dead person, and I’ve never eaten shit. I’m saving all of that for my wedding night.”

“How nice,” he said. “What an old fashioned girl!”

The script followed Club 90 members from their lives as porn stars directed by men, to the ladies all working on a porn film together, no male directors in sight. It was a vision of the porn world as a matriarchy, a vision brought in by their time together in Club 90, kvetching about the misogyny some of their directors and producers traded in, discussing their lack of pay and fear of asking for more. “It’s hard to ask for money for work that society says you’re going to burn in hell for,” Veronica Vera says in one scene.

Their script took that shared knowledge of what was wrong with the industry and imagined a brighter future: one in which female empowerment—and female orgasms—were front and center.

Once the script was done, their agent shopped it around. “While I think the subject matter is fascinating, in its present state, I don’t think it’s dramatic,” wrote an associate of one production house. “It seems much more like a consciousness-raising group than a dramatic play.”

“The producers thought we were stupid porn bimbos,” Gloria said in an interview for The Other Hollywood, “so we never moved forward.”

Soon they had larger problems to worry about than a producer’s criticism of their play. An ordinance Dworkin and MacKinnon helped draft passed in Indianapolis, allowing women to sue pornographers and producers. A female judge in Indianapolis was contemplating whether the ordinance was constitutional. Then the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Juvenile Justice, headed by Arlen Specter, held hearings on porn. Members of the committee hoped to apply Dworkin’s and MacKinnon’s framework on a national level, or according to some newspaper reports, to ban pornography altogether.

The committee invited witnesses from both sides: those in the business and those opposed to it. They reached out to the most politically active member of Club 90: Gloria. There was only one problem: Gloria was scheduled to have back surgery at the time of the hearings. “Why don’t you testify?” she asked Veronica, who was thrilled by the idea. Finally, she’d be able to share her views on porn that had been sharpened by Club 90 meetings. She called Annie and asked her if she’d come to provide moral support. Annie said yes. “I’m going to wow them with rhetoric, knock them out with intelligence and before they know what hit them, break into a sexy strip tease,” Veronica recalled telling Annie, in an interview she later gave to Adam magazine. “Wearing only garters, stockings and stiletto pumps, I’ll sit on the edge of a desk, look that committee right in the eye and ask, ‘Well, gentlemen, did that ever make you feel violent?’”

In reality, Veronica had already prepared her testimony: a philosophical treatise on the dangers of censorship. She showed it to an American Civil Liberties Union attorney who was also working on the case. “Forget all this philosophy,” Veronica recalled him saying. What they want to hear from you is what your experiences have been.” So she rewrote the testimony.

Wearing a draping, conservative, blue silk dress, perfectly manicured scarlet nails and a matching lip color, Veronica sat at a wooden desk next to another porn star, Seka. Senator Specter gazed at her from the front of the room, 30 aides surrounding him. Television cameras trained on her.

“I would now like to call a panel consisting of Ms. Seka and Veronica Vera,” Specter intoned behind the dais. Among the sea of media sat Annie, with her Nikon in hand, a leopard print miniskirt and a purple bow in her hair.

Veronica turned her gaze to Specter. Her emotions were all over the place: excitement, anger, pride, determination. With her hands folded neatly in front of her, she looked down at her notes and spoke into the silver microphone.

“The following comparisons are based on my own experiences in the production of sexually explicit materials. I consider myself very fortunate to be able to share them with this committee. Myth: Women in pornography have unhappy childhoods. [In] reality, I come from a very loving family. That core of love has always been my strength. I was raised as a Catholic and while I do not practice that religion—” Her voice broke, she raised her hand to her chest, smiled uncomfortably and grasped a glass of water. “I mean what I say, too. Excuse me,” she said, taking a sip. She didn’t want to cry. She wanted to tell her story. But she was scared. “I still feel that spiritual base. My family is aware of the nature of my work, and while they do not always understand what I do, we have always treated one another with love and respect.”

After discussing her various roles in the industry, Veronica described the first porn movie she appeared in, Consenting Adults. “At first, I was not going to perform sex in the film. I would just co-host the film with Ms. Annie Sprinkle. But one day I just decided to jump into one of the sex scenes. It was a tremendously exciting experience… There is a feeling of camaraderie and pride.”

She said that women were “assuming positions of more financial control” in the industry. “I speak not only for myself, but for every woman that I know in the sex industry. We do not see ourselves as victims. We do not need to hide in the shelter of being somebody’s victim. We accept responsibility for our own lives. We cherish that responsibility. Do not make any laws to ‘protect us.’ We do not want them. Leave us our precious rights to choose.”

Shortly afterward, Senator Specter, in a gray suit and tie, opened up a magazine featuring bondage photos Veronica had provided the committee with and asked her why she posed for them.

Veronica asked if she could read a paragraph explaining why she explored the bondage fantasy.

“If you wish,” Specter said.

So, Veronica began. “I am the love toy, the object of your desire, exposed and vulnerable. Picture yourself tying the ropes, keeping me as your prisoner, ready to be taken whenever you want me. Always open to your—” Veronica abruptly stopped, considering the rest of that sentence.

“Shall I go on?” she asked Specter.

“You certainly may,” he replied.

“Always open to your cock in my mouth,” Veronica said, smiling with mischievous joy. Her notes trembled a bit in her hand. “My erotica will get written up in the Congressional Record,” she thought, thrilled. “I wonder how many of my listeners in this place of such serious business feel a twinge between their thighs.”

Though Veronica’s testimony got news coverage, and the Indianapolis judge struck down an ordinance inspired by MacKinnon/Dworkin, it was stories of victimhood that dominated the narrative: both on Capitol Hill and in the pages of Ms. magazine. Linda Marciano (aka Deep Throat star Linda Lovelace) had written two memoirs championing her time in the porn industry in the 1970s but shifted her view in the 1980s, calling for the film to be banned. “Pornography destroys the family unit,” Marciano testified. “Every time someone sees [Deep Throat], they are watching me being raped.”

MacKinnon, Dworkin and legislators kept pushing anti-porn ordinances. Meanwhile, the women of Club 90 were more determined than ever to continue in their work—and to create porn they were proud of.

One day, at a Club 90 meeting, Candida brought up the idea of directing porn films for women. “We were all supportive,” Veronica said. With their encouragement, Candida started a porn company called Femme. She would direct, write and sometimes star. She employed market research on women and decided to target the movies to women, couples and educated men. “Women are really still at the bottom level of porno films,” she said. “The producers never worry about the woman’s orgasm. Now they’re starting to have women fake orgasms in films. It’s terrible,” she told The Hollywood Reporter.

It was a first: porn produced by women, for women. She hired all female camera people (except one). “I break all the formulas. It’s not like the camera is staring at genitals,” Candida said in an interview with Playgirl. “I allow my camera people complete freedom to move in such a way that it is caressing the lovers.” Her movies were heavy on the foreplay and didn’t end with cum shots. The orgasms were internal.

Annie, with her photography skills, took stills for Femme’s marketing. Jane got a job in the office helping to distribute Candida’s features. Soon, Candida decided to involve all of Club 90 in her films. She proposed a Club 90 porn film collaboration uniting, as she wrote in her unpublished notes, “the dynamic founding members of Club 90 to share a most intimate part of themselves in the ‘Star Director’ series.” Finally, Club 90 would be in control of a porn set, where they would pay performers fairly, focus on consent and center women’s orgasms as well as men’s.

Each woman would direct a 30-minute short film. They shot in March 1987 for two weeks. Candida insisted that the films had to be targeted to women and couples, had to feature a strong story, a love scene and safe sex, to address the AIDS crisis. All the penises in the films were swathed in condoms.

In Annie’s film, The Search for the Ultimate Sexual Experience, a blonde woman named Annie (not played by her, but by Jeanna Fine) picks up a bodybuilder played by Roger Koch (the model from the baby shower), brings him home and dumps a bag of dildos and vibrators on the bed. Then they put a porn film starring Annie Sprinkle on TV. After he goes down on her clumsily with a condom-like device on his tongue, they have mechanical sex while he gazes at Annie Sprinkle having sex on screen. Real-life Annie turns off the TV in annoyance. Then, a sexy shirtless genie in green parachute pants appears (played by Annie’s real-life gymnast lover at the time, David Sandler) and parades around her apartment walking on his hands. He teaches her how to make her diet healthier, switching out Twinkies for carrots. They rub each other while both wearing similar pants and have long, sensuous, spiritual sex. The movie ends with the main character and the bodybuilder together again. She teaches him what she learns.

“My concept was to make something that wasn’t so genitally focused, like mainstream porn, but something more full-bodied and sensuous,” Annie said. “I attempted to make hardcore porn from the heart. I decided there would be no standard porn cum shot on the face; instead, I created a kind of cosmic orgasm of love with special effects.”

Gloria’s film Fortune Smiles, explored the minds of lovers when they first have sex. Richard Pacheco, the star of her movie, later told Adult Video News, “I was really, really pleased to be invited by that crowd of Club 90 women, who I viewed as the best of the women in the business; the ones that could be a lever for humanizing the men’s room of adult film.”

Veronica’s Shady Madonna was about a hypocritical preacher named “Mr. Morality” who delivers thunderous sermons about the evils of fornication, but then fantasizes about having sex with a receptionist who is a stand-in for Eve from the Bible. She even takes a bite of the apple.

Candida’s short, Nine Lives Hath My Love, featured a woman “more engrossed with her cats than [her] boyfriend,” Candida wrote in her notes about the production. The porn opens with an unexpected image: a cat lounging on a chair, flicking its tail. Later she feeds her boyfriend tea with catnip, they have sex and then he turns into a cat.

The-Pick Up by Jane centered on a harried housewife and mom who appears to transform into a sex worker at night. At the end, we find out her client is actually her husband. Jane said it was her way of showing that hot sex and romantic love were not mutually exclusive. You could still be very monogamous and have a rich and fulfilling love life.

The female-led project was revolutionary in the porn industry. But feminists widely ignored Femme’s female-led productions.

“If legislation that allows censorship should make it through the courts, the first people to go… would be the women just starting out,” Veronica wrote to Ms. “I’ve learned from harsh experience that the only thing many anti-porn zealots find worse than a male ‘pornographer’ is a female ‘pornographer.’… [Porn] is the only real source of sex education in our society. Because of this fact, it is important that responsible people begin taking over the production of this material.”

Even though some feminists were opposed to hearing from porn stars, those in the wider culture, such as daytime TV host Phil Donahue, were not. Candida appeared on his show on Nov. 18, 1985. Candida also appeared on Morton Downey Jr.’s show, Gloria on Oprah, and the two of them together on The David Susskind Show. Jane appeared on AM Chicago with Oprah Winfrey, on The Morning Show with Regis Philbin and on Donahue.

While the women of Club 90 were finally getting mainstream attention, the anti-porn narrative was still winning out.

Newsweek came calling on Candida for their issue on porn. “I was interviewed extensively, they photographed me, they came to this big screening of one of my movies—they loved it,” Candida later said in an interview with Smashing Interviews. “Then they never mentioned me once, in the whole article. It was all presenting the sex industry as very seedy.”

In May 1985, the U.S. Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography reached out to Candida. They asked her to appear at a public hearing on pornography and exploitation. After thinking it over, Candida said yes. She decided to focus her testimony on her working experiences in the non-porn world. She detailed how, when she was working at a Manhattan health club at 18, the manager sexually assaulted her in his office “and would only let me go when I threatened to scream and alert the patrons of the club.” She discussed the executive who made her give him a goodnight kiss every night when she was working as his secretary at age 19. “Conditions are no worse for women in the ‘legit’ world than in the porn world, so what are we really upset about? The victimization of women or the fact that some people just don’t want any form of explicit material to be available to consenting adults?”

She described visiting a mainstream film set, where actresses had to sleep with the producer before getting their roles. “I learned a valuable lesson about the dignity of the work I did in adult films: I was hired to do a job, I went to the movie set, I acted. I performed an act of sexual love-making with another hired professional actor who was clean and hopefully attractive, and I was paid for my agreed-upon work… I never had to submit to relations with an unsavory character for a hope and a dream,” she said.

Decades before the #MeToo movement, Candida’s insistence that if the attorney general really cared about women’s safety, he should look at all kinds of workplaces, seems prescient. Yet the commission’s final report focused on the dangerous effects of porn on women, arguing that obscenity laws should be enforced more often, and that there should be greater restrictions on “violent” and “degrading” porn.

One day in 1987, Veronica was in the countryside with Annie, visiting the performance artist Linda Montano at her gallery space, Art/Life Institute, when she had a dream. In it, she and her friend Robert—the one who’d lived next door—were in Nairobi, a place they’d visited together when they’d traveled around the world. Except this time, something had gone wrong: Robert was talking on the phone, and he had been shot and was bleeding. “I had no trouble interpreting this part of the dream, for the same week I visited the Art/Life Institute, Robert had begun a series of radiation treatments for Kaposi’s sarcoma [AIDS-related skin cancer] on his legs,” she wrote in her Adam magazine column.

Veronica knew exactly what she wanted to do for her best friend. “I decided that I wanted to propose to him to let him know I would be really there for him,” she said. “I want him to know that he’s really loved, because he was not totally out… I feel if people are not totally out, especially to their families, they can feel that they’re not worthy of love.”

When she got home from the retreat, she didn’t waste any time. She entered 3C to see Robert tying his shoes in preparation for his uptown radiation appointment.

“Will you marry me?” she asked.

“I can’t think about this now,” he replied anxiously. “Let’s talk about it in the morning.”

After conferring with his nurses in the clinic and sleeping on it, the next morning, he said yes.

At the next meeting of Club 90, Veronica made her big announcement: She was getting married to Robert. Jane, Gloria and Candida stared at her, mouths agape. “No, no, no, I’m really serious. I really want you to be there for me. I want you to be supportive of this,” she insisted. After getting over the initial shock, Gloria, who had three ex-husbands, quipped: “You can borrow my garter. I’ve used it a few times. It hasn’t brought me too much luck.”

Veronica and Robert’s wedding invitations were the opposite of traditional. On the cover of the playbill-like document, a top hat and bow tie-clad Robert gazes at Veronica, while carrying a globe in one hand and holding Veronica’s hand in the other. Veronica stares back, her dark hair poking through her white veil. She’s lifting the tuile of the backside of her black dress.

The night before the wedding, Veronica and Robert slept in their separate apartments, as they always had. But Veronica, who was randy, brought a new lover over, locked her door and “had a delicious hour of animalistic sex,” she wrote in her Adam magazine article. After they were finished, he helped her load the Champagne into the refrigerator. Then she told Robert all about it. “No reason both of us need to go into this marriage horny,” she said.

On Sunday, Oct. 4, 1987, Veronica’s apartment hallway was plastered with a “This Way to the Wedding” sign written in magic marker. In the backyard, two rows of yellow folding chairs lined each side of the procession, and tables were set up laden with baguettes, cookies and trays of sandwiches. Soon the booze-soaked wedding fruitcake with flowers iced by Robert, who was a professional chef, would be brought out. Robert thought fruitcake was a particularly appropriate dessert for the celebration.

Annie bustled around in a flouncy black and white skirt.

“Do you have any advice for these newlyweds?” Veronica’s friend Dominique asked.

“Jeez,” Annie said, looking behind her as if hoping someone else would jump in to answer. “Well, you know usually you tell them how to fuck and stuff like that,” she said laughing. “But they already know well how to do that.”

Jane arrived in a sparkly blue dress, Christopher darting behind her legs, her husband, Michael, holding their younger son, Max.

Veronica was upstairs in her apartment bathroom, in a black corset, conferring with Gloria, also dressed in black. “This is my fourth happiest day of my life,” said Gloria, who was holding a bouquet. “The other three times were the times I got married.” Gloria laughed.

Roger Koch, the apron-clad bodybuilder who starred in Annie’s film and served cupcakes at Jane’s baby shower, worked as lead usher, his muscled body squeezed into a tight black T-shirt, his goatee tied into a ponytail.

Jane’s son Christopher walked in front of Robert carrying the ring as they came down the aisle. Veronica elegantly paraded down the backyard aisle in a purple dress made from iridescent Thai silk that she bought while on the round-the-world trip with Robert. She’d asked her friend to turn the silk into a dress that would give her “tits for days,” and the friend had delivered, as her breasts gloriously spilled out.

After the ceremony, Peter Allen’s “I Go To Rio” pumped through the speakers. It was a favorite of Robert’s, from a fellow Aussie, and it recalled the first stop on the newlyweds’ around-the world-trip. Veronica and Robert threw their hands in the air and danced up the aisle. Wedding guests joined, bounding behind, grasping the ribbon that matched a bow in Veronica’s hair. Annie and the others gave a beaming Robert kisses as they bopped by.

Three days later, Veronica was shopping at Lee’s Mardi Gras Boutique, a clothing store that catered to the drag community. There, she selected a pair of white crotchless lace panties, underwear she was planning on wearing to “consummate my marriage with another lover,” as she wrote in Adam magazine. As she walked back to her Greenwich Village apartment, she spotted a funeral home. “Should I check on the cost of cremations?” she wondered. Robert didn’t want Veronica to be faced with financial obligations after his death. What the hell, why not find out, she decided, and walked in the door. “The cost was $500. I could sell his fancy camera to cover that. With that problem solved, my husband and I could focus on living.”

About six months later, Robert died.

Now Annie was the only member of Club 90 to never have gotten married or had kids. It was 1987, and Annie’s relationship with Tommy, the boyfriend she had during Jane’s baby shower, had long ended. She was 33 and dreamed of being a mom. “I always wanted a baby. I thought I’d make a great mother. But I was not in a relationship—the biological clock was ticking,” she said. “I wanted to love unconditionally. And I was wanting more love, less promiscuous sex.”

Annie was also experiencing a lot of grief. Gay men were her lovers, friends and “sex teachers,” as she said. Now many of them were dying of AIDS. She, for whatever reason, had not caught HIV. Annie went off of birth control. Soon she was pregnant. “I was very excited. I didn’t care who [the father was]. I wasn’t going to tell them. I was just going to have a baby on my own,” she said. She knew there were two men who could possibly be the father: a straight Japanese porn star whom she’d shot pictures of for a gay magazine, or her professor from the School of Visual Arts, whom she had seduced when the last semester was over.

As she prepared for impending motherhood, she shared the news with Club 90, who were excited for her. Then she shared it with her mom. “And my mom talked me out of it,” she said. Her mother reminded her that she didn’t have much money saved and that it would be a challenge for her to be a single mother. “The more I thought about it, I realized I’d have to give up my art career, sex career,” she said. “In those days, if you were in the sex industry, the state could take your baby away, if you were a porn star. Even strippers could lose their kids if they were arrested for something.”

Soon Gloria was accompanying Annie to the doctor to get an abortion. “She sat with me—we were in the waiting room, like, six hours,” Annie said. “It was really busy that day, and I went last, somehow.” After the procedure was over, Annie cried. Gloria walked her home. “It was kind of sad, but it was the right thing to do. My mother was right,” Annie said. “Ultimately, I had art babies. No actual children. But I have a chosen daughter [Madison Young, a porn star], and chosen grandkids.” They call her Grandma Sprinkle.

Annie graduated from the School of Visual Arts, got a Ph.D. from the Institute of Advanced Studies of Human Sexuality, and became a very successful artist, traveling the globe with one-woman theater pieces that are now studied in universities around the world. Her films have been shown at many film festivals, including at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. In 2003, she conceived of the International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers, still observed in many countries every Dec. 17. And 20 years ago, she found the love she had been seeking and married the artist and art professor Beth Stephens. “I joke that after having sex with 3,500 men, it was time for a change,” Annie said.

Gloria, who created one of the first phone sex lines in 1983, only to see the federal government try to shut it down, took her case all the way to the Supreme Court, where she won. She appeared in nearly 30 X-rated films, and went on to become president of the Free Speech Coalition. She continued to defend the porn industry on talk shows, including Oprah and Geraldo, debating anti-porn feminists. She died following a stroke in 2014.

Candida directed and wrote dozens of women- and couple-focused porn films for Femme Productions. In the late 1990s, she also created a line of groundbreaking ergonomic vibrators in abstract shapes and pastel colors, in a collaboration with the Dutch industrial designer Jandirk Groet. Members of Club 90 served as sex toy testers, offering feedback. Candida died of ovarian cancer in 2015.

Veronica founded Miss Vera’s Finishing School for Boys Who Want to be Girls in the early 1990s, an academy in which she taught people assigned male at birth how to explore their feminine side through clothing, makeup, learning how to walk in heels and going out and about, helping normalize cross-dressing and transgender identities. The school ran through 2020 and was the subject of her three published books. She also fulfilled her dream of working as a journalist, writing her Adam column, “Veronica Vera’s New York,” for a dozen years.

Jane became an exotic dancer, then a producer and director of adult films, as well as some R-rated romps. Her features won many best director awards from the Adult Video Network Awards Show, the Oscars of porn. She’s had numerous mainstream roles, including ones in Six Feet Under, One-Eyed Monster, and two Paul Thomas Anderson films, Boogie Nights and Magnolia. Thomas Anderson called her “the Meryl Streep of porn.”

Club 90 continues to this day, with the three surviving members still meeting in person, and their legacy is clear. The porn industry has more female, transgender and gender queer directors than it ever has. Women ask for and obtain more money than they ever have. “We forged new ground in the sex world. We opened new doors for ourselves and each other,” Annie said. Feminist porn and post porn are now entire genres, and many third-wave feminists, in stark contrast to the Ms. generation, now share Club 90’s viewpoint on the porn industry.

“Each of these women directly inspired things that I have done with my career,” said Stoya, a well-known adult film star turned writer and director, who now pens a column for Slate. “They were part of an expansion of what adult films can be.”

Yet most porn is still male-dominated, and the female gaze lags behind. Club 90 put in the work, but there is more to be done. “There’s wonderful people that are making pornography today. And there’s horrible people that are making pornography today,” Jane said, “the same as back when we were making it.”

Beyond all the groundbreaking accomplishments, for the women of Club 90, the lasting legacy is the vital way it brought them together. As Gloria wrote in 1989 in The Adult Video Association Newsletter, “Club 90 helped make real women of us — the undying support that each knows the other provides, has created a kinship and closeness I frankly never believed was possible.”

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