LOS ANGELES — Vice has published a first-person account by Golden Era adult superstar Ginger Lynn of her industry experiences in the mid-1980s.
The material in the piece is drawn from interviews conducted by the producers of the documentary, “Sex Before the Internet,” which Vice — an alternative media conglomerate partially owned by Disney — recently released.
In the essay, Lynn discusses her upbringing in Rockford, Illinois, where she first experienced big-screen porn in a theater at 19.
“I remember sitting in the seats and Vanessa del Rio came on the screen and I got goosebumps,” she recalls in the article. “I’ve always been a sexual person, but watching someone else on film fucking was just amazing to me. I thought, ‘This is the coolest thing I have ever seen.’”
Lynn's movie theater epiphany did not immediately translate into a life plan, however.
“I always wanted to be in front of the camera. I wanted to live in California and I wanted to be a star,” she explains, “but when I saw Vanessa on film, I didn't think I wanted to be like her. I just got turned on by it.”
Eventually, though, she met up with Golden Era agent Jim South, who told her, “We need to take some Polaroids” and asked her to take her clothes off.
“I had no trouble doing that whatsoever,” Lynn notes. “I was never ashamed or embarrassed. I was always comfortable with my body. Jim took three or four Polaroids and we went back to his office and he put them in this big three-ring binder, full of pictures of all of these girls in alphabetical order. There were photographs of these beautiful women all around the office on the walls: Marilyn Chambers, Hyapatia Lee — though I didn’t know who they were at the time. Jim looked up and said, ‘Those are the wall girls’ and I’m like, ‘I want to be a wall girl.’ Those were the famous girls, and I wanted so badly to be famous.”
Having experienced the heights of porn stardom during the industry's most exclusive era, Lynn thinks that the internet “took away the joy of watching porn for the first time; taking that VHS or DVD home and putting it in the player. All of a sudden you could watch anything you wanted, anywhere, any time.”
As a result, Lynn says, being an adult star went from being “more fun than work” to “more work than fun.”
“Sex Before The Internet” airs Tuesdays at 9 p.m. PST on VICE TV.
To read Ginger Lynn’s “I Was a Porn Star During the Golden Age of Adult Entertainment,” visit Vice.com.
