It reads like a phony headline ripped from the front page of a tawdry tabloid: "Feminist Lesbian Rises to Top of Gay Porn World." But it's all true.
"It started in the 1970s, when I marched against pornography as a raging lesbian feminist," says Caryn Goldberg, the president and publisher of Specialty Publications, the multimedia company that is home to the most successful gay consumer magazines and increasingly popular websites and videos. It was somewhere between the 1970s and 1993 where she notes that she "grew up," eventually landing herself a job selling advertising for The Advocate.
"I got to know a guy who did photography for what at the time was called Advocate Men when I lived in New York, and I started to look at gay adult material and realized I didn't have that same sort of visceral reaction to it, politically and stuff," Goldberg says. "And I actually kind of enjoyed it. I realized I was part of a subculture of lesbians who like gay porn."
In 1993, Goldberg started to sell ads for Men (the flagship magazine started in 1984), Freshmen (the younger-themed success that started in 1991) and Classifieds, which has since morphed into Unzipped magazine. "I did it with a little trepidation. Here I am, this nice Jewish girl from Brooklyn, and I'm about to really enter the adult world — like actually meet these people, which was different than just managing the guy who dealt with them. I was sort of expecting the stereotype, that it was going to be sleazy pornographers. Well, I met the most amazing people in the gay adult industry who I really liked and I got to know... it was nothing like I expected."
Goldberg was then offered the top job when Liberation Publications Inc. decided to spin off its adult lines into a separate company (Specialty Publications) in 2000, five years after serving as publisher for the magazines at LPI. It was at the same time the company started to develop its own websites. Since then, it has grown to 25 people, added a fourth magazine, [2], opened two membership sites (MensCyberClub.com and ClubFreshmen.com, with MenMachine.com debuting soon) and developed a retail and mail order presence through BuyGay.com.
But the biggest step came in 2003, when the company finally made the leap into hardcore videos, creating [2] The Movie as a subscription premium for two magazines. "We ended up distributing probably 25,000 copies of [2] The Movie, which probably makes it one of the most widely distributed hardcore gay titles. And then we realized, Why don't we just start selling them and start making more movies, and use them for sales, subscription and promotion purposes as well?"
The idea worked. Unzipped's 11th title, Night Callers, was released recently. Six more are planned for 2006. Goldberg notes that the transition was easy because Specialty is a well-known, well-rounded company with a stature in the industry that enables it to attract models, advertisers, distributors, and customers. It also has the luxury of using each of its products to market the others, giving customers a complete experience.
Specialty's touch of class enabled it to snag a deal with Channel 1 Releasing, which makes and distributes the product using established directors (Chi Chi LaRue and Doug Jeffries), models, and crew. Hits like In Bed With, Dorm Days and Be a Man have quickly established Unzipped as a quality video line that fans instantly bonded with.
"If you look at the whole line, you'll see that it would be very hard to define them as a particular thing, except that they're all good, solid four- or five-scene movies. We're not making the gigantic productions that seem to be very popular right now, the seven-disc sets," Goldberg says. "They're high quality, good production values, good range of models, just solid, well-made movies."
And Goldberg should know—she's been a fan of gay porn ever since seeing her first film, The Pizza Boy. "The fantasy of gay porn — anonymous, quick sexual encounters in the strangest places — is an amazing fantasy when you're a woman and you've sort of been nurtured — even when you were nurtured to be a straight woman — that you were going to have sex within the confines of at least a relationship, if not marriage. And so then when you put two women together, they have that exact same expectation... so the fantasy, the idea that you would look at somebody across the room and two seconds later you'd be having sex with them, it's amazing.
"And I'm gonna so lose my lesbian card for this, but I think that the visual of male sexual excitement is more to look at, because there's a hard dick that explodes, as opposed to a woman where it all happens inside. It's just not as much to look at, so you don’t see quite the progression of sexual response. Lesbians who like gay porn are a real subculture, and it's a lot more popular than you'd imagine."
Which begs the question: When will lesbian porn actually made for lesbians find a place in the market?
"I've thought about producing them or maybe starting a division, but we're not really tooled up — no pun tended — to market to women. We have a machine here that markets to gay men all the time. We don't know how to market to lesbians, and to be honest, I don't know that anybody does," Goldberg says. "I gave a lesbian video to my friends, and they were all, like, 'Yeah, it was interesting and it was good... do you have any Unzipped videos?'"
Photo courtesy of Jane Lloyd/Specialty Publications.
