It woke us up and the next day there was the broken little plastic buttons everywhere. “We didn’t know all the details but I remember one time our father ripped the phone off the wall in the middle of the night. As much as he wanted to make better films, he was exposing himself to greater risks and we as kids picked up on that energy. “As the laws were being interpreted and reinterpreted, people were being arrested for making X-rated films. Nixon had a very public campaign against pornography and so my father was arrested and surveilled and our phones were tapped. Nixon took him on to divert attention away from his own wrongdoing. “Then he was prosecuted and pursued by the federal government. He felt that he was lucky to get away with his life. Gerard says of his father: “He first partnered with the mob and so there was some fear of retribution.
Photograph: APĪ 1975 investigation by the New York Times found that the mafia helped bankroll pornographic films such as Deep Throat and reaped huge profits from their distribution. Linda Lovelace arrives at the Oscars in 1974. It was only when it wasn’t such good press, when they hauled him off to go to jail, that we asked questions.” We thought there’s something special about being the children of our father. Film-maker John Waters recalled in the 2005 documentary Inside Deep Throat: “Deep Throat was a badge of the new freedom.” The trend was summed up as “porno chic”.Ĭhristar reflects: “Seeing photos of our father in the newspaper and people talking about it was very enlightening for us. People have a lot of fear against showing the human body but that’s not the way we were brought up.”ĭeep Throat was the first pornographic film embraced by a mainstream audience, drawing fashionable viewers such as Warren Beatty, Shirley MacLaine, Jack Nicholson and Jacqueline Onassis. The human body is an artistic work that should be appreciated. “So we knew what was happening and were brought up with the idea that sex was something beautiful that happened between consenting adults and not something to be ashamed of. We came from a very loving, tight, close-knit family our mom was our dad’s secretary she was like the backbone of him and his company. We were on a lot of the film sets, although we were skirted off when there was the ‘nitty-gritty’ happening. They were six- and seven-year-old children when they accompanied Damiano to Miami, Florida, where he shot Deep Throat in six days for $25,000 (it would gross a reported $600m), and remember interacting with the cast and crew.Ĭhristar, a sound healer and performance artist, says: “We were very privy to what our father did. ”Ĭhristar and her brother, Gerard Damiano Jr, 57, also a former director of adult films, are working on a documentary about their late father. He had a whim when he saw Linda and just took it from there.
He never set out to think that he was going to make this phenomenon and start what was known as the sexual revolution. His daughter, Christar Damiano, 56, says via Zoom from New York: “He never thought that it would get the notoriety it did. Photograph: Stephen Shugerman/Getty Images He died in 2008 at the age of 80, as surprised as anyone that Deep Throat would be his legacy. He went into film-making but, lacking access to big studios, settled for the underground scene in New York (with some financial help from the mob). The former hairdresser used to listen to his female clients discuss how difficult it was to express themselves sexually. The film’s director, Gerard Damiano Sr, never set out to change the world but did think he was on the right side of history. Erica Jong said she was “appalled at how offensive” the concept was. Others, even before the internet and #MeToo movement, viewed the 62-minute film as paving the way for the mass proliferation of pornography, exploitation and objectification.Īndrea Dworkin, for example, a feminist who at one point allied with Lovelace in an attempt to outlaw pornography, argued in a 1993 speech about its dehumanising effects that “when a woman has a penis thrust down to the bottom of her throat, as in the film Deep Throat, that throat is not part of a human being who is involved in discussing ideas”. Half a century on, some regard it as a milestone in America’s cultural and sexual revolution.
Its director was arrested and it was variously banned, unbanned and rebanned during obscenity trials that ensured more people were eager to see it (it was not shown at a British cinema until 2005) while its star claimed she was violently coerced into making it. Deep Throat provoked a fierce backlash from an unlikely alliance of feminists and religious groups and drew scrutiny from the FBI.