The most important thing you need to know about my uncle, the porn star, is that he’s not my actual uncle. He’s my mother’s cousin, which makes him my first cousin once removed. Johnny is now a seventy-four-year-old man partial to books-on-tape and cantaloupe, but between 1973 and 1987, he starred in 117 adult films. He was Man in Car, Man with Book, Man on Bus, Man in Hot Tub, Orgy Guy in Red Chair, Party Guy, Guy Wearing Glasses, Delivery Boy, and, perplexingly, Guy in Credits. He was the porn equivalent of Barbie, who can count astronaut, zookeeper, and aerobics instructor among her professional accomplishments. Except that Barbie, like Jesus before her and Prince after her, has no last name. Whereas Johnny’s last name, his actual last name, is Seeman. This is a fact too absurd to warrant further analysis.



A young Johnny Seeman back in his swinging heyday. Courtesy

I didn’t snoop around about Johnny until college, but this was not for lack of interest. My college years happened to coincide with the late nineties, when the Internet was fast becoming a tool for personal research. Before that, my generation mostly used it for chain letters and lightbulb jokes. How many Harvard students does it take to change a lightbulb? Two. One to hold the lightbulb and the other to rotate the world around him. But suddenly I had a vehicle for my curiosity. So I looked up Johnny to see what I could find. I was neither brave nor willing enough to search for video footage for fear of noticing any genetic resemblance to my mother’s brothers. Even the Greeks don’t have a name for that specific a complex. Instead, I read. My favorite article to this day was one in which Johnny is referred to—revered, really—as the most famous stunt cock ever. That was the headline—JOHNNY SEEMAN: THE MOST FAMOUS STUNT COCK EVER.

He was the porn equivalent of Barbie, who can count astronaut, zookeeper, and aerobics instructor among her professional accomplishments.

This superlative seared into my brain. How many self-identifying stunt cocks have walked the earth to make ever meaningful? Forty? Ever seemed a touch hyperbolic for an unquantifiable group of people. I also wondered if Johnny’s unique endowments meant I, too, had the good-genitalia gene. If I have a son, will he be pretty much set in that department? That might be a nice bonus attribute, though hopefully not one he will have to rely on for money.

In case you’re not familiar, a stunt cock is the guy who steps in to produce the money shot if an actor can’t maintain an erection. I imagine this was handy in the era before little blue pills and digital film, but it seems like a real morale dampener for everyone else. This is the guy who opens the pickle jar after you’ve loosened it, the one who carries the birthday cake you baked out of the kitchen. More than anything, it struck me as an odd hook for an interview. It’s the kind of detail that a man might drop about himself, but would be less likely to point out about another man. Unless, of course, it was the sole reason for an article that might not exist otherwise. And there, if you will, was the rub. I got the sense that, despite his 117 films, Johnny had been all but forgotten. In pornography, being tag-teamed by three women and a vacuum-cleaner nozzle does not a legend make. Johnny needed to be reintroduced.

Joan Devlon on set with Seeman in the mid-seventies. Courtesy

Like I said, the man’s not my uncle. Though I’ve known Johnny my whole life, I can count our interactions on one hand. Our family is not the reunion type. We’re either united already or distant for some very good reason. Growing up, I saw Johnny at funerals and shivahs, possibly a wedding—definitely one Thanksgiving when my father got a real kick out of offering him breast meat.

My otherwise straitlaced parents could barely contain their excitement at having a porn star in their midst. A porn star is chum in the water for people who think getting wait- listed from college is a haunting secret. Also, Johnny’s other brothers are a Parisian doctor and a businessman. Unfortunately, my parents’ reverse mythologizing of Johnny made it impossible to get an accurate sense of the guy.

Snippets about Johnny were presented as essentials or in lieu of essentials. I knew that he dropped out of UNC-Chapel Hill, which meant he was smart enough to get in, and that he’d spent the last thirty years living alone in an apartment somewhere in Los Angeles, which meant he was sad. I knew he was once so lost to a world of sex-crazed degenerates that he sent his mother, my great-aunt, a magazine with an advertisement for one of his films. The photo featured Johnny, bespectacled and naked, pushing a woman on a swing, also naked. I’ve always imagined him giving a thumbs-up but I can’t confirm this because I’ve never actually seen the magazine.

A porn star is chum in the water for people who think getting wait- listed from college is a haunting secret.

But most shockingly of all, I knew that Johnny got into porn to find a girlfriend.

To me, this idea was always the most difficult to grasp. It seemed the most implausible. What kind of cockamamy plan was this from a man who got accepted to UNC from out of state? It’s common enough for people to spend their whole lives building careers or amassing wealth in order to get laid. So one could argue that Johnny had cleverly skipped the middleman. His career was to get laid. Which is all well and good—unless that was never the point. Unless Johnny only ever wanted to cuddle and spoon and take turns spitting toothpaste into a bathroom sink. What if all those lawn orgies and park-bench encounters were constructed solely for Johnny to find love? For years, I thought about this every time I sat on a park bench. Until one day, when I couldn’t stand thinking about it anymore.

“What do you need his email address for?” My parents are skeptical about me contacting Johnny. They don’t want me pestering a seventy-four-year-old man with stunt-cock inquiries.

In truth, I don’t know exactly what I want from Johnny. Certainly, an academic curiosity about pornography is not a revelation. What am I going to do, blow the lid off fake orgasms? Nor is it a sociological curiosity. David Foster Wallace wrote at length about the Adult Video News Awards, thus pissing a circle around the subject for all eternity. My only credential is that I am a blood relative. But even this is a lame justification.

At least some portion of Johnny’s draw comes from my own coastal turmoil. I have often felt I was mistakenly born a mid-Atlantic baby. The more I heard of Johnny’s “running off to California,” the more I felt a kinship with this person over my family.

But I can’t tell my parents that. So I play the mortality card instead.

“He won’t be around forever,” I say. “Neither will we,” my father says. “And we’re interesting!” “Not that interesting,” my mother corrects him, and forks over the email.

Seeman, Georgina Spelvin (behind the bar), and Devlon on the set of 1977’s "Desires Within Young Girls." Courtesy

Johnny writes back right away. It’s nice to hear from me, but he’s hesitant to chat. He needs to mull it over. I tell him to take his time, mull away, no problem. In truth, I am surprised. Not because I expect him to expose himself emotionally as he has physically, but because he has been a public participant in his former life. Only a few years ago, he was inducted into the Legends of Erotica Hall of Fame in Las Vegas. No one in my family was told about it, but it turned out a former colleague introduced him as “the most important person in all of Northern California during porn’s golden age; the guy who literally taught me how to fuck on camera—and this was before Viagra!” (The invocation of Viagra seems to be the porn-industry equivalent of telling a younger person that you used to walk uphill to and from school, both ways.) At the end of the ceremony, the host wheeled out a block of wet cement for Johnny to stick his septuagenarian penis into. He demurred and signed his name instead.

A full month later, Johnny’s name reappears in my in-box along with the subject line “apologies.” Of course, “apologies.” Of course, I should never have contacted him. I should have done as my parents suggested and let the man live his life. But Johnny is only apologizing for the delay. He was in Ojai and off email. Ojai, I think. He has a place in the mountains! A place he can escape to or at least visit. He is not sad, he is happy. One rumor debunked already. Ojai. That’s where they have the turtle sanctuary. I imagine Johnny stepping out of a sun-dappled ranch house. The air is perfumed with flowers as he heads out on his morning turtle feed. I imagine him sitting on one of the great big ones, being carried in slow motion across a green meadow. Then I imagine him doing all of this naked and giving a thumbs-up.

And so I stop imagining and get on a plane.

Reality is quick to replace fantasy. This is true in every arena except for sex, where pornography has more or less ruined sex for all men under thirty. But it remains true that once you visit a place, it’s almost impossible to replicate the images you had of that place before you went. As I stand across the street from Johnny’s apartment complex in West Los Angeles, I make a mental note of what I think it might look like inside. From my febrile imagination, I conjure a time capsule of the seventies—faux-wood paneling, disco records, memorabilia, and awards. Maybe a sunken living room. Maybe a sex swing. Maybe a wicker sex swing.

Johnny comes out into the hallway to greet me as I step off the elevator. He is shorter than I am, soft-spoken, with a shy grin. Some people are more comforting to look at than others and Johnny is one of them. He has a face like the man in the moon. He opens the door to an aseptic one-bedroom with white carpeting that stops at the kitchen. The counters are overrun with rows of vitamin bottles. In the living room sits a white sofa, white sitting chairs, and a white table with a glass bowl of fruit on it. Angled on a small piano are framed photographs of his nieces and nephews, a family that is not quite mine. This is the apartment of a dental hygienist. There is, however, a curious amount of exercise equipment. “I like to stay fit,” Johnny says.

Pornos in the 1970s were gentler and more romantic than today’s—hence the strawberries. Courtesy

He removes a hand gripper from one of the chairs and offers me blueberries. I sit and sigh. Then he sits and sighs.

We then proceed to talk about his brother’s cockatoo for what feels like ten minutes. This is my doing. I’m the one who broached the subject of the cockatoo. When I was nineteen, I spent an afternoon with the Paris-dwelling doctor while backpacking across Europe. We sat on his balcony, drinking tea, while the cockatoo sprawled out on his lap, getting the underside of its wing scratched.

Johnny informs me of the cockatoo’s recent demise. I thought they lived forever, like African grey parrots. Apparently they have an average avian life span.

“Do you think he’ll get another one?” I ask.

“Oh, I don’t think so,” says Johnny. “I think the cockatoo was burdensome, shrieking every time the phone rang.”

Have I flown to Los Angeles to make a retired porn star say “cockatoo” over and over? People go to Los Angeles for less.

“I don’t know why I’m here,” I confess. “That’s okay,” Johnny says, gracious and smiling. I had said those words to myself many times en route, but saying them out loud, I realize just how untrue they are. Deep down, I know exactly why I have come and it is not because I have a California fetish. It’s because, like Johnny, I have been looking for love in all the wrong places.

Reality is quick to replace fantasy. This is true in every arena except for sex, where pornography has more or less ruined sex for all men under thirty.

While I have not been frequenting strip clubs in hopes of snagging a soul mate, I have become increasingly attracted to unrealistic or unobtainable men. I have broken things off with them or vice versa but each relationship feels quicker than the one before it. This is a problem everyone I know seems to have encountered in their twenties but has spontaneously outgrown in their thirties. One day you look around and the most romantically remedial people imaginable are signing leases with whole human beings, getting wistful about their former proclivities for drunks and sociopaths. I attempt to participate in these conversations, nodding along. How stupid we all once were! But I am only thinking of the phone in my pocket, where some flirtatious text might await me. I am in my mid-thirties and I seem to be working in reverse, going from long relationships that aren’t wonderful to short relationships that aren’t horrible.

So I have come to see Johnny the same way sadistic parents make their children smoke an entire pack of cigarettes if they catch them smoking one. I want to stare into the face of a single man, forty years my senior, who’s been looking for love in the most unlikely place imaginable. I am in search of well-earned wisdom, of someone to smack me out of my habits. Like a vaccination, I am hoping that by immersing myself in an extreme version of my problem, I can be cured of my problem. But seeing as how our longest conversation ever has been about a dead bird, I hold off on sharing this revelation. Instead, we start at the beginning.

Johnny was born in 1943 in New York City and raised in New Rochelle, where he was a good student but not a great one. His younger brothers quickly surpassed him in athletic and academic prowess. Not that Johnny would have known. His mother instructed his brothers to lie about their trophies and their grades—even to physically hunch on occasion—to protect Johnny’s feelings. Which is an efficient way to mess up multiple children at once. Johnny learned that he was living in his own personal Truman Show during college, while home playing basketball with his youngest brother. For the first time, he didn’t let Johnny win. Johnny was unable to compute the loss, so the brother explained everything. As one might imagine, Johnny was more than a little unmoored. Activities at which he’d always excelled were called into question. He wondered if he had any talent at all.

Then, in 1965, he was drafted. This upset him because he was seeing a therapist whom he liked and he hadn’t “completed the therapy.” Therapy, understandably, was paramount to Johnny. Less understandable is the fact that most of the family saw the same therapist when he was growing up. He remembers riding a Schwinn to go see a psychiatrist. When I ask him if he was given a specific reason, he says therapy was like “brushing your teeth,” just some Salingery exercise in which the whole family partook. “So how long did you stay in therapy?”

“I stopped a couple of months ago. My therapist was older than I am, which is hard to find at my age.”

“Oh,” I say, “I’m sorry.”

“He’s not dead,” Johnny corrects me. “He just thought I was cured.”

“Of what?”

“Of my problems,” he says, smiling coyly.

Skin flicks back then had at least a veneer of artfulness. Alamy

After he got out of the military, Johnny packed up his car and moved to Fort Lauderdale to “figure out what life is all about.” When I tell him that Fort Lauderdale is not a place generally associated with enlightenment, he tells me that’s why he moved to Minneapolis. After Minneapolis came Denver, after Denver came San Francisco—and San Francisco is where his life cracked open.

“I arrived in 1970 and everyone was openly smoking pot and I thought, Wow, this is pretty wild. At first, I was living in a residents’ club. It was cheap and you got to meet a whole new group of people before everyone went in different directions. It was really delightful.”

Only a small percentage of the population speaks of shared toilets with such fondness. Then again, an even smaller percentage of nice Jewish boys from Westchester go into the adult-film industry. But Johnny has a way of imbuing everything with positive thinking. On his castmates’ orgasms: “I would wager a high percentage of them faked it, but hey, what can you do?” On his niche notoriety: “I was just so happy knowing the women were happy with me.” On John Holmes: “Private guy. Upbeat!” Johnny’s first job in San Francisco was selling cable subscriptions door-to-door. And guess what? He friggin’ loved it.

“The cable company was required by law to have a channel that was available to the public.”

“A public-access channel?”

“Yes, one of those. And they needed a host. So I wound up interviewing people, and they supplied me with a cameraman. I interviewed exotic dancers and artists. They filmed me getting a massage. One day I interviewed this guy who published a magazine for the Sexual Freedom League and I was intrigued. They had some wild parties—nude parties, sex parties—and I attended those.”

“Attended,” I interject, adding air quotes.

Johnny looks at me as if I’m trying to sexualize a trip to the mailbox.

“Anyway, I started distributing the league’s magazine in vending machines. I had never even seen an adult film at that point. So I went to a theater downtown and I was awed by what these people were doing up on the screen.”

"I had never even seen an adult film at that point. So I went to a theater downtown and I was awed by what these people were doing up on the screen.”

Awed is what most people feel when they see the northern lights or Meryl Streep. And yet I wholly believe Johnny when he says it, just like I believe him when he says he then said to himself, “My God, that woman seems to be having a great time! How do I get in on that?”

Turns out, the answer was at hand. The paper Johnny distributed was covering the trial of the Mitchell brothers, who, already famous for producing live sex shows, were in hot water for making a film during which a priest sticks his penis through a confession box and gets a blowjob. Years later, one brother would shoot the other in the face, an incident that, among other tragic consequences, fated them to be played by Charlie Sheen and Emilio Estevez in a made-for-TV movie—but first they had to contend with a determined young man by the name of Johnny Seeman.

Johnny knocked on their office door one day and explained that he wanted to have sex on camera. He left out the part where he also wanted to take his costar to a candlelit dinner and ask her about her hopes and dreams.

“They took one look at me and laughed in my face. I wasn’t hip. I wasn’t a flower child. I didn’t have long hair. I was probably wearing what I’m wearing now.”

He gestures down at high-waisted khaki pants, a belt, and a short-sleeved button-down shirt. It’s true. This is an unfuckable outfit if ever there was one. But Johnny persisted, coming back week after week until the Mitchell brothers relented. Mystifyingly, Johnny did not have to try out in any capacity. In Boogie Nights, Rollergirl fellates Dirk Diggler in the back of a club before recommending him to the director. While I do not assume real porn casting is all blowjobs and roller skates, dropping one’s pants seems like it would be industry standard. But apparently all you had to do in this pre-AIDS, post- sexual-revolution flesh carnival was hop into the back of a VW bus and drive to a house in Walnut Creek.

When Johnny arrived, two men and a woman were already waiting, lounging naked on a circular sofa. Upon seeing this scene, he and his priapic penis became anxious about the straw they were about to draw.

“I told them I was heterosexual and they told me not to worry. They said, ‘You’re all just going to be relating to her at the same time.’ ”

“Relating,” I interject again, once more with the air quotes. No response.

“I was so nervous,” Johnny says, “I had to pee every fifteen minutes while they were setting up. Then I couldn’t get an erection on camera. They had to shoot the whole thing around me.”

Pornography kings Jim and Artie Mitchell. AP

In the end, they gave him seventy-five dollars and, to Johnny’s surprise, a second chance. This time with just him and one woman. And that was all he needed. So strong was Johnny’s desire for a steady relationship, even his dick was in on the plan. And while a relationship never did manifest, a career did. Before long, Johnny was a regular in movies. Then he began managing productions. Then he became a script supervisor. (This was when there were lines, before the dialogue had moved from “Nice shoes, wanna fuck?” to “Shoes.”) Then he became a producer, coordinating with location scouts and catering people. (Prior to this moment, I had not imagined there would be catering on the sets of adult films. Though it makes sense—sex requires more energy than a monologue unless you’re doing both wrong.) When Johnny started directing his own films, his parents flew out to San Francisco for his first premiere.

“What did your mother think of it?”

I had always imagined my great-aunt’s expression upon opening the dirty magazine, and it didn’t jibe with her flying out to California to support her son. She was one of those mannered ladies with flawless taste in clothing, husbands, and houses. After she died, her wine collection went to auction. And while the idea of some scandalized East Coast lady in a San Francisco porn theater is appealing in the abstract, I couldn’t picture this particular East Coast lady there.

“She had a one-word review,” Johnny says. “She found it ‘repetitious.’”

This is as fair an assessment of pornography as I’ve ever heard. “But she was proud?” “She was relieved. She liked me being on the other side of the camera.”

All Uncle Johnny wanted was to take his work home with him. Which, in a way, he did. Just not in the way he’d hoped. He got to know the industry so well, he made “a booklet of tips” for guys getting into porn for the first time. When I ask him if it was called “Just the Tips,” he stares at me blankly. It dawns on me that Johnny’s life has been so chockablock with sex jokes, he doesn’t have the capacity to let another one in. Instead, he tells me about how he took these guys under his wing and taught them how to fuck on camera. He speaks with such fondness for his costars that I am momentarily transported, forgetting that knowing how to fuck on camera is not a life skill.

“We ate dinner on each other’s porches,” he says. “Everyone thought we were having orgies, but never. We just . . . we just really liked each other.” I tell him what I know to be true: He was adored by these people. I’ve read the interviews. I’ve been reading them for years.

“Yeah,” he whispers, “that was my world. We were outlaws together.”

“Everyone thought we were having orgies, but never. We just . . . we just really liked each other.”

He means that literally. San Francisco was the hot spot for porn. In Los Angeles, police would drive around, following the actors, raiding sets. Tailing porn stars was a trickier business in a semi-walkable city. They could film where and when they wanted. For the most part. Once Johnny was part of a crew that borrowed a Rolls-Royce and drove up to Mill Valley to shoot a sex scene on a hill overlooking the city. Johnny was in the film, in the midst of “doing crazy sexual things” to Annette Haven, one of the industry’s more famous faces.

“We were on the trunk, on the roof, on the motor, inside the car, on the—”

“I got it.”

“The next thing you know, a police officer comes charging out of the woods and yells, ‘Nobody move!’ We were taken down to the station for public indecency, but when we got there, Annette just spent hours signing autographs for the cops.”

Seeman was a contemporary (and doppelgänger) of porn legend John Holmes, seen here in 1975. Getty Images

Johnny laughs. I laugh. Finally, I see my opening. “So did you ever date Annette? After that?” “She had a boyfriend,” he says. “And it wasn’t like that.” “Right,” I say. “But did you ever want to date one of your costars?” “You mean like was I in love with one of them?” I raise my fist to my mouth and clear my throat. “I was under the impression that you got into porn to find a girlfriend.” “Ah,” he says. “It’s true. I was always scheming about how to make one of these women my girlfriend. I know it’s not the standard reason people do this. A lot of people I knew were aspiring actors or models. Mainstream Hollywood was getting more risqué and porn was getting longer scripts and so they thought eventually it would meet in the middle. They thought they were going to be needed. But they weren’t needed. And then it was just—over. But I was looking for a relationship.”

“Did you ever find one?”

“I haven’t dated a woman for more than three months my entire life,” he says, popping a blueberry into his mouth. “The last time I had sex was the night Mike Tyson bit Evander Holyfield’s ear off.”

“And you haven’t dated anyone for longer than that since then?”

“Nope.”

The irony of this is not lost on Johnny. He runs a singles group at his local temple. He spends half his days helping other people find love.

“I hate to say this, but I think it’s the ultimate form of going after something you can’t have. If people become available to me in a real way, I think, How could they be interested? How could I have been interested in them? When I was working, I’d feel a connection with someone but then she’d start having sex with someone else who was taller and better-looking and I thought, I can’t compare to that guy.”

"I’d feel a connection with someone but then she’d start having sex with someone else who was taller and better-looking and I thought, I can’t compare to that guy.”

This is a familiar scenario for anyone living in the world, but Johnny subjected himself to the experience in real time. When he says “start having sex with someone else,” he means on the same piece of furniture.

Johnny made his last film in 1987. He was really attracted to the woman he was paired with and thought she might, at long last, make a good girlfriend. Then it turned out she already had a boyfriend and said boyfriend was a Hells Angel.

“I thought, well, that’s not going anyplace.” “And that was the last straw? After a decade of this?” “It would have been nice for it to come earlier,” Johnny agrees, “but I guess I’m a slow learner.” He looks at me for the first time without blinking or smiling, just dead-on like he knows exactly why I’m here. “You don’t just stop being who you are when you reach a certain age. You know that, right? You don’t magically outgrow yourself. The life you’re living now is your actual life, the habits you have now are your actual habits. I hope I’ve evolved—but I’m not so sure. But I can tell you that if you’re setting things up so they never work out by picking the wrong partners and you know you’re doing it . . .”

Johnny trails off. He looks at the photos on the piano. “Yes?” I ask. “Just stop it,” he says.

Seeman in a climactic scene from the 1976 film "Baby Rosemary." Courtesy

Johnny has never watched himself on-screen. He doesn’t own a single copy of his films and the idea of going to some retro-themed website holds no appeal. He thinks the Internet is plenty masturbatory without having to watch himself have sex on it. He is happy enough knowing that his movies are out there, that there’s proof he was the best ever at something, which is more than most people get. Plus, Johnny’s particular brand of fame means he can deploy his history at will, pluck it out of obscurity, or keep it buried.

“It will always be mine,” he explains. “It may be a red flag but it’s my red flag. Like I said, this is my actual life. This is the one I chose.” It’s getting dark out. Johnny walks me into the hall, where a halogen light flickers above our heads. He presses the elevator button for me. Nothing is revolutionary about Johnny’s advice. It feels as if I’ve always known it. Which is the flawed nature of all advice—you can have all the wisdom in the world laid out for you but it takes a lifetime to apply it. But just because Johnny’s plan didn’t work doesn’t mean it was ill-advised. His costars weren’t undatable by virtue of their profession. He just kept relating to them in a way that made them impossible to date. This is perhaps a less exotic lesson than I hoped for from a former porn star, but at least it’s one I can take home with me.

He is happy enough knowing that his movies are out there, that there’s proof he was the best ever at something, which is more than most people get.

I can feel an internal shift right then and there. It’s a subtle one—I am not (presto!) immune to the texting pyrotechnics of the opposite sex. You don’t magically outgrow yourself. But in the words of Johnny Seeman, this is my actual life and these are my actual habits. Or, in the words of Joan Didion, the most notoriously gone-to-California woman of our time: “. . . I was discovering that not all of the promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and every procrastination, every mistake, every word, all of it.”

“Hey,” Johnny says, moving in front of the elevator doors as they open, “you want to hear a dirty joke?”

“Sure,” I say, stunned that he knows any. “How many porn stars does it take to change a lightbulb?” “How many?”

“One,” he says, and grins. “So long as he screws it in himself.”

Excerpted from , available April 3, 2018. Copyright © 2018 by Sloane Crosley. Excerpted by permission of MCD, an imprint of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.