Double Play: An Interview with Phil Tarley, the Man Behind Porn Auteur Phil St. John
The guy who made DPs as common as a casual BJ in gay porn talks about his rebellious life ahead of the publication of a juicy, juicy memoir.
I met Phil Tarley earlier this year after a friend sold him to me as an interesting guy with a porn past. It turned out that Tarley, 73, all but invented double penetration in gay porn under the nom de fuck Phil St. John, and has worked with legends like Chad Douglas (whom he discovered), Scott O’Hara and David Ashfield.
My friend had buried the lede.
But framing Tarley as merely a porn director also buries the lede of the wild ride that is his artistically driven, recklessly rebellious life. Porn is not even the primary focus of his forthcoming memoir — there’s his 2018 tell-all Diary of a Puerto Rican Porno for that — though it does come up in the book, which deserves a wide audience.
“I’m a run-away, a teenage drug dealer, a hustler, a whore, and a thief,” he writes at the outset of the memoir. “I’m a revolutionary street-fighting man. I make art, I write, I make films, too. High adventure has always been my curse and my reward.”
He is all those things, and is also a fellow of the American Film Institute, member of the Photographic Arts Council, has curated more than 100 contemporary photography exhibitions, was creative director at the AC Gallery in Beverly Hills, and is an art collector with an astute eye whose West Hollywood digs are a mini museum of queer photography and painting.
Tarley prefers to keep the title of his shocking memoir, a hot commodity that any agent or publisher should snap up after cracking a few pages, a secret. But that’s just about the only thing he doesn’t discuss in the 200-page opus, which follows him from 1964 until today, starting in New York and enticing us from there to Cleveland to San Francisco to London to Rome.
In some ways, Tarley’s memoir is larger than himself, a historical document about what “we’re here, we’re queer” has really meant all these years.
What motivated you to write a memoir, and how did you decide what you were going to include and leave out?
Well, I made a documentary about my life in porn. I took all the behind-the-scenes footage that was hot and I shot some interstitials and wrote a script. Then I had a dual party for it, screening, which was the book party for Diary of a Puerto Rican Porno and screening of Phil St. John, My Life in Porn, at the Tom of Finland house. All the people that I loved and respected — artists and writers — came up to me after and said, “Your life is so much more fucking interesting than porn.” And I thought about that and I said, “You know what? That's fucking right on.”
Shortly after that, COVID hit. Now, whenever I had some wild, crazy adventure, usually out of the country, not necessarily porn, but porn included, I'd come back to L.A. and I'd write it. And sometimes it got published as a travel piece, and other times it just went in the drawer. When I sat down and wrote my memoir, I wanted to put that all together.
The book reads like a collection of literary short stories, so it makes sense that that's how you put it together. It's an amazing story. In the beginning, when you describe running away from NYC to Puerto Rico, it just is really crazy because it couldn’t happen today.
Yeah! [Laughs] I just thought when I was 13, I thought, “Well, everybody's like me.” I thought everyone was either Jewish or Italian until I left Brooklyn, you know? I knew everyone wasn't gay, though. But I've had some really fucking wild gay adventures.
The book opens with Tarley, just 13, sneaking into Greenwich Village from Brooklyn on his own, in search of a Beatnik underground club and cheap pot he’s heard about. Instead, he encounters a Beat poet who gets him high and rapes him, something he vividly describes as a struggle to survive. He wasn’t the only man to take advantage.
“All the older guys want to bugger me, but I don’t let them. Well, sometimes I have to. So, I close my eyes, grit my teeth, and hope it’s over quickly … They bring me home, give me hippie drugs, buy me great clothes, and take care of me. Sometimes, I have nowhere else to go.”
I was afraid reading what you were doing at 13.
I was afraid when that guy raped me and I was on LSD, yeah — I was really afraid. I thought, “This guy's going to kill me.” I thought I was going to die on his couch on the Lower East Side. But I didn't ... The good die young and the evil live forever. [Laughs]
That's something that could have traumatized a lot of people and kept them from wanting to go on. You seem to be someone who's always looking for what's next and moving forward.
Adventure. Yes, I'm a risk-aversion adventure junkie. I have some basic chromosomal damage on my risk-aversion adventure gene, and that has fucking propelled my life like a maniac. I have a situation ... I won't talk about it too much, but someone tried to slit my throat in my apartment about 20 years ago in West Hollywood. And the guy wanted to cum down my throat at the same time as he slit it.
My God ...
And also, I was orgasming at the same time. So, there was blood and cum spurting everywhere. And that totally traumatized me. I had to go into therapy, and I couldn't have sex with anyone for six months. I had post-traumatic stress disorder. Basically, well, after about three or four months, I could have sex with my, kind of, squeeze, but nobody else. Then after another six months, I could have sex with someone I didn't know, but it had to be by my door. [Laughs] Slowly, that went away, and I still have the scar on my neck. I could have gotten been taken off, but I thought it was important to keep the scar.
Still just 13, Tarley listens to his mom rave about Puerto Rico as a place “where summer never ends” — and decides to go. He packs, hails a cab to JFK and finds a woman to pose as his mother. He offers to pay her $50 to buy him a ticket to San Juan — and she does it. Once he lands, a Trans Caribbean airport employee, alerted to his presence, takes him to a hotel where he is stripped to keep him from leaving. The employee rapes him, afterward apologizing and asking Tarley to keep quiet so he won’t lose his job.
When he is returned, it isn’t exactly a happy ending.
“There is my mother with my aunt Ann, and they are dressed up to the tits. Mom has a big, white, fluffy mink coat, and they both wear lots of jewelry and makeup. The Trans Caribbean people have a legal release … She reads the form and hands it back to them. ‘I didn’t sign anything for him to go to Puerto Rico, and I’m certainly not signing anything to take him back. … If you don’t like that, you can keep him. He’s more trouble that he’s worth.’”
After tears and wheeling-and-dealing, Tarley is returned home, where his story about being raped is used to secure a large, undisclosed settlement. A doctor provides cream for his rectum.
With the trauma you had when you were so young, it didn't stop you from seeking sexual adventure.
I wasn't injured from the two rapes I had, the one in Puerto Rico when I ran away at 13 and the one on the Lower East Side. My ass was a little sore, but I didn't almost die. I went to a demonstration about the war in Vietnam. I went into the subway, into the bathroom, and I saw what was going on. It was the most amazing thing I could ever think of happening to anyone. Right away, I got a subway map, and I circled all the stuff of all the types of guys I wanted to see fuck, like Black guys in Spanish Harlem. And by the way, when I saw the first Black guy cum, and his cum wasn't black, it was white like mine, I thought, “Oh, my God, I am learning stuff.” [Laughs]
I went to Little Italy for Italians, the West Village for hippies, Madison Avenue for models. And the subway only cost a nickel. You get it? I had the best sex. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. It was so good. And the more sex I had, of course, the more I wanted.
How did that Puerto Rican episode color the rest of your life, especially with how you saw your mom, considering her icy handling of it?
She was hot, and she was cold. She was hepped up on diet pills a lot, and she would blow hot or cold, and she would beat the shit out of me, too. Then sometimes we'd open up a bottle of champagne and kill it. She'd tell me ... She's the only person who ever called me Philip. She'd say, “Philip, you really can't dance at all weddings.” I think, “Maybe not, Mom, but I'm sure as hell going to fucking try.”
She died at about 86. And interesting because in New York, they have a law, if you're over 60 and Jewish, you have to move to Florida, which she did. And so, I got to fly out there all the time to help out with her health care needs and take off to Key West, beaucoup times. I think I shared a joint with her once in Key West at a naked beach that she booked the hotel room for the sunset thing. That was the only time we smoked together.
So it wasn't a Leave It to Beaver situation.
No! Mom liked her sex, but she made men pay. The butcher had to bring us to steaks, the bagel man brought hot, fresh, steaming bagels every morning. The ice cream man, ice cream, and they all tried to get in. The ice cream man said, “But it's going to melt if I don't get in.” Me and my brother were dispatched to stop them. But some of them got in, and when she met the man that brought everything, she married him. He was from Transylvania. Literally. He had a cape. He'd take her to the opera and dress up in a cape and tux. Oh, my God, it was frightening.
“Mom liked her sex, but she made men pay.”
With another teen, Phil makes a fateful mistake, getting high and taking turns shooting out the windows of subway cars late at night. They tell the straphangers they encounter not to fear, they don’t mean them any harm, they just wanna shoot out some windows. Caught red-handed, Phil’s next adventure is one not of his own choosing.
How did you not end up in juvie?
I was sent to live with my uncle in Cleveland when the charges were dropped after I shot out the windows. We went from car to car to car [shooting]. I was already a runaway when they popped me. My Transylvanian stepfather brought a lawyer, and the lawyer said, “It's all been arranged. You'll have to appear before the judge. Basically, you're going to be sent to your uncle who's going to straighten you out in Cleveland. If you try to run away again, you'll be judged an incorrigible and sentenced to the rest of your youth in prison until you turn 18. Do you understand?” So what could I say? The judge banged the gavel and they just put me on the plane to Cleveland. That was terrible culture shock.
And I didn't have any sex! I was used to being a full-on whore in New York. But in Cleveland, I wasn't getting any until I became the largest LSD dealer in the Midwest.
While still a kid and exploring sex with a beautiful hippie girl (“If I like sex with guys, can I also like sex with girls” he wonders), Tarley stumbles upon a lucrative new career — dealing LSD — when the girl’s brother offers to set him up selling acid at $5 a hit. In no time, he’s doing thousands of dollars worth of business on a regular basis.
Once he was able, he later took off to San Francisco to capitalize on his business and to soak up the full hippie experience.
We had been selling a lot of the LSD, and the acid was the best. I mean, totally the best. When we made a biker connection for them to buy wholesale from me, they became my distributors, and they called me Schoolkid because I didn't want to join the biker club.. They knew that. They just bought my LSD. It was really strange. Do you know [the queer writer] Samuel Delany?
Oh, yeah.
I stayed in his house every time I went to San Francisco. Chip. I stayed with his roommate, Paul, who arranged dates for me with bikers and cowboys to fuck me. I couldn't believe these fantasy guys wanted to fuck me, but they did. He brought me out and schooled me into the ways of the gay world in San Francisco. I was very SDS [Students for a Democratic Society]. I was very, I was super radical. When Kent State happened [in 1970], that was it. They were rounding up activists. I was afraid for my life. I had already been arrested a few times. I said, “Fuck this shit. I am over the politics. I'm just going to go to San Francisco and take a lot of LSD and fuck my brains out and be a gay hippie.” And so, I did.
In your memoir, you write about a couple of different very early gay organizations. I was wondering, when you went to Mattachine meetings, how old were you?
I was 14, 15. It was a little alien because all these people were dressed in suits and stuff. They were very straight-looking. They were very kind to me. I had a lover from summer camp, Robert, a guy who lived in Great Neck. When I brought him the Mattachine brochures, he flipped out. That was it. Yeah, that was it. He said, “I'm not gay. I'm no faggot. Don't ever call me again.”
That's why it's impressive that you were going there so young because there were so many adults who would be too afraid to go to a meeting like that.
It didn't dawn on me of being afraid to go to a meeting. I was trying to understand my sexuality. I was confused. I was confused in trying to make sense of why I was so crazy for dick, cock-crazy at an early age. I was on fire for sex. It was wild. I just couldn't get enough cock, and I didn't understand why I was like that.
I bet they didn't discuss that at Mattachine! What was the Gay Liberation Front like?
That was much more fun. They were hippies. They were political. They were SDS people. That hit a lot of my beads. They were druggies, SDS, they had good politics. They were a little too left-wing for me, a little too regimented. Then I picked up a boyfriend from there in San Francisco who got me into a crazy house I stayed in, where it was very political. There were a couple of gay guys in there. My two roommates, who were my age, and then my boyfriend, who got me in there, and his political friends who were straight, and a girl who bore a baby there. The midwife cooked up the placenta with brown rice, mushrooms, cashew nuts and we all had to take a taste of it and eat that shit. [Laughs] It was nasty, too. I just had a tiny, little piece. Just to say I did it.
Where did you get your entrepreneurial streak from? Because going back to the LSD deals, you seemed so on top of how to conduct business.
Being a New York Jew, everybody around me was making buck. It just made sense: if you're going to do drugs, you might as well not have to pay for it. It seems to go well with sex, too. Drugs and sex was always a winning formula.
“Drugs and sex was always a winning formula.”
Always fascinated by movies, Tarley made a short and used it to gain admission to San Francisco State’s School of Cinema. But perhaps his most exciting movie adventure comes after making porn directly leads to an opportunity to work with some greats in Italy, including Marcello Mastroianni and Monica Vitti.
How did you wind up in Italy?
Sex! [Laughs] Well, I was making gay-porn loops for the mob’s Times Square peep shows. It's really an involved story, but they hooked me up. They also knew this guy, and I made them a lot of money. This was the East Village, 1978. I got to cast all my friends in my gay porn loops. I was employing all these people. I was having lots of fun. I was having lots of sex and making money and making movies. That was my night. But by day, I was reading scripts for United Artists. The mob guy said, “We have a friend here from Italy who's very high up and very connected in the Italian filmmaking industry — would you like to meet him?” I said, “Yeah, I'd love to.”
The guy was in town, he was an expat, and his father was dying, and he was, like, a basket case. So, I let him sleep with me in my little room in the East Village. We didn't have sex because he was into fist-fucking and — not my thing. But I would hold him in my arms and comfort him. He was also a friend of Bernardo Bertolucci's. Between the mob guys and him, they said, “Come to Italy and we'll hook you up.” I learned Italian in six weeks, and they got me a job on my first set — with Monica Vitti.
Were you intimidated working with such an icon?
The only time I was nervous was with Monica Vitti's assistant. She had biggest nose on any human face I'd ever seen in my life. I couldn't look at her. I would just break up. Finally, finally we became friends. Monica was playing in her thirties when she was in her late forties and was really hard-working. At the end of every take, she'd yell, “Scarpe! Scarpe!” [“Shoes! Shoes!”] and this woman, the nose, would run up with her slippers and put them on between takes. We were shooting on location in a field, and I saw some shoes and a bunch of cow shit. I lifted them up and I yelled, “Scarpe! Scarpe!” and everybody on the whole crew just went silent and looked at Monica. I thought, “Oh, my God, I've really done it.” She just broke out laughing, and then we became friends.
Going back to the loops, can you describe how you would make a porn loop? I feel like a lot of people wouldn't understand how they were made, they were so underground.
Well, my loops were a little more elaborate. A loop basically is a continuous piece of film. Then it was shot on 16mm but they would make 8mm prints. They would splice it together so it would run in a continuous loop, and you would have to put in quarters. If you wanted to see more, you'd have to put in another quarter. Usually, people put in four or five quarters at a time. You didn't want to be next to cumming and your coins run out. That's the principle of a loop. The gay loops, well, they just gave me carte blanche, but they did say, “Don't make comedies, because you can't laugh and keep a hard-on it at the same time.” I always remembered that as good advice.
“Don’t make comedies, because you can’t laugh and keep a hard-on at the same time.”
I remember my favorite loop was — I lived in a six-story walk-up in the East Village with a Dutch cemetery hidden in the middle of the block. I had this really hot Jewish boyfriend who looked Puerto Rican. I cast him as the Puerto Rican mugger. We got everybody's fire escapes, and we lit it apartment to apartment. Basically, he goes up and rapes everybody — ties them up and fucks them — until one guy turns the tables and ties him up and fucks him. That was so much fun to make. I shot it all on the fire escapes and in the apartments of my building and cut it all together. I think the whole thing ran about 20 minutes, and they put it out. They loved it.
Where did you find the people who would do this? This is the '70s — weren't people squeamish about putting themselves on film having sex?
Hell, no! This was the East Village. Artists friends of mine, actor friends of mine — half the people in my building wanted to be in it. You'd have to bat them away because you only want to cast the best-looking with the biggest dick. Because, of course, the old adage: the bigger the dick, the bigger the porn star, the bigger the movie. That's how I cast. Some of them were boyfriends, like my boyfriend. They were fuck buddies, actors, people that lived in the building and artists that I knew in the East Village. I was totally into the East Village filmmaking underground scene back then.
Did you ever see any of your loops?
Yeah, I did. I put a few quarters in just to see, and that was it.
But you were able to do it with a little extra flair? Most loops were probably just no-frills, right?
Right. Just fucking — the guy comes in, takes off his clothes, gets in bed, and spreads his legs.
Do you know if any of your loops survived? Do you have them saved?
No, I didn't save anything. Too bad.
What's the earliest thing you shot that you know exists, porn or not?
Well, let's see. I was nominated for a Student Academy Award, and that film played on PBS in New York, and that's how I got the United Artists job in UA from Stephen Bach. I just restored that. Also, it's very strange because I wanted FotoKem to do the color correction. They did all the prints of Oppenheimer in 70mm. And they wouldn't do it because they had content issues because the protagonist is this kind of sprite played by a naked boy throughout the whole movie who time-travels. He's naked throughout the whole film. The first shot you see him, he's laying on the floor in this 1890 Parisian apartment, looking at a stereopticon on his belly with a trail of duck eggs between his legs that the camera uses to pan up his body.
Atomic bomb yes, child nudity no.
Even though it played on PBS, even though it was nominated for a Student Academy Award. That was very odd, but I have it. I restored it. I also have this very strange film on VHS called Masters of Discipline, which I like very much. It's hardcore SM and softcore sex. It was shot in two days. The sub was so beaten up the first day, he didn't want to show up the second.
Then I think I have a copy of The Arousers [1984].
Was that your very first porn feature?
I'm trying to think it was the first. It may have been, but I wouldn't want to get credited for that. Getting It [1985] was an amazing film. Getting It was my first full-stop, 16mm porn film. The Arousers was a bigger-budgeted loop, but Getting It was like a big, giant Hollywood narrative movie.