Beaver Street

For sixteen years Robert Rosen worked behind the X-rated scenes of such porn magazines as High Society, Stag, and D-Cup. In BEAVER STREET: A HISTORY OF MODERN PORNOGRAPHY, Rosen blows the lid off the lucrative and politically hounded adult industry, providing a darkly engaging account of its tumultuous decades—from the defining Traci Lords scandal and the conception of ’free’ phone sex to the burgeoning success of smut in cyberspace in the twenty-first century. When Robert Rosen came to international awareness with NOWHERE MAN, his critically acclaimed portrait of Lennon’s last days, few knew that the author had spent two decades toiling as a publisher, copywriter, editor and photographer in the pornography industry. As a jobbing writer looking to make ends meet, he stumbled into porn at the moment his new employers, publishers of the ’adult’ magazine HIGH SOCIETY, invented phone sex. Initiating the latest phase in the historical alliance of sex, money and technology, the...