CENTER FOR SEX AND CULTURE

$10-30 sliding scale – no one turned away for lack of funds

Sam Benjamin has recently come out with a memoir about his time in the porn industry called "American Gangbang: A Love Story." “It's my story about how I graduated from Brown, hoped to become an auteur, sex-positive porn director, and fell flat on my ass . . .” says Sam. Among many other adventures, Sam describes taking part in one of Good Vibes's first films, "Slide Bi Me."

Instead of doing readings, Sam is presenting a funny, informative multimedia lecture called "A Brief History of Porn" that attempts to track the evolution of contemporary adult film across the last forty years, via non-explicit clips.

Joining Sam onstage will be Richard Pacheco, whose yet-to-be-published memoir of his time as a Golden Age pornsman is greatly anticipated. Sharing a bill with Pacheco we’ll time-travel through the porn worlds of now vs. then.

About the Book
A thoughtful, hilarious, and compulsively readable memoir by an Ivy League graduate-turned-pornographer who sets out to bring sophistication and equality to sexual cinema—only to find that he can’t change porn, but porn can certainly change him.
American Gangbang heralds the arrival of a profound and gifted new voice in narrative nonfiction. In 1999, after four years of studying at Brown University, Sam Benjamin heads to California in a twenty-year-old Volvo, dead set on turning himself into an artist, despite his complete lack of talent. There, stoned, he has an epiphany—he will make progressive porn. And so begins his turbulent journey. . . .

In whip-smart, lyrical prose, Benjamin traces his three-year immersion into the world of Hollywood’s bleak, screen glow–lit doppelganger: the southern California sex industry. His rapid ascent from the dingy storefront rental of a starving artist to the multimillion-dollar Malibu villa of a full-fledged porn producer confronts him with the uncomfortably alluring realities of America's strangest industry: gun-toting actors, high on terrible, drug-induced potency; giggling actresses battling internal demons in wobbly heels and pink fishnets; the insatiable consumer demands to sink ever lower, more exploitative, nastier. The result is the titillating, dramatic chronicle of a young man who invites the deepest, most troubling parts of himself to rise to the surface in order to get a good look at them—only to find that what he sees makes his world seem suddenly very small.

A provocative, universal coming-of-age story, American Gangbang explores with unflinching honesty the darkly rich junction of sex and self-discovery.
Review from LA critic Holly Willis:
http://www.kcet.org/updaily/socal_focus/arts-culture/a-love-story-about-sex-sam-benjamins-memoir-details-a-brief-career-in-the-adult-video-industry.html

Sam’s book will be available for purchase!