Whether in front of the camera or behind it, Candice Vadala
understood herself as both an artist and an entrepreneur. As Candida
Royalle (1950-2015)--underground actress, porn star, producer of
adult movies, and staunch feminist--she made a business of pleasure.
She helped crystalize the broader hedonistic turn in American life in
the second half of the twentieth century: a period when the rules of
sex were rewritten; when the white-hot "sex wars" cleaved
feminism and realigned American politics; when Big Freud, Big Drugs,
and Big Porn all came into looming focus; when the sex industry of
the 1970s and '80s radically upended conventional understandings of
law, technology, culture, love, and human desire.
The sexual
revolution was Royalle's war--even when other avowed feminists exited
the field or became her opponents--and pornography emerged as the
arena in which she would wage it. With the founding of her adult film
company, Femme Productions, in 1984, Royalle became an owner of the
means of pornographic production, infusing her sets with the ideals
of labor feminism. On-screen and off-, she was, by turns, exuberant
and thoughtful, self-possessed and gleefully shameless. A trailblazer
who lived along the cultural fault lines of her generation, she
danced at Woodstock, marched for women's liberation, survived the
AIDS crisis, and became a talk show regular, interviewed by Phil
Donahue, Dr. Ruth Westheimer, Morton Downey Jr., Jane Pauley, and
many others. As a performer, director, producer, and writer, she
moved the needle of her industry. But she never transcended the
politics of pleasure.
With full access to
Royalle's remarkable archive, historian Jane Kamensky has spent years
examining the intersection of Royalle's life with the clashes that
have defined her era--and ours. Deeply informed by these
never-before-studied materials, Kamensky explodes the conventions of
biography, with its assumptions about who makes history and how.
Written with cinematic verve, Candida Royalle and the Sexual
Revolution evokes Royalle's times in their broadest contours as
Kamensky traces the rise of an improbable heroine who broke the mold
and was herself broken in turn.