Robert Rosen

If you read my book Beaver Street: A History of Modern Pornography, you may recall a story about Bill Bottiggi, an editor I used to work with at Swank Publications who was murdered in 1991. 

A piece about Bottiggi in The Rialto Report, a website dedicated to the history of the adult entertainment industry, was recently brought to my attention. A number of Bottiggi's close friends were interviewed, and a portrait emerged of a beloved gay man with severe substance abuse issues. I'm referenced in the article as an associate editor who worked under Bill at Stag magazine, which is not quite correct—I was Bill's managing editor. One of his friends is quoted as saying that in Beaver Street I was "mean" to him.

In Beaver Street I describe what it was like to work for a boss who was in way over his head in a job he couldn't handle and would show up at the office reeking "like gin is coming out of his pores," as it says in The Rialto Report. I also describe how Bill damaged our working relationship by trying to demote me for making a few proofreading mistakes and hit on me when we went out drinking after work one night, and then got permanently pissed off when I made clear I wasn't interested. If this is being mean to Bill, then so be it.

It also says in The Rialto Report that I wrote in Beaver Street that Bill was extorting money from prisoners. This is false. I said he was soliciting correspondence from prisoners, selling their letters to porn magazines, and keeping all the money for himself, which is what I'd heard the police had theorized back in 2009 when I was writing the book. I suggested this might have been the motive for Bill's murder, though it seems more likely now that he was killed by somebody he picked up and took home.

I should add that several years ago I got a phone call from a cop who saw what I wrote about Bill in Beaver Street, which is in part why they reopened the case. That's how I found out that the police know who murdered him, they had the suspect in custody, but they let him go because the evidence was tainted.

According to The Rialto Report, the police encourage anyone with information about Bill's murder to call 800-577-TIPS.

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Joyce Snyder, whom I call Pam Katz in Beaver Street, released her own book, Mistress Pussycat, published last year by Headpress. Below is an interview she did with the Florida radio station WOCA, in which she discusses submissive men and her experiences as a dominatrix.

And here's a link to the story about the 1984 Critics Adult Film Awards on The Rialto Report.

I invite you to join me on Facebook or follow me on Twitter.

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That I've used pseudonyms for many of the "characters" who populate Beaver Street was an unavoidable concession to the fact that I was writing about real people, and it would have had a negative impact upon their lives to be portrayed as pornographers or former pornographers. One of those characters is "Pam Katz," and soon after Beaver Street was published, due to a variety of factors, it no longer was necessary to disguise her identity. She is Joyce Snyder, best known as the writer and producer of Raw Talent, parts I-III, classic XXX films from the 1980s that have recently been rediscovered by such sites as The Rialto Report and The Projection Booth, where you can listen to an interview with Joyce.

What Joyce has to say about making these films while she was working for Swank Publications should be of special interest to anybody who’s read Beaver Street. “Pam Katz” comes to life, veritably stepping out of the book.

The other people interviewed are the film’s director Larry Revene and its star, Jerry Butler.

It's been nearly seven weeks since I last posted here, and the ninth day of the ninth month (see Nowhere Man) seems like an auspicious day to declare an end to summer hours. Regular readers of what used to be The Daily Beaver will notice the name change. I'm now calling this blog The Sporadic Beaver, which means that I'm no longer going to post Monday-Friday, but will make the effort to post at least once every week.

A lot has been going on since July 24:

· I’ve given the complete Bobby in Naziland manuscript to the Mistress of Syntax, who has read the entire thing. I’ve since been working on corrections and rewrites.

· The Beaver Street Kindle edition was re-released on Amazon U.S. and Canada, and last week it was the #1 “Hot New Release” in pop culture books in the U.S., and the #2 “Hot New Release” in art books, behind Gertrude Stein’s The World Is Round, in Canada. This is my first #1 anything in the U.S. since September 2000, when Nowhere Man was riding high on numerous bestseller lists.

· In other Amazon news, the secretive company has made the Kindle edition of Beaver Street unavailable in the U.K., telling me that they “don’t have the rights to sell it.” This is what Amazon U.S. told me last year about the print edition of the book—before the threat of a public protest against Amazon censorship persuaded them to make the book available. Perhaps the Brits will sort this one out, though they’ve given no indication that they’re capable of doing so.

· I’ve been kicking back in Machiasport, Maine; Saint Andrews, New Brunswick; and Greenacres, Florida, doing my best not to think about Amazon or any of the other routine aggravations that the publishing industry is so good at generating.

· Eric Danville, Lainie Speiser, and I have been preparing for our next group reading on Tuesday, September 17, at 8:00 P.M., at the 2A bar in the East Village. The theme is politics, and I’ll be reading from the Lockhart Commission/Deep Throat/Watergate section of Beaver Street. Stay tuned for more info, and in the meantime, you can listen to Eric talk about Deep Throat on The Rialto Report.

Having written a book about the history of pornography, set mostly in New York City between 1974-1987, I take an abiding interest in all things having to do with the history of porn in New York. Recently, I've discovered a site called The Rialto Report, run by a man with a British accent who calls himself Ashley West and occasionally Benson Hurst, and who shares my abiding interest in the Golden Age of New York's adult industry.

Named for the now-closed Rialto Theatre on 42nd Street, the site has posted a series of podcast interviews with porn people from New York's past. Last night I listened to the interview with Carter Stevens, an actor, director, and producer, probably best known for a film called Lickity-Split. Though I didn't write about him in Beaver Street, he's one of those pornographers whose name you heard time and again if you worked in X; he was everywhere in the 70s and 80s.

The interview is over an hour, and Stevens, with his tough-guy voice, goes into great detail about New York in the days of Plato’s Retreat, Bernard’s, Jamie Gillis, Bobby Astor, Sharon Mitchell, and his ex-wife, Baby Doe.

As I write this, I’m listening to the provocative interview with Annie Sprinkle—she talks about rape and feminism. Sprinkle was a unique (to say the least) New York character whom I worked with when I was managing editor of Stag in the 1980s, and whom I did write about in Beaver Street. (I discuss Annie and some of her freaky predilections in this video clip from my interview with Kendra Holliday.)

Also interviewed on The Rialto Report are porn stars Jennifer Welles, George Payne, and Jeffrey Hurst, filmmaker John Amero, and photographer Barbara Nitke.

This is a rapidly expanding site, and a great resource well worth checking out.