Golden Age of Porn: Interview with Richard Pacheco, Pt. 1

Surrounded by Womanizing Studs, Pacheco was the Sensitive Dream Date

Richard Pacheco has seen and done more than a few pornographic things during his career, as well as quite a few famous princesses and queens of the Golden Age of Porn. Unless you are a hardcore fan of early hardcore fare, you may not be familiar with the multiple award winner’s name or his films, but you should be because he and they are wonderful.

Born Howie Gordon, the Pittsburgh-raised lad had a promising future ahead of him when he attended Antioch College in Ohio. After hooking up with a crazy hippie chick, the two moved west to Berkeley, CA to live in a commune. As one might expect that romance did not last long, but in 1971, when he met the woman who would become his wife, (also at the commune), his life changed. He became frustrated with the low wages of construction work and discouraged by his rabbinical and theological education options. The couple’s solution was to explore an open relationship with him giving porn a chance.

He got his chance in the 1978 film, The Candy Stripers. Shot in 33mm, what seems sexy, silly, and quaint by today’s standards gave the newbie hives before his first scene, according to Gordon’s autobiography, Hindsight. “I believe foreplay consisted of the director (Bob Chinn) saying to me, ‘You drop your drawers’ and then saying to my partner, ‘You get on your knees and suck his cock. When he gets hard, we’ll start shooting.’” His co-star’s stage name was Nancy Hoffman. His was McKinley Howard. Alas for McKinley Howard’s first porn shoot, he couldn’t. Shoot, that is. Not until director Chinn took mercy on the duo, and they broke for lunch. Hours later, Hoffman had to be woken up for the pop shot.

It was then he realized he was “not an exhibitionist. They invited me back for the orgy and I went.” Money, after all, is money, and at $200 a day, it paid some bills. The same year, he became Playgirl Magazine’s “Man of the Month” for November as Howie Gordon. The following year, he was declared the magazine’s “Man of the Year” and appeared on the Phil Donahue Show. Donahue had no idea the male model was also a porn star.

After The Candy Stripers, Gordon used a variety of stage names because he hoped to one day become a member of “real Hollywood.” That changed when he signed the model release for the 1980 film that made him a porn name to remember, Talk Dirty to Me. Directed by Anthony Spinelli, a man Gordon calls “my mentor and… a dear friend,” the actor needed a better screen name than he used at the time. Inspired by Donald Duck’s nephews and the famous king of Macedonia, “Dewey Alexander” had appeared in several films. But not in this one. Spinelli told the performer, “Kid, you did a great job in this movie. But I’ll tell you what. Fuckin’ Dewey Alexander’s not in my movie. Pick a new name!”

With that, Gordon turned to his director’s son, who had written the script. “He looked me up and down and said, ‘Richard Pacheco.’” He signed the model release and, as he explains it, “that movie became a big hit.” Soon, the phone was ringing constantly with offers for porn gigs for Richard Pacheco. “And that’s how I ended up with that stage name.” The multi-award-winning Talk Dirty to Me wasn’t just a professional game-changer for Gordon, it showed once again what was possible when a porn film appeals to the brain, the heart, and the genitals simultaneously.

Based very loosely on Of Mice and Men, the classic American novel by John Steinbeck, the characters Jack and Lenny remain, but with the necessary pornographic twist. The part of Lenny, which earned Gordon two Best Supporting Actor awards, still has special meaning to Gordon. His mentally disabled uncle had lived with his family. Uncle Izzy “was the center of my life growing up,” Gordon shares. “He was batshit crazy, but funny, especially in the walls of our own house. Anything could come out of his mouth. You never knew what was going to come.”

The tenderness that Gordon continues to feel for his uncle, who died during the production of the film, is part of what set him apart from most of the other male performers in the industry at the time or possibly since. “A lot of porn in those days,” he observes, “and a lot of porn still today, is written for an audience of men. An audience of men without women, who are angry because they don’t have women. And they want to see women they can’t have get really fucked. Hard.” He wanted his depiction of Lenny in Talk Dirty to Me to be an homage to his recently deceased uncle, who he describes as “one of the gentlest men in my life.”

Top male stars like John Leslie and Jamie Gillis, who worked alongside Gordon in several high-profile movies over the years, had very different online personas and attitudes toward women and sex with women. Leslie and Gillis became superstars of porn, mostly playing unsavory characters who moved casually from woman to woman and delighting in rough sex. Like Gordon, the men had genuine acting chops. Additionally, Leslie could come on cue.

By comparison, Gordon explains, “I don’t have that view of sexuality. I actually like women. And it’s not about revenge. It’s about ‘you get yours and I get mine.’ That to me is just common sense, good politics, and I try to live that way in my sexual relationships.” Because of this his persona was seen as “the thinking girl’s stud” and it took him time to learn to like his male co-stars.

“They were the men’s men and they had it any way they wanted,” Gordon reminisced. “And women would fall at their feet. I would mock that when I would meet John because, to me, he was a neanderthal. That was the past and I was the future. But I hung out with John a fair amount and started seeing the number of women who really liked that. They wanted to be treated that way, so I broadened my perspective.”

When Gordon entered the industry, porn movies were watched by men in search of a place to gather, smoke, drink, gamble, talk about women, and watch them get fucked. “It was entertainment for men,” he concludes. “It wasn’t meant for a larger audience.” With the advent of porn theaters and Gerard Damiano’s film with a plot, Deep Throat, as the first to appear in them, women could join their male partners and watch explicit sex films together while eating popcorn and sweet snacks. “It changed the world when he made that movie,” according to Gordon.

During those early days of accessible porn, Gordon felt that being a patron “really wasn’t a very pleasant experience for women to see women portrayed that way. I mean most women. Some women relish being in that role. It started to become that kind of sexuality was presented as the sum total of human sexuality. For a woman with an IQ higher than a plum, it was positively insulting. And cruel. And angry. And dangerous to present that as normal. It didn’t matter because they (women) weren’t the people buying the tickets by and large. They learned to stay away from that.”

“That all began evolving when women’s liberation began happening,” Gordon recalls. “We saw that as a national wave beginning in the late 60s. I remember being at a demonstration in Washington DC to end the war in Vietnam. When the first woman got up on stage and started talking about women’s liberation, it was like ‘What? What is this shit? We’re trying to end the war. Why is this on?’ It made no sense. I was one of the men yelling ‘get off!’”

Within the following six months, every woman Gordon wanted to fuck was into women’s lib. This led to a change in attitude. “Okay, what do I need to learn to get laid?” With women not interested in buying tickets to porn theaters, for the market to grow it had to change. It did so, but slowly. “In the ‘70s, Candida Royalle was a huge agent in that. That appealed to me, and I sort of became the champion of that cause and was used that way.” Ironically, he would often play opposite Leslie as they become friends.

As the tone of adult content began to expand, Gordon realized that if women “were in a place where daddy was a dominant, they wanted to fuck daddy. If they were in a place where mom and dad were more equal and had a working marriage where they worked shit out and both were entitled to their own opinions, then they wanted a more balanced human sexuality. That’s where I landed and I’m happy to have done that. My marriage reflects that, and my life reflects that.”

Next Chapter: All the Girls He's Loved