The Secret Women’s Club That Rocked the Porn World

On a chilly February afternoon in 1983, the baby shower guests made their way into Annie Sprinkle’s Lexington Avenue apartment in Manhattan. Inside, a couple dozen people mingled around the “Sprinkle Salon,” as Annie, an adult film star, called it. Her home was a sort of Andy Warhol factory of the porn and underground art worlds, a place where she’d hosted sex world luminaries alongside artists and celebrities like the singer Tiny Tim.

At the shower, scholars, lawyers and gynecologists noshed next to dominatrixes and phone sex operators, escorts, and porn stars. A hunky bodybuilder named Roger Koch, who was one of famed photographer Robert Mapplethorpe’s favorite models, served cocktails and nipple cupcakes in a speedo and apron. A life-size cardboard cutout of a garter-and-stockings-clad Annie in a corset, licking her finger, stood in a corner of her apartment: promotional material for a recent film. The black-and-white glossies of porn stills on the walls were interspersed with blue and pink decorations in honor of the soon-to-be born child.

It was a pivotal time for porn. The once completely taboo industry had begun to be treated as somewhat legitimate in the 1970s, when celebrities embraced “porno chic” and big-budget adult films came complete with red carpet premieres. It was a time when Jack Nicholson and Jackie Kennedy went to see Deep Throat. Porn was booming. Yet many states still had laws criminalizing pornography, and many political and religious leaders were on missions to stop the rise of porn in its tracks. Movie theater owners who screened porn still risked prosecution. The female actors who worked in the industry, where nearly all producers and directors were men, had little to no workplace regulations or safety protections—in an era when the AIDS epidemic was just starting to spiral out of control.

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