Rough Transcript

Season 2: Episode 2

Sex Over the Phone

Hosts: Gillian Frank & Lauren Gutterman

Guests and Additional Audio: Operator, Cellphone Ad Singer, Midnight Blue Phone Sex Ad, Broadcaster, Zoe, Laura, Mark King, Advertiser, Brian Herrera, Susie

Operator: Welcome to 6969 Fantasy Palace, to enter the Garden of Earthly Delights with anal pleasures push one on your touch-tone telephone. Succumb to the amorous desire of two lusty lasses, push two, I’m sure they’re in the maids quarters. For your own personal harem sex slave, push three and step into the chambers of Marquis de Sade. To descend to mistress divine’s den of pain and pleasure, push four. And for the kinky surprise of the day, push five and come in to the secret closet. Make your selection and wait for the sound of the tone, then push the number you want on your telephone, if you don’t have a touch-tone telephone stay on the line and I’ll select for you.

Lauren Gutterman: Pornography is as old as print, but in the 1980s, the porn industry entered a new era. New technologies allowed Americans to enjoy a greater variety of sexually explicit materials in more ways than ever before, often from within the privacy of their own homes.

In addition to magazines like Playboy, which had been around for decades, consumers could purchase new specialty publications like Juggs, Bound & Gagged, and Honcho. You could still see pornographic films in adult theaters. But the invention of the Video Cassette Recorder—what our over-30 listeners will recognize as the VCR—brought those pornographic films into people’s homes. By 1988, Americans were renting over 200 million X-rated videos a year.

Gillian Frank: Alongside the pornographic video revolution, two new kinds of telephone services transformed sexual entertainment. Due to new credit card technology and the deregulation of the phone industry, Americans could now have an erotic auditory experience wherever there was a phone line.

A simple and relatively cheap phone call could connect you with dial-a-porn, a telephone service offering short erotic recordings. Phone sex lines were more expensive, and featured operators, known as fantasy artists, who would act out sexual fantasies for and with you.

Cellphone Ad Singer: Reach out, reach out and touch someone. Reach out, call up and just say hi. Reach out, reach out and touch someone.

Gillian Frank: For years, telephone companies had been encouraging customers to “reach out and touch someone.” But phone sex lines and dial-a-porn transformed the intimacy of phone conversations into a multi-million-dollar sexual enterprise. Over the course of the 1980s, telephones, credit cards and imaginations brought countless people together to co-create sexual fantasies, and experience new forms of sexual gratification.

Lauren Gutterman: Although moaning and whispering voices shaped the phone sex revolution during the 1980s, the loudest voices were not always the owners, the operators or the callers. Often, they were the voices of politicians and concerned parents who angrily denounced dial-a-porn and phone-sex-lines as dangerous. These groups spearheaded legislation and wrote angry articles in the name of protecting children from sexual messages. Their campaigns largely obscured the lives and experiences of the everyday people who worked the phones.  

In this episode, we speak with five former “fantasy artists,” who worked on phone sex lines in the 1980s or early 1990s. Their stories help us understand how phone sex lines and dial-a-porn recordings allowed Americans to experiment erotically, form sexual community, experience pleasure, and make money.

I’m Lauren Gutterman.

Gillian Frank: And I’mi Gillian Frank, welcome to sexing history.

Midnight Blue Phone Sex Ad: 970-MOST gets me hot dates. Take Dan, he frenched my clit and tit fucked me. I deepthroated his hot, stiff dick. I met Bob on 970- MOST, he butt fucked me. And I met Frank, I roto-rooted his ass and slamfucked him. Anytime I want the most action, I just dial 970-MOST.

Gillian Frank: Two major factors made the phone sex industry possible in the 1980s: the liberalization of obscenity laws during the 1960s and 1970s and the deregulation of the telephone industry in the early 1980s. In the 1960s, the courts granted greater legal protections to the producers and consumers of sexually explicit material. Legal changes made it easier to produce, distribute, purchase and possess sexually explicit photographs, films and writing.

Pornography also became an increasingly important and controversial issue in national politics, especially after the 1970 report from a federal Commission on Pornography and Obscenity. This report found that most Americans “believe that adults should be allowed to read or see any sexual materials they wish.” The Commission’s report angered conservatives when it called for the repeal of all federal, state, and local laws restricting the sale of sexually explicit materials to consenting adults.

Broadcaster: The presidential commission on pornography released it’s report officially today, a good deal of it had been leaked in recent weeks and President Nixon had made it clear he wanted no part of it. He hadn’t appointed the commission and he disagreed with what it advocates. The report recommends repeal of all laws prohibiting the distribution of any dirty materials to adults, it does ask however for state laws that keep children from seeing or buying dirty pictures, but not written materials. That, said the commission, just cannot be legislated. And finally the commission asked for a massive program of sex education, so people can deal knowledgably with such matters.

Lauren Gutterman:  By the early 1980s, the pornography industry was pumping out countless magazines and films and making millions of dollars a year. In 1982, changes to phone companies created new opportunities for producers of adult materials. When the Federal Communications Commission broke up AT&T’s national monopoly, it ordered AT&T to sell off its "enhanced" phone lines. In the past, these “enhanced” phone lines had offered a variety of pre-recorded services including jokes, prayers, and weather reports. After deregulation, the cost of operating 1-800 and 1-900 numbers dropped significantly. With costs down, pornographers could now afford to by 1-900 numbers and used them to promote their magazines and make money.

The popular adult magazine High Society led the charge. In May of 1982, it created a service called “Free Phone Sex.” This service, of course, wasn’t free. A call to “Free Phone Sex” cost an average of 7 cents — 5 cents went to the phone company and 2 cents went to High Society. “Free Phone Sex” contained a three-minute steamy message that complemented a photo spread in the magazine. “Free Phone Sex” was an instant hit and reportedly received 1.5 million calls over its first two months. By February of 1983, half-a-million callers dialed the “Free Phone Sex” number each day. By then this service was popularly known as dial-a-porn.

Gillian Frank: Dozens of dial-a-porn lines quickly sprang up. Some of the most popular lines received hundreds of thousands of calls a day. Between 1983 and 1988 the Dial-a-Porn industry grossed billions of dollars. dial-a-porn, according to one commentator, was the “tv dinner” of the telephone sex industry: cheap, quick and pre-packaged for mass audiences. For longer and more customized experiences, there was a second, more expensive option: live phone sex lines where you could speak with a so-called “fantasy artist.”

Phone sex companies advertised their services in the back pages of pornography magazines. These advertisements featured women in various stages of undress, telephones to their ears, with captions like “Be seduced by phone!” By the end of 1983, the phone sex and dial-a-porn business had become so large that there were more advertisers than spaces to advertise. One adult publisher reported that he had to turn away "more than $300,000 worth of tele-sex ads." Likewise, phone sex companies took advantage of the booming adult home video industry and advertised their services at the beginning of pornographic videos.

Lauren Gutterman: Phone sex workers were drawn to the industry because it paid decently and offered flexible working hours. Some operators took these jobs because they enjoyed the work.

Zoe: Hello, my name is Zoe, I am 47 years old, and I have been, I have done phone sex when I was younger. Then I took a break and then for the past 17 years I have been doing in-person work with real people. So I had probably already tired some work at coffee shops and stuff and I’ve always been more adventurous and I had a lot of theatre skills already from this point. So when I saw this advertisement I was like “I can do this”, and especially since I already knew that the thing that I was good at was talking and kind of creating a fantasy through roleplay, through theatre, and like improvisation. So I went that way for those reasons, and being dyslexic and not having any written ability played a big part too of why I’ve remained in the industry and why I’m good at it, and also why it’s kept me, in a good way. I mean now I’ve made it what it is.

Lauren Gutterman: Laura, a wife and mother of two, also responded to an ad in the newspaper for a "fantasy artist." Initially she thought she was answering an ad for visual artists:

Laura: Hi my name is Laura and when I was 27 years old I was a fantasy artist on the telephone. I did it very briefly and it was really interesting, I had two little kids at home and I was desperate to find some kind of job I could do. And I saw fantasy artist, so I put together my little portfolio of my pen and ink drawings of unicorns with moons and stars and I took it to the address, and I actually showed up with a portfolio in my hand saying “Hi I’m here to apply for the job as a fantasy artist.” I walked into this room and I showed the lady all my pictures and she said “That’s really nice, um, but can you talk about cock.” It was just really difficult for me, I was really kind of not kinky at the time, I was just like young and I was like “yeah I can totally do that”, because I really needed the job.

Gillian Frank: Phone sex workers typically received little, if any, formal training. They learned their trade on the job. Their callers quickly taught them about a range of sexual expressions and a variety of sexual fantasies. The phone sex workers we interviewed recalled feeling nervous about their sexual knowledge and their lack of sexual experience. Here’s Laura:  

Laura: I was so terrified, because I, I thought, you know, okay, well how much can you say about sex, like you put it in and it goes out and it goes in and it goes out. You know, I could probably describe a blow job adequately, but I didn’t know anything about any kind of sex other than vanilla sex, I had never, I didn’t know people spanked each other, I didn’t know, I mean I only vaguely knew about butt-sex and that wasn’t something anybody I knew was probably doing.

So I was terrified that somebody was going to want to talk about something I didn’t really know about, and I asked the woman, her name was Tiffany, I asked her, like “what do I do if they want to talk about something I don’t know about.” She said, “Well you get them to tell you about that thing and then you just give it back to them, and if you’re creative you can just make something up.

So I kind of did that, but the, a regular client I had was a submissive guy that always wanted to talk about why I was pulling the collar on his leash back so hard, and I just had no idea, I just didn’t have a clue. But pretty much every call I took unless it was a regular, I was terrified they were going to want to talk about something that I didn’t know about and I was going to get called out for not being sexy enough.

Lauren Gutterman: Here’s Zoe.

Zoe: So, I had only read a lot of words at this point, so I wasn’t very sexually experienced, but in my mind I had had lots of sex in books, so I was ready, I was ready to get these words out of my mouth. But I hadn’t heard them because my family really didn’t talk like that, and I didn’ really have an outlet. I was young, I was like 20 at this point, and so at my first day of work there I was like “twat, twat”, cause that was a word you could use. I’m like, “yeah, fuck my twat” and the guy’s like “is this your first day here” and I’m like “Yes!” and he’s like “Yeah I can tell. The word is twat” and that was like a total learning disability moment of not knowing how some of these words sound pronounced.

Lauren Gutterman: Phone sex operators’ work experiences differed depending on the size of the company. Zoe, who worked for a large phone sex company, remembers the long, tiring shifts:

Zoe: This was all on shift work, this was all over the United States. People were calling in at all times, so you know, people have hard-ons at 6 AM somewhere and we’re given literally a phone and told to chit chat about an idea of sexuality and being fucked for 8 hours straight with like 15 minute breaks and another half hour lunch break and then another 15 minute break. So it was really hard on the voice. So, I got off at like 11:45 and then I would catch the midnight bus home to my home and I’d be very tired and it was very isolating.

Lauren Gutterman: Laura was employed by a smaller company that allowed her to work from home:

Laura: Well I decided to work from home because I had these little, these two little kids, and my idea was I was going to only take calls when they were either having nap time or they had gone down to bed. I had a husband at the time and he was totally down to like run interference, but customers especially regulars especially didn’t really know or respect my time frame that I wanted to do this. So I ended up trying to take calls in the middle of the day, I got interrupted by my kids more than once which was really awkward and weird.

Gillian Frank: Phone sex, of course, was a performance and phone sex workers were known as “fantasy artists” for good reason: The models and actresses who appeared in phone sex ads, whether printed or on television, were rarely actual phone sex operators. But they helped to shape callers’ fantasies long before they reached for a phone.

What mattered to callers was that the fantasy artist’s aural self-presentation seemed real and validated their desires. As Mark explained, this suspension of disbelief was part of what differentiated phone sex work from other types of sex work:

Mark King: My name is Mark King, but in the 1980s I went by the name of David on gay phone sex lines. One of which I worked for and another of which I owned which became Telerotic which became one of the largest gay phone sex companies in the industry. It was, it was a little nerve wracking because you want to come off as this sexual, you know, superman sorta guy that is just too good to be believed.

And so I learned early on I had to have lots of details, lots of salient details about why I was built so magnificently and my part-time job as a volunteer firefighter or the fact that I just retired from the minor-leagues baseball. Whatever all those details were that just kind of had to be tossed out in a casual way. “Oh you don’t believe that I have a 10 inch dick, you should see my brothers, cause I’m not the biggest one. You know, whatever I could throw out there that seemed to be kind of just enough detail to be convincing. And that was the whole point, you’re faking all of it, you’re faking who you are, what your background is, how well you are hung, what you’re in to sexually, you’re faking it all.

But what’s interesting about that dynamic with a customer is, they have to believe it’s real and look, I’ve met everybody that worked for me, none of them were sexual ideals, none of us are, none of us can live up to the descriptions we were giving of ourselves and the lives that we led and what was between our legs. Nobody, you know, we were all Olympian in our descriptions.

Lauren Gutterman: Phone sex workers developed a portfolio of characters that enabled them to cater to as many different callers as possible. And they learned that performing multiple voices was a marketable skill. Here’s Laura:

Laura: She said, watch me do a couple of calls, if you think you can do it, then your training will be to listen in on calls for a couple of times and then if you think you can do it, we’ll just route you a call. She told me, the first time she was like, can you do accents, because if you can do two girls, you can make all the money on a two girl call, that’s how you make the big money in this. And I was like, well how can you talk with two voices at the same time, and she had this wet foam rubber thing that she would hold in her hand that would kind of make this blowjob sound and she’d go “oh no no, both girls don’t talk at the same time, one girl has his dick in his mouth and she squishes the thing and the other girl talks.” She goes, “And if you can do ethnic accents, that makes you even more valuable and I was just like, I think that’s beyond my skill level. But I was totally from southern California and I was still young so I had this valley girl character that became the character that was most asked for all the time.

Brian Herrera: My name is Brian Herrera, I am a professor of theater at Princeton University and I, let’s see, in the very early 1990s immediately after graduating college, my day job, the job I used to pay my rent, was I was a phone sex moderator on some of the most profitable party line services serving the greater New York City area. When I started, they told me, “you might have a couple personas at hand” and so I developed three personas, one of which was a reliable persona which I used off and on throughout my entire time and one was one that didn’t really click and then one was one that I could use, it was an easy one.

But what they didn’t tell me was that one of the most important personas you had to have was the operator persona. The person who went “Hi this is the operator, what can I do for you”. And that was a kind of flirty convivial host kind of job that wasn’t necessarily, didn’t necessarily lead with the sex, but led with the sexy. And so that was the persona that I didn’t know I had to develop. Like I came in my first shift expecting I had Max who was the top dominant kind of guy, there was Eddy who was the young, kind of submissive guy, there was Vince who was the curious guy. You know, I have these sort of very specific voices, different places in my voice, you know the whole thing.

But the one I wasn’t prepared for was when somebody who called the operator pressing the zero button on their phone and I came up saying “Hi this is the operator what can I do for you, and they’d go ‘hi operator what’s your name’. And that was like, I didn’t prepare for this, and I knew thankfully, not to use my own name. So the name that came to mind was the name of my most enduring high school crush, and so I just, I became Dean. For the next three years, Dean became a big part of my life and a big part of myself actually.

One of my co-workers, I don’t know what she had on our bosses, but there were times when she would just at three o’clock in the morning say ‘I’m going home’. Which of course meant the rest of my shift was rotten, because her lines were totally unattended, there were no women’s voices out there, and so her guys were just beeping like crazy, just, it was in the quietest time of night when they really needed a woman’s voice out there on the line, and I was having to go over to her line. So there was one night where my lines were utterly empty, nobody was on my lines, and her lines had a handful of people who were just button hammers, they were just constantly pressing there. And I’d go out there and say “Hey this is the operator” and they were like “You’re not the operator” or they would get homophobic or whatever and it was just terrible.

For reasons I just do not understand, there was one beep that came on the nine line, I wouldn’t have done this on one of the regular straight lines, I went out and said “Hi this is Sheila”, and using a sort of modified voice that I felt could pass as somebody who was trans or like in the lingo of the day as cross dressing. And so I went out and it was an amazing, like suddenly everybody was like “Hi” and I went “Hi this is, this is Sheila”. And in that moment of the callers mishearing my name Sheila as Sheena, this thing happened where I let them just sort of tell me when it was working. And I went out, and for the next two hours I was out there and I periodically would go and like I would get a beep from one of the other straight lines on the six line or whatever and they would say “Hey is there any ladies out there” and I’d go like “Uh no, I do have a girl talking on the nine line, that’s a line for cross-dressers and their admirers, if it’s cool with you I can take you over there, she’s talking. And he’d go “Oh okay, okay”, and I’d drop him off and I’d switch gears and be back to being Sheena again.

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Gillian Frank: Racial fantasies and stereotypes shaped the marketing and making of pornography. Phone sex lines, like the larger pornography industry from which they grew, scripted and provoked callers’ fantasies along racial lines. Because callers wanted to play out racialized sexual fantasies, phone sex workers obliged them and by doing so played into, perpetuated and sometimes even subverted racial stereotypes.

Lauren Gutterman: The segmented nature of the pornography industry inspired racial performances and racial masquerade. Here’s Laura:

Laura: Oh yeah, that was the two voices, if you can do two ethnic voices, she used to do a black woman and a Filipino woman at the same time and that woman was just as pasty white as I am. I said, “Oh no, I wouldn’t be good at that”, but thinking back on it they were pretty stereotypically terrible vocal impressions of ethnicities. But yeah, black women and Filipino women were two of the characters that she did and she could do them both at the same time, with her squishy little foam thing.

Lauren Gutterman: Phone sex operators were required to aurally perform race in different ways.  As part of their repertoire, some white phone sex workers performed with stereotypical black and Asian accents. At the same time, phone sex workers of color were often instructed to “talk white.” Rather than bringing people together across racial boundaries in ways that might have challenged racialized, sexual stereotypes, the phone sex industry, like the pornography industry itself, exploited these stereotypes for profit.

Mark King: The sexual politics even today are so much different than they were then, in terms of our objectification of the black male form and they were by and large white. They would often ask for a black man, they wanted a big black man, right, you know, wow how novel. I was not able to do that accent very well, I was not a very convincing urban black man, so other people would do those calls, and absolutely, it certainly fell along the sexual objectification stereotypes that you might imagine. It was always a little strange, to say “Tony, he wants a black guy, so you need to act like, really black.”

Gillian Frank: Here’s Brian.

Brian Herrera: Um, different folks did different things, I mean I know that the- I didn’t do this, um, all I had to say is that I found if I said I was Latino it would often activate a whole narrative. Like cause I am Latino, so when I would say I was Latino I could see that the idea of Latino-ness would change how the client, what they would, like it’s the idea of just name-checking it sometimes.

Some guys I know, like I’m thinking of one guy in particular who was um, uh, biracial, Asian-White, would sometimes do these sort of interesting euphemistic ways of talking about his looks. He could play white, or he could play more exotic, or he could play Asian. One guy I know, did have, he was black, sort of walked in between legibility, would shift of his idiomatics would sometimes not disclose that he was black. So I remember one of the women who worked the line, she was black, and she was read, if that’s the right word, she was read as black by callers almost immediately and there would be sort of abusive talk to other operators, saying I don’t want to call in that blah-blah so on.

So, there would be certain ways where the question of if someone was legibly specific and I mean that was the trick, right, every erotic fantasy is contoured by specifics. So the trick I found was trying to find a way that was neutral, you know so it’s that thing of how do you find the line that can be, like what is the measure of neutrality that’s going to be the most clear, most appealing, most specific that can also be adapted to what people want to talk about.

Gillian Frank: As Brian and Mark suggest, phone sex operators fund fantasies from and in response to widely shared ideas about race. At the same time, phone sex operators became intimately familiar with how the sexual scripts that they performed on the lines depended on troubling and stereotypical ideas about racial difference.

As phone sex operators catered to the diverse desires of their clientele, they began to notice larger patterns in the sexual behavior of their callers. These patterns broke down along gay and straight and male and female lines. Here’s Zoe:

Zoe: Well there was two different types. So there was the type that did the party line and I think that they were basically at home masturbating listening in and then some of them wanting interaction and some of them wanting to just listen in. And then definitely once you got to the private lines there was a beginning, middle and end, you know, where it was kind of like a phone date, where you got to know them, you got to their choice of interaction or what kind of interaction they wanted, and then do that interaction and then they would cum.

They would always, always, they hang up without saying anything, like it just didn’t happen. You know they’re cleaning like, I swear what would happen is that they would put down the phone to clean up their cum, and then they would just put the phone down, and you’re like “Alright, whatever, okay that was good.” So that would always make me laugh too.

Mark King: And I will say to you, we also did straight calls, after a while I hired women and I had women talking to straight customers, we advertised in straight magazines and straight guys called. Completely different animals, completely different customers. Whereas the gay men had lots of ideas about the kind of man they wanted to talk to or the fantasies they might have, straight men were like “Uh there’s a manor, just give me a hot girl yeah, just give me a hot girl that’s fine.” That’s it, you know I don’t want to say they didn’t have much imagination, but they didn’t have much imagination.

They really just wanted the girl to coo and coo and go “Oh honey oh yes that’s so hot oh do that and, and they’d get off in five minutes and that was that. They didn’t have a need for someone to truly understand them, because their sexuality was misunderstood or stigmatized. Gay men cared a lot, and uh, the kind of conversations they had with the employee was very different.

Gillian Frank: Zoe had a more generous reading of men’s behavior and desires. She believed that men's sexual behaviors over the phone sprang from deep insecurities and their unmet emotional needs.

Zoe: It was interesting because before this like, you know I thought guys had it made and I think this experience really gave me the reality that guys are insecure and they’re a little lonely, they’re afraid of their dick size. They’re just these kind of miscreant, you know unnerved creatures like we all are and they would be funny and kind and concerned and they would want to hear about what was going on in my day or what did I think about this. Sometimes I think that was really interesting to me, to see that all these different ways that these men wanted to interact with me and it wasn’t just about sex, especially on the party line.

Gillian Frank: For Susie working in phone sex provided a window into men’s emotional lives and into their sexual anxieties.

Susie: Hi my name’s Susie I’m an OG sex worker and a former phone-sex operator and owner. I’ve always found that most guys are regular Joe’s that want some female companionship. You know, and then there’s your fringe people, and the majority of guys are just pretty typical, you know. They just want to hear how hot they are, how strong they are, how big they are, and how good they’re making you feel.

Lauren Gutterman: Although the vast majority of callers to phone sex lines were men, Mark remembers having one straight, female client who called him regularly. According to Mark, this woman’s needs were quite different from those of his male clients.

Mark King: Our calls together were like her Calgon moment. The moment where she could just put on her night gown, she was divorced, she would put the kids to bed, once a month right after pay day I would get a call. She would place an order and she would talk to me because we had built this relationship and she would be in her basement wearing her prettiest negligee with a glass of wine in her hand. And it was time for some me time with David, my online persona. She would talk to me about life and things that were going on and I would have to be, you know, I knew that when I talked to her it was going to be at least a 45-minute call and I had to be okay with that. I could’ve just not taken it and just done three 13 minute calls with gay men but there was something about her that was so lovely, because clearly this was her escape, she was such a lovely woman. And it would be about her life and about her divorce and about the man that she thinks she might have a date with and what not and only after establishing that kind of rapport you know, for a while on the phone, could I then start speaking explicitly about sex.

Gillian Frank: Phone sex workers became adept at reading their caller’s desires and inviting them to express their fantasies.

Susie: Well you’d say, you’d do the money thing and then you’d get on the phone and go “Hi, this is Susie how are you today?” and they would say “Oh you know I’m great” or whatever and go “Well what would you like to talk about?” and if they were hemming and hawing you would say “Would you like to talk about, oh, red lips that might wrap around the head of your cock or would you like to talk about my big bouncing breasts or how about my hot steamy pussy?” And then you know, you’d just listen to hear like when that catch in their voice or their breathing starts. Like if they’re a boob man and you go “My big bouncing tits” and *sharp inhale* then you know to go down that you know, that road. And some guys you had to draw out and other guys would just sit there and talk back to you, and then you’d get your guys, and I’ve literally, I hate to say this, dude whoever you were I’m sorry, one guy just kept talking and talking and talking and I actually went to sleep with the phone against my ear and woke up and he was still talking, describing all this stuff, luckily I went to sleep and didn’t make any sleep sound.

Gillian Frank: Phone sex lines created opportunities for some men to communicate desires that they could not express in their day-to-day lives: desires such as group sex, bondage, and cross dressing. Here’s Laura: 

Laura: But I had two really specific and strange clients that liked specific strange things. One of them, his deal was he wanted me to be putting shaving cream all over my naked body and pressing myself up against the wall while I talked to him. The other guy wanted to discuss specific either Playboy, or Penthouse, or Hustler specific pages of that and then he’d want me to tear the pages out and then he’d want me to tear down right between her tits, now try to get it to tear right in the middle of the crotch. The first time I had a call with him I tore up my husband’s playboy magazine, and he was like “Hey, I was going to read that” and I realized wait, newspaper sounds the same as a magazine tearing and *sprays empty shaving cream can* can sound the same as spraying shaving cream because I totally killed all the propellant in his shaving cream. He was like, I can’t shave because I have no propellant in the can because you used it all for that. Necessity was the mother of my invention, I probably would’ve been better and more successful if I had known more about real sex and what kind of things to make sounds for.

Gillian Frank: For some women, working on phone sex lines allowed them to form friendships and community. Their jobs also created opportunities for sexual exploration. In learning about a variety sexual practices, gossiping with co-workers, and creating alter egos, these phone sex workers experienced a feeling of sexual freedom and empowerment that was not always possible in their daily lives. Susie, who ran her own company, remembers that drafting the phone sex scripts for pre-recorded calls, was particularly fun.

Susie: Oh it was absolutely fun, that’s why we did it, it was fun. I mean we would laugh until tears would roll out of our eyes. These scripts I mean they’re funny, they’re sexy, but they’re funny, I mean it’s crazy like fast food, I mean c’mon we’re working at a fast food place and okay so it was myself and my friend so it’s like number one and number two. “Wow this fast food job is really a drag, I wish something exciting would happen.” Second person, “Hey here comes that guy with the big balls in his pants, I love how he always stares at my ripe tomatoes.” Number one “Yeah, there’s his friend, the one with the hot buns I wonder if they have an mayonnaise for us, let’s ask. Hey guys, you deserve a break today, my pussy’s so hot and juicy it’s just right to cook your meat in, I hope you like it well done.” “Mmm yeah, well I like my meat raw come over here baby and let me wrap my lips around your whopper, I’ll do it your way.” So yeah, we had much fun doing it, that’s why we did it because it was fun and you could make money.

Lauren Gutterman: Commercial phone sex also fostered queer community. Gay male phone sex workers Mark and Brian who worked in LA and New York City recalled that phone sex offered a vital service for younger and more isolated gay men desperate for sexual affirmation and understanding. Here’s Mark:

Brian Herrera: A lot of my regulars were actually young gay men who would call me and ask me questions about what it was like to be out. Like, and would be law students at NYU or whatever and they would have these elaborate phone fantasy experiences and with me they would say “How does anal sex really work?”

Lauren Gutterman: Here’s Mark.

Mark King: And yes of course there was, there was pillow talk sometimes, sometimes you would find out where they lived, and they would share things about their lives. These were primarily gay men who lived not in big cities, where they had a lot of options, in terms of sexual options. These were men who lived in second-tier cities or small towns. So they were relying on services like ours, and of course as AIDS appeared on the horizon and became more and more of a threat, more and more people – I think that that certainly played a role in the popularity of those phone sex companies at the time.

Lauren Gutterman: By 1983, phone sex lines were in full swing with “fantasy fulfillment” at $35 a call. Boosters of the business described it as a “herpes-free, guilt free” sexual outlet. And for gay men, it became a site of sexual contact at a moment when the HIV/AIDS epidemic was emerging.  Having phone sex with another man was a form of safe sex, one that carried no risk of infection or transmission at all. Here’s Brian:

Brian Herrera: Phone sex is, I argue, is a crucial pivot point in the history of gay cruising. Because, at the time, phone sex was part of the big phone telecommunication transformation of what phone services were available and how you could make money off of telephones. But if you look at the history of gay cruising, phone sex was this pivot point of moving from shared air spaces of bars and backrooms and bathhouses into telephonically computer-mediated cruising. So, some of the practices of erotic experimentation or erotic exploration or erotic curiosity that might have found its way to an adult bookstore in the era of infection means death, that was a little more fraught, yet those erotic impulses, those erotic curiosities, those did not go away. So it’s this interesting sort of moment, it had a use value for gay men as they sort of maneuvered a shifting reality of ‘how can I have casual sexy fun, without the risk of it being something more frightening than a standard STD.’

Gillian Frank: Here’s Mark.

Mark King: It was not a consideration when the business, certainly when I started in the business, it wasn’t a consideration, it wasn’t something that had encroached on my community or among my friends yet, it was something kind of off in the distance, 1981, 1982. And certainly by the time I had started my own company 1983, 84, 85, it was drawing nearer. And certainly it was in the news a lot, it was something that customers would mention as kind of the rationale for calling us, which may or may not have been true, maybe they were just lonely and couldn’t get laid elsewhere, I mean that’s probably the case as well.

I remember when it had really arrived, AIDS had really arrived, when one of my customers, during a call, you know we’re going through sex on the call and he talked about – he described reaching in his nightstand for a condom to put on me before we had sex. And I thought to myself, wow, wow, you know HIV and AIDS has so permeated this guy’s sexual psyche that even on a fantasy call where there is no risk at all, he’s reaching for the condom. And there’s something profound about that, that made me realize: first of all, good for him, second of all, how kind of him to be thinking of our safety, both of our safety, to do that. And then, wow this is really scary in a way that it must be here, AIDS must have arrived, that this is something that has worked its way into his fantasy choreography.

Gillian Frank: As the phone sex industry grew, a public backlash emerged. Much of this outrage came from parents who received hefty long-distance bills when their children called Dial-a-porn lines and listened to hours of pre-recorded erotic messages. Business owners also became angry when forced to pay for employees who called phone sex numbers from their office lines during working hours.

Conservative politicians warned that phone sex and dial-a-porn would tear apart marriages by making it easier for men to cheat on their wives. Conservatives worried the most about the impact phone sex could have on innocent children. They alleged that young boys who learned about sex from dial-a-porn lines would go on to reenact these sexual scripts on even younger girls. Phone sex lines and dial-a-porn services, in their view, could lead to deviant and dangerous sexual behavior.

But phone sex workers themselves understood their work in much different ways: as sustaining or exploited labor; as a type of entertainment; as a service; and as an act of self-care or care for others.

Lauren Gutterman: Opposing pornography was a winning political issue for conservatives, and it drew wide public support. Over the course of the 1980s, legislators attempted to curb the commercial phone sex industry. They tried banning phone companies from selling enhanced lines to pornographers. They tried limiting the hours of operation of phone sex services from 9 pm until 8 am. And they tried to prohibit phone sex operators from using explicit language.

The political backlash caused phone sex operators and dial-a-porn services to adjust the way they talked about sex with their customers.

Gillian Frank: The backlash against dial-a-porn and phone-sex-lines peaked in 1988, when Congress banned all indecent and obscene, commercial telephone conversations across state lines.

A dial-a-porn company in California called Sable Communications sued the government to stop enforcement of the ban. ” Eventually, the case made its way to the US Supreme Court, which found in favor of Sable Communications.  As a result, the phone sex industry continued to thrive... at least for a little while. Within a decade, the internet would make the phone sex industry largely obsolete by providing new avenues for interactive sexual experiences.

Lauren Gutterman: For the average phone sex worker, it wasn’t political backlash and social stigma that caused them to quit their jobs. Rather, unfavorable work conditions created an industry with high turnover. These, combined with changing personal circumstances led  the workers we spoke with to leave the trade. Mark King became disenchanted with phone sex and sold his business after he discovered that he was HIV positive.

Laura eventually found more reliable, mainstream work that was more appealing than phone sex. But Laura, who took calls at home, also left the industry because the boundary between her work and her private life was becoming harder to maintain.

Gillian Frank: Zoe left her job at a large phone sex company after she recognized that she was being underpaid.

Zoe: And what got me to quit is that the economics of it, it really bothered me once I kind of realized with the private lines how much they were charging per hour. That they were giving us like two dollars on the fourteen dollars, but they were charging those people like 75 dollars and then I was like, ‘someone is making a lot of money’.

Gillian Frank: And Brian left his job because he was tired and overworked. Brian felt badly about abandoning the regular callers he had developed relationships with, and he hoped to say goodbye to them on his last day of work, but things didn’t go as planned:

Brian Herrera: I stopped because, I sort of hit a wall in my life in New York, I was in my 20s and I couldn’t burn the candle at both ends. If I had left dial when I knew I needed to leave dial, I may have not left New York, but it was just like everything was sort of coming to a point where I had outgrown it and it was time for me to move on. So, I left New York and so I quit my job. My last shift at dial and I left New York city a few days later.

The last shift was... it was full of disappointment because I wanted all my regulars to call so I could say goodbye. It was that thing of “where’s so and so, I wanna say goodbye”, but it was this notion of like, you know, this all meant something to me, did it mean something to anybody else? So it was very melancholy.

Gillian Frank: Mark, who now works in HIV/AIDS care and prevention came to see his work on the phone sex lines as deeply connected to the work he does in sexual education today:

Mark King: Now here I am HIV positive, and suddenly the allure of running a phone sex company, talking about sex 24/7 was losing, uh, the bloom was off the rose, and I sold the company and I went to work for an AIDS agency, one of the first in Los Angeles. And I figured, this will be the last job I’ll ever have, I’ll just do this till I die, I’m sure it’ll be a couple of years, and much to my surprise I didn’t, and that became my career working for community based organization, designing programs to prevent HIV among gay men. And now I write and speak as a long term survivor, and it’s funny, I don’t think back about my phone sex days as much anymore, and yet it’s interesting how much it did inform me in terms of the sexuality of gay men and what their wants and desires are, including the simple desire to be loved and to be taken care of and to be treated respectfully and to talk about sex in a way that didn’t shame them, or make them feel perverted or less of a human being because they were gay. You can’t have HIV prevention that’s effective if you don’t treat gay men like full sexual human beings. And I learned that early on because of my years working at phone sex, and it has informed my life ever since.

Lauren Gutterman: Ultimately, the fantasy artists we spoke with described their work as a job like any other, one that had both positive and negative aspects. Listening to the voices of sex workers can transform the story we tell ourselves and each other about sex and work and the pleasures and dangers that arise at their intersections. Here’s Laura:

Laura: If you’re putting yourself together and you’re offering a service, and you’re making clients happy, I feel like that should have a layer of respectability to it. And I think that legalizing different kinds of sex work is the answer to that problem because that allows workers to come out of the shadows and not be exploited by stronger, meaner people that want to run them or take their money or anything like that, but mostly I wish that most humans would just realize that the urge to do things sexually with each other is really normal and it’s really okay and pretty much unless you’re into harming non-consensually or you’re into children, you can find another adult to do what you enjoy doing and have a great time and everybody’s cool with it. And I just feel like the false morality that’s layered over peoples sexual behaviors just causes so much grief for humans in the world and I just, I think it’s kind of time to come to an end to that as society.

Gillian Frank: Sexing History is produced by Rebecca Davis, Saniya Lee Ghanoui, Devin McGeehan Muchmore, Jayne Swift, Lauren Gutterman and me.

Our intern is Alexie Glover.

Special thanks to Brian Herrera, Laura, Mark King, Susie and Zoe for sharing their stories with us. Thank you to Carolyn Bronstein for sharing her historical expertise with us.

Lauren Gutterman: Sexing History is made possible with generous funding from a 2018 Media Production Grant from the Humanities Media Project in the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas, Austin. The Humanities Media Project: Their goal is to tell human stories and invite critical conversations that educate, inspire, and connect communities. They believe that the humanities play a crucial role in maintaining a healthy, democratic society.”

Gillian Frank: If you’re enjoying our show, You can help new listeners find us. Please review us on Apple Music and share us on social media.

To stay up to date on all things Sexing History or to send us a note, visit us on our website, www.sexinghistory.com

From all of us at Sexing History, thanks for listening.

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Transcription by Ian McCabe, University of Delaware