The X-Man

The X-Man

It's kind of tough to juggle life as an Orthodox Jew with a career as chronicler of the porn world

Sheli Teitelbaum Los Angeles

LUKE FORD HAS A problem. Actually, the 35-year-old Aussie expat has several. But the one we focus on while strolling through L.A.'s Pico-Robertson Orthodox Jewish stronghold is this: How can an apparently sincere convert to Orthodox Judaism secure a place within a community that would never be able to stomach the way he makes his living - if he were actually to come clean with them about what he does?

Ford covers the pornographic film industry. He interviews performers, producers and distributors; he reports back from shooting sets and trade shows and awards ceremonies; he hangs out with people from the business to elicit the latest "dirt"; when things are quiet, he publishes a running Internet rumination about his own difficulties balancing the demands of an unsavory profession with his own attempts to live an observant life; he has even written a book, "A History of X: 100 Years of Sex in Film," published in 1999.

Ordinarily, covering a controversial beat, however distasteful, would not present an insurmountable obstacle to gaining acceptance within the Orthodox Jewish community. It would be hard to imagine, for instance, a journalist being barred from polite society because he covers organized crime or the drug trade.

Ford, however, is not your everyday journalist. In fact, some of his philosophical leanings would be hard for anyone to swallow: He often cites the writings of a rabid American neo-Nazi, William Pierce, and views liberalism, communism, socialism, feminism and Freudianism as largely Jewish-instigated afflictions every bit as perfidious as the field he covers.

Asked by a recent visitor to his website how he was able to reconcile his vocation with his identity as an Orthodox Jew, Ford wrote:

"I view my primary Jewish obligation to my work is to do it well. Journalism is an honorable profession. I'm a journalist who writes on pornography. I no more endorse pornography than journalists who write on the Mafia endorse the Mafia. Yes, my website is sponsored by porn companies. So yes, I do make money from porn. That is very troubling from a Jewish perspective. I have no answer to that. A third party does operate all the ads on my site, and I receive a regular weekly check. The third party can sell the ads to whoever will pay."

Although he makes no bones about his own dim view of the burgeoning porn industry and the people associated with it, Ford is not loath to hang out with some of them, commiserate with others, or adopt their smutty terminology. Indeed, he has even appeared as a clothed extra in some of the productions he has written about.

This kind of familiarity with a completely outre milieu could not possibly sit well with his Orthodox friends and associates, some of whom had mentored him and supported his conversion unaware of how he earned his daily bread. There is simply too large a gap between the titillating yet obscure celebration of sexual desire in such Biblical sources as Song of Songs and the mechanistic rutting in Jewish-oriented porn videos like "Debbie Duz Dishes," "Mitzi's Honor" and "The Three Daughters."

And so it should have come as no surprise that when the leaders of Young Israel of Century City - where Ford had been studying Talmud on a daily basis - were recently apprised of his profession, they were less than thrilled. As much angered by his misrepresentation of himself as by his website, the rabbis stripped him of his tefillin, handed back a $ 600-donation and drummed him out of the building.

A New York Times survey of the industry this spring referred to Ford as the "Matt Drudge of porn." Drudge, founder of The Drudge Report website, gained notoriety when he beat the mainstream media in breaking the Monica Lewinsky story. But while Drudge has parlayed his scoop into paid gigs on TV and radio, Ford has not quite managed to approximate his success. Supported solely by ads, his site brought in a comparatively modest $ 40,000 last year, and will likely fare the same this year as well. And he lives a spartan existence, spending his nights in a sleeping bag on the floor in a small converted garage in this middle-class Jewish neighborhood. His kitchen consists of a microwave and a hot plate. The tiny apartment is packed with stacks of old magazines; a lone bookshelf contains titles by Jewish radio talk-show host Dennis Prager. A copy of his own book is nowhere to be seen.

Ford's website attracts upwards of 1,600 visitors daily. His running narrative is peppered with e-mails from various industry types and hangers-on who hold forth on their latest gripes and gossip, and fans who can't believe their own good fortune at being able to interact with their heroes on-line. On any given day, readers will find up for discussion such subjects as: Mafia involvement in porn (still an issue, he reports); why the women who perform in the upper-crusty "Vivid" videos so often seem inanimate (partly it's drugs; partly, it's because the company thinks the pose of unavailability is alluring); what the industry hopes to accomplish in an upcoming Free Speech Coalition visit to the California state capital in Sacramento (making blue films is no longer illegal, and the industry wants it to stay that way); the pros and cons of breast implants; and why it's so hard for a guy like him to find a spouse who is not only more religiously observant than he is, but unfazed by his professional associations - and hot to boot.

Ford also calls upon the services of a host of imaginary characters, whom he uses as agents provocateurs. These include the redoubtable Haim Amalek (a once-legendary performer and videographer now living quietly on New York's Upper West Side) and deranged starlet Cindy Plenum, who invariably take Ford to task for his journalistic practices, his affinity for Orthodox Judaism, and all of the other glaring contradictions he embodies.

THE SON OF DR. DESMOND Ford, an Australian Seventh-Day Adventist theologian who ultimately caused a split in the church over his insistence that its members were no more assured of salvation than any other Christians, Luke Ford seems bent upon emulating his father's propensity for shaking things up. For instance, although warned by his psychotherapist and friends not to do this interview, for fear it might find its way into the hands of members of his synagogue, Ford says he waved them off. "I suppose I just like the attention," he explains.

At 16, Ford saw his first Playboy centerfold. The sight of such unblemished female perfection, he recounts, resulted in an erotic epiphany. He became a passionate collector of girlie magazines, which he kept buried in the woods outside his house, near Walla Walla, Australia. Before he burned them in a fit of righteous resolve, they were, he acknowledges, very well worn indeed.

During his first year in college, at UCLA, Ford succumbed to chronic fatigue syndrome, an affliction, he says, kept him bedridden for six years. He used up his savings searching for a cure, and still regards the disease as a metaphor for his own conflicted existence.

Growing up among Adventists, who Ford says continue to regard Jews as Christ-killers, he never actually met a Jew before entering college. In 9th grade, though, at a Christian day school in Auburn, California, he came across some of Chaim Potok's novels, which he found perplexing. "Judaism," he recalls, "appeared strange and irrelevant. Living in religious ghettos where they perform hundreds of minute commandments, Orthodox Jews showed no sense of mission to the world." Later, though Ford encountered the work of Jewish radio host and ethicist Prager, and found himself convinced of the efficacy of Judaism as a pathway to a proper, moral existence. As a result, he embarked on a two-year conversion program with an Orthodox rabbi. In May 1992, he became a Jew, (a conversion that has recently been called into question by some local rabbinical leaders).

In 1994, having recovered somewhat from chronic fatigue, Ford took up what he describes as a job offer from Prager as a personal assistant. But the job, and the relationship, fell through; Ford's website mentions that in 1998 he was accused of stalking the man. Ford rejects this, insisting that he had begun an autobiography of Prager during the early 90s, and that although initially cooperative, the talk-show host withdrew his sanction in 1997, and threatened a defamation suit. For his part, Prager doesn't recall having offered Ford a job at all, and says the threatened suit was meant to prevent Ford from publishing copyrighted material on his website.

Shortly after his blowout with Prager and a stint pursuing an acting career, Ford wrote "A History of X," a chronological saga of the genre. "Why porn? I suppose it sort of sums up how I live my life. I have always had a naughty streak, and I suppose I had a salacious interest in the industry. But primarily, I thought this presented an opportunity to distinguish myself. I am now at the top of my profession - even if it's a sleazy profession."

Ford has broken some stories that not only got picked up in the mainstream press, but by identifying a particular porn star who appeared to have made himself a deliberate vector point for a spate of HIV infections, may well have saved lives. His book does a thorough, if somewhat perfunctory and even crude, job of chronicling the industry, and the newsletter doesn't shy away from addressing the moral pitfalls of his profession or its players.

Ford makes the case that however much one might wish to overlook it, porn brings in an awful lot of money, most of it from mainstream, otherwise decent and law-abiding consumers. In the process, "porn chic" - the genre's trappings and aesthetic - has made its way into a variety of media, including film, fashion, TV, advertising and popular music.

Ford's somewhat Gonzo, stream-of-consciousness chronicles, however, have alienated many in the industry, and many producers and distributors now refuse to talk with him, and strive to keep him away from their sets and out of their hair. Yet his self-appointed crusades have done little to win over fellow Jews. Some, like Long Island-based journalist Sheldon Rantz, who has also covered the industry, are appalled by his apparent internalization of various anti-Semitic canards in his analysis of the industry. In his website archives, for instance, Ford devotes significant attention to the Jewish role in the evolution of the porn universe, and lists the original Jewish names of legions of performers. Ford insists that pornography constitutes a deliberate attempt by "non-Jewish Jews," alienated from normative Judaism and Christian mores, to undermine Western civilization.

Perhaps most glaring is his fascination with the American Nazi propagandist Dr. Pierce, who claims that Jews dominate pornography so that they can mount an assault on traditional Western mores. "Nazism is my own favorite kind of pornography," Ford explains. "I'd say I find myself agreeing with anywhere from 50 to 80 percent of what Dr. Pierce has to say."

Says one local Jewish observer: "My sense of him is that while he seems very sincere in his religiosity, his socialization, Jewishly, may still be a tad incomplete." But, he says, "there's a saying that the Jews were given the Torah because they needed it most. We are a passionate people, and before receiving the Torah were prone to channel those passions into all kinds of illicit behaviors. By virtue of his conversion, Luke was most certainly at Sinai with the rest of us. But in some ways, he missed out on the ensuing millennia. He may just need a little catch-up time."