“A lot of kids had dads in the war. But how many kids had their mom in the war? Especially as a member of the OSS and as a spy?”
It recently came to my attention that Ron Jeremy, the famous porn star, comes from an ‘Office of Strategic Services’ (OSS) family. The OSS was president Franklin Roosevelt’s secret spy network, which he used to undermine his political opponents.
Ron Jeremy talks about his mother in an interview promoting his porn documentary, ‘Porn Star: The Legend of Ron Jeremy’, which was directed by Scott J. Gill. (If that link ever dies, email me adotnolen@gmx.) Perhaps even more interesting than learning Jeremy’s mom was a spook, is that Gill edited out every mention of Ma Jeremy’s spook work from ‘Porn Star’ proper– the director only left snippets about Ma in the credits. Why might this editing have occurred? Let’s start from the beginning.
Roosevelt set up the OSS to assist a British spy ring run by William Stephenson, whose purpose was to undermine Americans whose political beliefs ran contrary to British interests or Roosevelt’s aims.
In other words, the OSS was Roosevelt’s way of partnering with foreign spies against the people who he represented as president.
The OSS organization was supposed to remain ‘deniable’, and did until the 1960s. According to Stephenson, the only reason that old OSS’ers (who were then working at the CIA) decided to talk publicly about the OSS was that Kim Philby’s defection to the USSR threatened to blow the lid on OSS schemes anyway. (See Stephenson’s autobiography A Man Called Intrepid.) Talking about the OSS might have been the first time that the CIA ‘took control’ by preempting classified leakage.
So what was the mother of Ron Jeremy– a porn start and porn industry promoter– doing for this band of traitors? Here’s the answer in Ron Jeremy’s own words:
R [Ron Jeremy]: About my parents in the war. I couldn’t believe that my mother being in the OSS, which became the CIA in the late-Forties, was cut from the movie. She was a lieutenant, a decoder, and a cryptographer. Because she spoke fluent German and French they put her right into the army. They gave her high-rank, incase she was ever captured. She fought the Germans, and my dad fought the Japanese. And what kills me is that was a credit. (laughs) It’s in the movie as a credit. I said, “Scott, what are you thinking? You had pictures of her in her lieutenant uniform; you’ve got my dad talking about her. What are you fucking doing?” He said he had no place to put it. And I said, “That’s my mom, you fucking idiot.”
I don’t follow Ron Jeremy’s career, but when I have heard him talk, he’s never struck me as the sharpest tool in the shed. However, even Ron can see that editing out a bombshell revelation like ‘The Most Famous Porn Star’s Momma was a Spook’ isn’t good entertainment tradecraft. I propose, readers, that not talking about momma might be good tradecraft of another sort.
The CIA, the daughter organization to the OSS, has some very unsavory relations with the pornography industry. This will come as no surprise to my readers in the former USSR and particularly East Germany, where older people will remember that ‘opening up to the USA’ also meant ‘opening up to pornography’.
The CIA has direct links to the Playboy Empire, as well as Penthouse magazine. In the 1991 incarnation of Alfred McCoy’s book The Politics of Heroin, he recounts how a 1973 IRS investigation lead to uncovering Hugh Hefner’s and Bob Guccione’s patronage of CIA bank ‘Castle Bank and Trust of Nassau’. ‘Castle Bank’ was so heavily intertwined with CIA operations that the Agency quashed the IRS investigation on “national security” grounds. Hefner’s and Guccione’s CIA connections were then quietly ignored.
Why is the CIA interested in promoting pornography in the USA and in other places? Could it be that spreading pornography has something to do with spreading control? I’ve covered part of this topic already in The People vs Bob Guccione. Pornography is a useful political tool: way back in 1795 the Marquis de Sade recognized that pornography was a good way of diverting men’s excess energy, something that was “indispensable to the mechanics of republican government”.
De Sade wasn’t content with heterosexual pornography either:
It has been said the intention of these legislators was, by dulling the passion men experienced for a naked girl, to render more active the one men sometimes experience for their own sex. These sages caused to be shown that for which they wanted there to be disgust, and to be hidden what they thought inclined to inspire sweeter desires; in either case, did they not strive after the objective we have just mentioned? One sees that they sensed the need of immorality in republican matters.
Why does de Sade think that revolutionary legislators would want to promote homosexuality? (Homosexuality is what’s important to him, not lesbianism, even though de Sade was no stranger to lesbianism in his writing.) Historically, people interested in social control have had a marked interest in homosexuality and promiscuousness (multiple, short-term sexual partners).
I’ll remind readers that the CIA in particular is eager to hire from the LGBT community. The LGBT community is already overrepresented in the US military, and therefore is probably overrepresented in the intelligence community as well. I haven’t found a good explanation for this overrepresentation, however, it may be worth noting that John Gittinger’s work for the CIA shows that the Agency is interested in identifying sexual weaknesses in ‘persons of interest’ which can be exploited. These ‘persons of interest’ include the CIA’s own regular officers/ employees.
What makes something a ‘sexual weaknesses’? LGBT activists have cast doubt on homosexuality’s usefulness as a blackmail tool; I agree with these observers, there have been too many famous LGBT spies through history to suggest that homosexuality would sink a spy’s career. I doubt that the ‘Lavender Scare’ in Washington D.C. was about a mindless desire to persecute the LGBT community, either. I suspect that the ‘Lavender Scare’ was motivated by a realization that the Soviets– or other actors– were using a psychological tool that US counterintelligence wasn’t wise to.
What might this psychological tool have been? According to Gittinger’s personality assessment work– which spanned the ‘Lavender Scare’ during the 1950s-60s– the CIA was interested in identifying self-centered sexual activity like promiscuity and masturbation, rather than homosexuality on its own. Gittinger’s work suggests that the intelligence community was only interested in homosexuality in as far as homosexuality is related to promiscuity.
In fact, Gittinger’s personality assessments make very little mention of homosexuality at all; Gittinger wanted to know whether the person under assessment related to their sexual partner, or if sexual energy was spent on “autoerotic” and “autosexual” behavior. As an example, here’s Gittinger’s description of an ‘e*fa’ personality:
He will react very much against autosexualilty by becoming extremely active in heterosexual relationships in spite of the fact that he is not inclined to become involved, in the reciprocal sense, of efa or the i*fa, with his partners.
And here’s Gittinger on an ‘iru':
Unlike the e*ru, however, the iru is not active or aggressive in taking material things or in any interpersonal sexual activity. While the e*ru may rape with little awareness of the object– he may be guilty of sexual assault of an aged woman or necrophilia– the iru is more prone to compulsive masturbation.
My point is that the CIA isn’t bent on shaming queers or cross-dressers. The CIA is interested in anyone who shows a tendency towards self-centered sexual behavior, which encompasses promiscuity and ‘autoerotic’ activity. Why? Because promiscuity and autoerotic behavior are isolating. Both of these forms of sexual behavior make it harder for the sufferer to form strong, lasting relationships with other people– including the strongest relationships of all, that of family.
Promiscuous people are vulnerable people, it’s harder for them to develop and maintain the protective influences of family. The leaders of the Sullivanian cult understood this and that’s why they encouraged people who they wanted to control, like Amy Siskind, toward promiscuity. Plenty of powerful people have recognized that promiscuity leads to vulnerability and that vulnerability opens people up for control, I encourage interested readers to check out my post on Aleister Crowley’s System of Control.
How does promiscuity isolate people? Promiscuity discourages mature attitudes to sex; it keeps a person from developing balanced, healthy attitudes toward themselves and other people. Promiscuous sex is a “me, me, me” activity, it’s about searching for something that makes ‘me’ feel good. (Or what one thinks will make one feel good.) Promiscuous sex is more like masturbation than sex, which brings me back to porn…
Using pornography and promiscuous sex have something in common: the other person, the person in the picture, isn’t really important– they’re just objects which aid sexual gratification. Objectification of people is unhealthy in any situation, but pornography is particularly destructive if using it becomes compulsive so that intimacy with a real partner becomes difficult– ‘porn addiction’ is a problem, just like addiction to gambling is a problem. I suggest that it’s particularly problematic for young men– who are just developing self-control, critical thinking and attitudes towards sex– to be exposed to exploitative sexual material that objectifies sexual partners.
What about Gill’s documentary on Jeremy, does Gill address pornography’s usefulness for control? No, it doesn’t. In Jeremy’s own words:
The main thing about it is that it [Porn Star] put a nice face on the world of porn. The John Holmes documentary didn’t put a very good face on the business. But this did. One critic from Film Threat made a really nice comment, saying that after seeing those, you didn’t want to watch porn; you felt guilty. Then you watch Ron, and you enjoy seeing a porn film. And I had no real skeletons in the closet, other than the porn. I knew I had no history of drugs, abuse, beating people up. You know? Just a nice, Jewish boy from Queens; so I figured what the hell.
“Just a nice Jewish boy from Queens”. Ron Jeremy is more than that, readers, as he explains a few minutes later in the same interview:
R [Ron Jeremy]: It’s [his mom’s spook connections] what puts me in common with George Bush, Jr. Both of our parents were in the OSS/CIA. And, I went to high school with the head of the CIA, George Tenet. There’s a big article about that in the Queens Tribune; about how we both went to Cardozo High School. We were in the same class. So, anyway. In the DVD, if you watch the extra scenes, in one of those scenes my dad does talk about my mom and the war. So that’s a little different. When people first see the DVD they say, “Why weren’t these extras in the movie?” Everyone has said that about those ten extras. “Deleted scenes? What the fuck was he thinking?”
Most people reading this post will remember that W sold a few wars using rhetoric about “freedom” and “democracy”. Ron Jeremy, and his industry cohorts, sell pornography using rhetoric like “freedom of speech”, “love” and “liberation”. Western history and philosophical tradition show us that pornography is about repression and control.
Daniel Shaw on exploitative leaders: “when taking, they are understood to actually be giving.” (IJCS Vol. 5 2014) Movie Poster from ‘The People Vs. Larry Flynt’, a film equating pornography with freedom of expression.
I doubt Ron Jeremy is aware of his place in the system. Another highlight from his interview with Tastes Like Chicken:
I had a cousin who died in a war. He got shot, so they gave him the Purple Heart and the Medal of Honor. I showed it to Scott, but he didn’t use it in the film. That’s a great story on its own. That’s a whole documentary in itself. And I had another cousin who had to change his religion to become a lieutenant. He was Jewish, but you had to be Christian to become a lieutenant. He died as a hero under the cross. The relatives exhumed the body, switched him back to a Jew, and buried him under a star. So a lot of that stuff didn’t make it in there.
Jeremy’s opinion about his cousin’s religious persecution is interesting, seeing as when he aired this grievance, Jeremy was just about to tell us that his Jewish mother was made a lieutenant. (Is there more to that story, Ron?) Jeremy never opines– in this interview– on why a “fat, short, hairy bastard” was able to make a career in pornography.
Scott J Gill edited out Jeremy’s family history because drawing attention to Jeremy’s spook connections gets uncomfortably close to the intelligence community’s role in the porn business. Talking about Ma Jeremy is likely to raise questions such as “Why are spook-sorts involved in porn?” and “Is porn some type of soft-power tool?”
Scott J Gill, and the folks backing his career, really don’t want people like you and I asking those questions. Take home: Buy porn and help support your buddies in Washington D.C.!
