Porno Power: The Next Generation

Their parents broke barriers, supporting each other through trials and tribulations during the Golden Age of Porn. Now these grown children of porn stars have formed their own unshakable bond.

Collage by Yunuen Bonaparte | Story Edited by Brendan Spiegel

Last month on Narratively, I was thrilled to write about how the women of Club 90 created a support group for porn stars, a collective that upended their industry and changed their lives. In my StoryCraft piece about how I approach sex-positive stories like that one, I revealed that it was actually Club 91 — a support group for adult children of porn stars — that originally got me interested in this world. Now that the full feature is published, I want to back up a bit and tell you a little more about how this next generation, Club 91, came to be.

It’s January 1972, and porn star Linda Lovelace is lounging near the edge of the cerulean pool at the Voyager Motel in Miami, wearing a maroon bikini and painting her toenails the same color. Just offscreen is Gerard Damiano Sr. directing her in the scene — it’s for his latest film, Deep Throat. 

The director’s kids, 7-year-old Gerard Damiano Jr. and 6-year-old Christar Damiano, are perched on the other side of the pool, silently watching the dialogue — not sex! — scene, and learning all about the magic of moviemaking. “Our father instilled upon us the sensitivity of the microphone,” Gerard Jr., now 58, tells me recently. “He’d say that you can hear the sound of a blade of grass growing.” (Gerard Jr. also assures me that, “Whenever they shot what our dad would call the ‘nitty gritty,’ we were ushered off. We weren’t exposed to hardcore sex as kids.”)

The kids waited eagerly for their dad to yell “cut.” The minute they heard it, they jumped back in the pool. While they were interested in learning about filmmaking, they were still kids, so they were even more interested in doing cannonballs into the hotel pool. Later, during breaks in filming, the lead, Harry Reems (or “Uncle Herbie,” as Gerard Jr. called him), would toss a football with Gerard Jr. while Christar would go hang out with the adult actresses. Sometimes they’d braid her hair or let her try on their makeup. “It just seemed like a normal thing for kids to do,” Christar, now 57, says.