Soft Core Pornographic President

In 1973, the Supreme Court ruled in two cases, Miller v California and Paris Adult Theatre I v. Slaton, that pornographic films were protected speech by the First Amendment so long as nobody under 21 was allowed in the theater. At the time, most pornographic films were shot and distributed on 8mm or 16mm, but that was about to change.

By 1980, the outdated, single-screen theaters that peppered the American Landscape began showing pornographic films. No longer were they the one-reel (ten-minute) films of the past; these were feature-length (sixty-minute) productions like Deep Throat and Behind the Green Door. The Supreme Court ruling specifically mentioned that there had to be artistic merit to the films, so what these old-school porn guys considered “artistic merit” could get pretty interesting. In Mississippi, with multi-screen theaters popping up all over, the old Pix or Capri theater sat dark sometimes until a guy from out of town leased it to see if he could make a few bucks showing dirty movies.

Paul Rubens was a star on television in the Peewee Herman show. The original Pee Wee stage show featured many very adult jokes presented as a 1950s-style children’s television program. Television producers offered Herman an obscene amount of money to turn his brainchild into an actual children’s show, so he did—but he remained a pretty unconventional person with a very unconventional idea about aesthetics.

When he wasn’t filming the Pee Wee show, Rubens lived in the avant-garde part of Sarasota, Florida, and let his hair grow out. If you had seen him on the street, you would not have recognized him. Working on a tip that Rubins had been attending a gay pornographic theater, the police had trouble identifying him when they showed up to arrest him. There are different opinions on whether or not Rubens was actually exposing himself when he was arrested for exposing himself in a theater showing absolutely naked men by the dozen doing things you couldn’t imagine on a forty-foot screen.

The misdemeanor arrest nearly ruined his career. Rubens never intended for the Pee Wee character to take over his life, so he didn’t cry too long when people started saying he couldn’t play him anymore.

By 2002, Rubens had moved back to Los Angeles and had been working on projects that didn’t involve Pee Wee. Working off a tip, the City Attorney raided Rubens’ home, confiscated several boxes of what he characterized as “child pornography,” and had Rubens again arrested.

In court, the older, straight judge demanded to examine the evidence. What he saw was dozens of nude body-building magazines, many of which featured a few dozen nude photographs of then California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in the all-together, taken in his mid-twenties. Since none of the photographs showed anyone who even seemed underage, the charges against Rubens were dropped, and the City Attorney admonished.

Anyone involved in the sport of weight-lifting or bodybuilding in the sixties, seventies, or eighties knew that Bodybuilding was basically just a scam so Joe Weider and his brother could make a living. He owned the magazines, produced the supplements, costumes, and weights themselves, produced the contests, and managed the careers of the people in them, including a young Austrian named Arnold.

For a while, Weider produced most of the “protein powder” sold in America. It was dehydrated, fat-free milk solids. It had a lot of protein, but god, was it awful. Sometimes, they “flavored” it with chocolate and banana, which only made it worse.

Not wanting to part with any more of his own money than he had to, Weider found all sorts of odd jobs for the young bodybuilders he managed to help pay their rent and buy his god-forsaken protein powder. While he drew the line at pimping out these young athletes for actual sex, he had no problem setting them up for pornographic, nude photography for gay magazines. This is how the governor’s all-together ended up in the possession of Pee Wee Herman when he got arrested.

These and other shenanigans are why I insisted that I was a weightlifter and not a bodybuilder, even though we did many of the same exercises on the same equipment. It also made sense to me that if I moved x amount of weight on exercise X with good form, nobody could ever say I didn’t win. In contrast, with bodybuilding, there were constant arguments about the judges (who all worked for Joe Weider) favoring the wrong guy and the guy who won shouldn’t have won.

This was particularly pronounced when future governor Schwarzenegger won his last Mr. Olympia contest. He had actually lost weight to play Conan the Barbarian because the director wanted him to look like he didn’t eat often. He also didn’t have time to train every day and make a movie where he was on screen most of the time. He spoke about the controversy and the possibility that Weider had rigged the contest because he was suddenly the world’s highest-paid bodybuilder, but he didn’t speak about it often.

During the sixties and seventies, bodybuilding was only associated with men and mostly associated with gay men. My father warned me about this when I started spending more time at the gym than home. I’ve never once in my life had a gay man approached me inappropriately. Maybe I’m just ugly. I knew these men were around, but I didn’t much care.

The idea of women's bodybuilding started to be popular in the 1980s. Again, Joe Weider moved quickly to ensure his dominance of the concept. His young wife (considerably younger than he) became the most famous early woman bodybuilder.

Controversy surrounded the issue of whether women bodybuilders should look like ballerinas or like male bodybuilders. Most of the women I knew smiled at the idea that they, too, could have really big muscles. You’d be surprised how many women wanted me to feel the size of their arms.

Joe Weider and his Brother ran the business, and the judges for Women’s Bodybuilding were the same men who judged the men’s contests for a while, so the decision of which female body type dominated women’s bodybuilding tipped overwhelmingly in favor of ballerinas. Since what you see in bodybuilding magazines influences what you see in comic books, the character She-Hulk looked awfully like Betty Weider, even though when the character was first introduced, she looked more like Bruce Banner.

Women’s bodybuilding has changed quite a bit since then. Supermuscular women regularly win over fitness/dancer body types. The Weider company doesn't dominate the business anymore. Paul Rubens died, and nobody wants to see Governor Schwarzenegger naked anymore, not even his Kennedy ex-wife.

I tend to be protective of young actors and young athletes when I meet them because I know there’s a lot of bullshit that goes with those careers. Being judged because your hips are an inch too wide or your chest is an inch too small can be pretty rough on a young person pushing their body to make it do more and more.

The people who set Paul Rubens up to ruin him because he was “secretly gay” saw their own careers ruined instead. While I’m not satisfied with that outcome, at least there was some accountability.

I’ve met Governor Schwarzenegger a few times. He’s a swell guy. His story fascinates me. For a time, there were people who seriously wanted to change the constitution so he could run for president. He would have been the second US President to star in a movie and the first US president with his photographs in soft-core pornographic magazines. America can be a strange place. I love it for that.