Leading Man

I spent a recent Tuesday evening-Election Night, no less—in the student union building at West Virginia University. It is not every day, after all, that one is able to gaze at the “leading figure in the most celebrated civil-liberties case in modern times.”

That, anyway, is how our speaker was introduced, and given the hyperbolic tendency of college boys, it was, I suppose, an appropriate start. For our speaker was Harry Reems, who, the reader will recall, achieved his peculiar kind of notoriety by starring with Linda Lovelace in Deep Throat. His part (to quote one of Reems’s chief publicists, Nicholas Von Hoffman) was one of “gonadal simplicity.” Now Mr. Reems, the reader will also recall, was convicted last year of “conspiracy to transport interstate obscene materials” —a preposterous charge indeed, since Reems had nothing to do with the film’s promotion and distribution and in fact received nothing beyond his original acting fee of $100, paid upon completion of filming.

About the Author

Alan Pell Crawford

Mr. Crawford is the author of Twilight at Monticello: The Final Years of Thomas Jefferson.

I spent a recent Tuesday evening-Election Night, no less—in the student union building at West Virginia University. It is not every day, after all, that one is able to gaze at the “leading figure in the most celebrated civil-liberties case in modern times.”

That, anyway, is how our speaker was introduced, and given the hyperbolic tendency of college boys, it was, I suppose, an appropriate start. For our speaker was Harry Reems, who, the reader will recall, achieved his peculiar kind of notoriety by starring with Linda Lovelace in Deep Throat. His part (to quote one of Reems’s chief publicists, Nicholas Von Hoffman) was one of “gonadal simplicity.” Now Mr. Reems, the reader will also recall, was convicted last year of “conspiracy to transport interstate obscene materials” —a preposterous charge indeed, since Reems had nothing to do with the film’s promotion and distribution and in fact received nothing beyond his original acting fee of $100, paid upon completion of filming.