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local women could come for PAP smears and pelvic exams. For Royalle, it was an ironic disappointment to see the movement go in what felt like an anti-sex direction, because one of the most powerful things she’d gleaned from feminism was a heightened sense of connection with her own body, one area in particular: “A lot of girls don’t grow up knowing they have a clitoris,” she says. “I remember reading the very first edition of Our Bodies, Ourselves, and it was that book that made me understand how I could have an orgasm. I had a boyfriend for years who I’d been sleeping with and I couldn’t understand why it was never enough! But then I saw that book and there was this diagram, and it said, you know, you rub this thing long enough and then you have an orgasm. And I thought, Oh, I think I’ll try that. That was a big part of the movement back then. Sexual liberation was really a lot of what it was about. Sadly, that changed.”
    Now middle-aged, Royalle is a bright-eyed blonde who wears wacky glasses and lives in a roomy apartment in Greenwich Village decorated with dozens of photos of herself in various phases and ages and hair colors. “I think it was the summer of 1970 that I went with a friend over to Corsica and we rented mopeds and spent a night in the mountains and took a hit of mescaline, and there’s all these really fun pictures of us,” she says. “There I am posing—probably flying—with my copy of Sisterhood Is Powerful. Like it’s the Bible.” (Keep in mind: Sisterhood Is Powerful, the anthology of feminist writings, was edited by Robin Morgan, the same woman who postulated “pornography is the theory, rape is the practice.”) “It was this fun moment, very much about sisterhood,” says Royalle, “but things changed. It became sort of the opposite. It started about two-thirds of the way in…you could feel the subtle shift. I remember feeling that I was becoming a minority; that I was not sticking to the party line because I did have a boyfriend, and it was kind of like I was sleeping with the enemy. There was a real move to rejecting heterosexual relationships and embracing lesbianism, or embracing separatism. There are women who won’t want to hear this, but I think a lot of women were calling themselves lesbians who, in the end, really weren’t. Because it was the thing to do, it was more politically acceptable.”
    In this environment, Royalle felt almost as restricted as she had back in the fifties, only now she was rebelling against feminist sisters instead of an overprotective patriarchy. She left New York for San Francisco to pursue a career as an artist. Royalle paid the bills by modeling for other artists, which led to an offer to appear in an art film, which led to a career in pornography. “During that time I was living amongst a group of people who were fiercely independent, these outrageous drag queens. We had sex with whoever we wanted. We did drugs whenever we wanted. No one could tell us what to do. So when I needed extra money and the opportunity to be in a movie came up, it wasn’t like Ooh, is this acceptable? It wasn’t a big deal…there was no AIDS yet and it was still a time of sexual adventurousness.”
    Royalle knew her movement sisters wouldn’t see it that way. “I pretty much lost touch with them. I knew that what I was doing would be seen as a betrayal, that I was taking part in something that was considered degrading to women. It was my way of going to the other extreme,” she says. “Rebelling against the too-radical uptightness that was turning a movement I loved into these old biddies telling me we shouldn’t have relationships with men.”
    Imagine how Susan Brownmiller must have felt. Her vision had always been crystalline, her beliefs ardent. She had become engaged in the women’s liberation movement when it was a unified, sure-footed quest for change, and suddenly she was in a maze of contradictions. Now there were “feminists” working