Candida Royalle and the Sexual Revolution: A History from Below

Harvard historian Kamensky (A Revolution in Color) delivers a powerful portrait of the “profoundly uniquely 20th century life” of erotic film star Candida Royalle (1950–2015), née Candice Vadala. Raised in Riverdale, an upscale Bronx neighborhood, by her father (a sex offender) and stepmother (after her mother abandoned the family), Royalle came of age in the era of the pill, women’s liberation, psychedelics, psychoanalysis, and “the world that made Deep Throat, and that Deep Throat made in turn.” After dropping out of college, she joined a boyfriend in San Francisco, where she “felt herself blossoming into a performer.” She took odd jobs until she discovered nude modeling (and heroin), which led to adult films and a brush with Hollywood as an extra in the orgy scene of Blake Edwards’s feature film 10. In 1980, she married a fellow porn star as the adult film industry took off thanks to the introduction of the VCR and cable TV. Soon after, Royalle’s byline “began appearing in the sex press” and she cofounded Femme Productions, a feminist and sex-positive porn production company. Drawing from Royalle’s private archives at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, Kamensky utilizes her subject’s long career in the sex industry, including pioneering work producing erotic safe-sex education videos, as a window into the AIDS epidemic and the feminist movement. It’s a captivating biography of a major figure of the sexual revolution. (Mar.)