Candida Royalle and the Sexual Revolution

Whether in front of the camera or behind it, Candice Vadala understood herself as both an artist and an entrepreneur. As Candida Royalle (1950–2015)—underground actress, porn star, producer of adult movies, and staunch feminist—she made a business of pleasure. She helped crystalize the broader hedonistic turn in American life in the second half of the twentieth century: a period when the rules of sex were rewritten; when the white-hot “sex wars” cleaved feminism and realigned American politics; when Big Freud, Big Drugs, and Big Porn all came into looming focus; when the sex industry of the 1970s and ’80s radically upended conventional understandings of law, technology, culture, love, and human desire. The sexual revolution was Royalle’s war—even when other avowed feminists exited the field or became her opponents—and pornography emerged as the arena in which she would wage it. With the founding of her adult film company, Femme Productions, in 1984, Royalle became an owner of the means of pornographic production, infusing her sets with the ideals of labor feminism. On-screen and off-, she was, by turns, exuberant and thoughtful, self-possessed and gleefully shameless. A trailblazer who lived along the cultural fault lines of her generation, she danced at Woodstock, marched for women’s liberation, survived the AIDS crisis, and became a talk show regular, interviewed by Phil Donahue, Dr. Ruth Westheimer, Morton Downey Jr., Jane Pauley, and many others. As a performer, director, producer, and writer, she moved the needle of her industry. But she never transcended the politics of pleasure. With full access to Royalle’s remarkable archive, historian Jane Kamensky has spent years examining the intersection of Royalle’s life with the clashes that have defined her era—and ours. Deeply informed by these never-before-studied materials, Kamensky explodes the conventions of biography, with its assumptions about who makes history and how. Written with cinematic verve, Candida Royalle and the Sexual Revolution evokes Royalle’s times in their broadest contours as Kamensky traces the rise of an improbable heroine who broke the mold and was herself broken in turn.

"A tour de force, Candida Royalle and the Sexual Revolution is a penetrating history of America’s least studied revolution.… Originally conceived, impressively researched, and beautifully written, Candida Royalle deepens and complicates our understanding of America’s recent past.", "A riveting, humane, and essential contribution to modern feminist history. Jane Kamensky has written a biography that reads like a novel, an astute intellectual work that recognizes and humanizes the role of sex workers in recent women’s movements. Thanks to this book, I am proud to recognize the place of Candida Royalle in my own lineage.", "A rich slice of Americana, a deep dive into the era of the pornographic movie industry and its feminist adversaries, told through the unexpectedly moving story of a woman, Candice Vadala, who tried, and failed, to make peace between the two sides. Whatever your views about porn, when you read Jane Kamensky’s beautifully sympathetic and clear-eyed biography, you will find yourself rooting for Candice, a woman struggling heroically to redeem a difficult life.", "Porn star Candida Royalle dared to bring feminist questions to the business of sex. Couldn’t there be a porn that would tamp down the degradation and misogyny? Couldn’t women claim space for their own fantasies? Did we all have to fit in at the Playboy Mansion? Jane Kamensky’s vital and illuminating account of Candida’s bruised life and uphill struggle to radically change porn from within asks us to consider the true meaning of sexual liberation.", "Jane Kamensky has written a groundbreaking, cinematic, and sensitive portrait of an unlikely heroine: Candida Royalle, the adult film actress and director who pushed herself from the margins of porn to the center of the sex wars in the 1970s and ’80s. Kamensky understands exactly what Royalle gained, and lost, in her bid for sexual freedom and artistic independence. This is more than a biography of one woman who experienced the perils and pleasures of the sexual revolution ‘from below’—it is a brilliant, sweeping, and tragic history of desire, feminism, and sex in postwar America."

Jane Kamensky is the author of the prize-winning A Revolution in Color, among other books. She serves as Trumbull Professor of American History at Harvard University, and as the Pforzheimer Foundation Director of the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women at Harvard Radcliffe Institute. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.