Traci Lords' UNDERNEATH IT ALL: The Rise of a 15-Year-Old Teen Porn Star

Here's Amazon's description of Traci Lords' memoir Underneath It All:

At 14, Nora Kuzma ran away from home and ended up on the dirty streets of Hollywood. She fell in with a fast crowd, and her dreams of modelling soon landed her a spectacular centrefold in Penthouse Magazine, where at 15 she became internationally known as TRACI LORDS. From there she appeared in numerous adult films and magazines, denying her past and battling a deep addiction to cocaine and men. Three years later she got out. This is her memoir [...] 

Underneath It All's Back Cover

A clipping of a newspaper article posted on the back cover of the memoir adds to the description of Traci's career in teen porn:

15-year-old runaway Nora Louise Kuzma, now known in the sex industry as Traci Lords, was indentified yesterday as the child porn star of more than 20 explicit hardcore [teen] sex films, according to the FBI. Sources requesting anonymity claimed that Ms. Lords was brought half naked and under the influence [...] 

Although, this memoir is supposed to be a cautionary tale, it reads more like a teen sexuality expliotation tale. For example:

Less than half of the memoir is about Traci's career in teen porn, but one wouldn't know that from the misleading yet bawdy double entendre title. 

On the front cover, Traci is straddling a black chair in a cleavage-baring short red silk dress. 

10-Year-Old "Traci" on Christmas Day

And on the back cover is a picture of Traci, in a lace bra, next to the title of a newspaper clipping "15-Year-Old Schoolgirl Stars in Porn Films". The book even includes, in the chapter "The Curse of the C Cups", a photograph of 10-year-old "Traci" in a pair of white panties. 

15-Year-Old Nora Kuzma\Traci Lords
Redondo High School (1984)

Interestingly, at the end of the book, Traci expresses her displeasure with her teen porn career; but oddly, she kept her porn name. 

On page ten, Traci shared that when she was 10 and in the 4th grade, she fantasized about being kissed on her panties by Ricky - a 16-year-old high school student. 

"I wondered what it would feel like to get kissed on my panties, and fantasized about my new [boy] friend, Ricky, doing the kissing [...] I was ten, he was sixteen [...]"

(Traci wrote that Ricky raped her in a field and left her: "[...] alone, bloody and naked in the dark.") 

Roger, prematurely balding, was the boyfriend of Traci's mother. Traci wrote that while her mother was driving Roger's lime green van, Traci awoke, topless, to find Roger standing over her and zipping up his pants. Roger referred to Traci's fountains as "little poached eggs". Subsequently, Traci awoke to find Roger's fingers inside of her. 

Interestingly, after Traci's mother left Roger for Daniel, Roger's friend, Traci remained in close contact with Roger. "I started smoking Marlboro reds, ditching classes, and crashing out at Roger's when I was too wasted to go home."

Dee Dee, Traci's 13-year-old neighbor and junior high schoolmate, gave Traci a kiss after lunch. Traci shared: "[...] it was exciting. I breathed in the sweetness of her skin. She smelled of vanilla, and, strangely, I wanted to kiss her again."

Traci's junior high band teacher informed Traci that he appreciated her beauty and offered to buy her dinner. She dropped out of band the next day, but she shared that the experience: "[...] made me feel wanted. I longed for the that attention."

18-Year-Old Traci Lords in Traci, I Love You

Traci shared that her first love was Dean. Dean was a 17-year-old surfer boy and a senior, and Traci was a 14-year-old sophomore at Redondo High. Despite his promise to pull out, Dean got Traci pregnant in his parent's bathroom shortly after Traci's 15th birthday. (Roger drove Traci to the abortion clinic.)

The next day, with a borrowed birth certificate, Traci went to the DMV and walked out of the facility as a 22-year-old and a burgeoning teen porn star. 

Afterwards, Roger drove Traci to see Mr. North, a modeling agent, whom Traci found in an advertisement. As Traci and Roger entered Mr. North's office, Traci heard, "She gets paid double for a DP and she chooses the guys." 

18-Year-Old Traci Lords
Los Angeles (1986)

Before Traci showed Roger her fake ID, the 15-year-old posed, topless, for some Polaroids for her new agent. 

The next day, Traci had her first paid ($250) photoshoot. She described herself as being "the center of attention" - "important, even powerful". She wrote that her teen sexuality gave her "control". "I got off on the power my body held over that entire room of adults." And this is how she described her first photoshoot:

"As I lay on the bed, the photographer showed me where he wanted my rear end. Then he asked me to really arch my back as I bent forward. Cupping my naked breast, I slid my panties off, closed my eyes, and made the kissy face Tim North taught me."

"I spread my legs and caressed my breasts"

Later, 16-year-old Traci was hired to model for Penthouse, which she described as a "total ego trip", because she was "[...] the flavor of the moment, the It girl."  And she shared that any doubts that she had about posing nude were "overruled" by her "[...] insatiable desire for attention." And that she "[...] got off on the idea of getting away with it all."

Penthouse (September 1984)

To make the other porn stars even more jealous of her $5,000 Penthouse gig that ended up being the best selling issue of all-time (September 1984 with teen Vanessa Williams), Traci "cozied up to North" "cooed softly in his ear" and "gave him a wet kiss that left him smiling".

But before Penthouse, Traci had her first photoshoot with a man. "A stunning man in his early twenties [...]" "During the photo shoot I found myself completely turned on and hoped to God no one could tell."

The next day, Traci decided to leave Roger, walked into the Poop Deck bar, "my t-shirt clinging to my breasts" and after drinks, went home with Blue Eyes whom she described as a "forgettable lover". Shockingly, the next morning, the nymphet left Blue Eyes' apartment with 22-year-old Sonny, the roommate, and weeks later she was washing Sonny's "dirty underwear in the kitchen sink".

Traci, I Love You

Unsurprisingly, after Penthouse, Traci graduated to pornographic films. Traci's first film was a softcore film with no nudity "All I had to do was walk around the pool in a bikini during the party scene." But for some reason, after the wrap, Traci had sex in the kitchen with Tom Byron. Someone decided to film it, and the rest his history. "Over the next six months I starred in twenty X-rated films." And she filmed her last film in France, Traci, I Love You, about two years later on the morning after her 18th birthday. (Reportedly, Traci sold the rights to Traci, I Love You for $100.000)

Of porn, Traci wrote:

[...] I had given in to a feeling I had never known during sex - power. And with that power came pleasure."

"Freedom, peace, revenge, sex, power. I had finally found a place to put my energies [...]"

"Porn was a power trip for me."

"Sex on-camera fed a very specific hunger in me. It was the best drug of all."

"Porn made me the kind of girl people [...] paid attention to, and that's what is was all about."

BEAVER STREET: A HISTORY OF MODERN PORNOGRAPHY | From Free Phone Sex to Teen Porn Stars

I wrote the following Amazon review for Robert Rosen’s Vanity Fair Hot Type Pick, Beaver Street: A History of Modern Pornography:

For the purposes of this blog, I’ll elaborate on some references to nympholepsy that are peppered throughout the book. 

Firstly, Rosen related that ‘Free Phone Sex’ began in 1983 and that due to “[...] fear of a newly discovered disease called AIDS, phone sex sweeps America.” Publishers were making $70,000 per week and New York Telephone was making $245,000 per week. In addition to Pentagon employees “[...] spending a thousand bucks a day on free phone sex”, junior high school students were “heavily” into it phone sex too. 

This reminded me of a previous post where I wrote that "In Porn Before Puberty?", an ABC News feature, Winnifred shared that when she was in eighth grade, "[..] boys mostly, were watching porn during school [...] during independent reading, they would do that." In addition, the feature related that nine out of ten children between the ages of eight and sixteen have viewed pornography on the Internet.

Rosen started working at High Society magazine on Monday April 11, 1983, and his first writing assignment was as follows:

“I need a couple of paragraphs of girl copy for this,” the editor-in-chief said with a chuckle. “She’s only seventeen, but she’s really hot, and she can’t wait...if you know what I mean.”

Other quotes from Rosen’s time at High Society include: 

“Look at this girl - she’s beautiful, she’s barely eighteen, and she’s wide open [...]” and “We’re shooting a virgin sacrifice with heavy bondage. The girl is very young, very pretty, and she’s never posed before [...]”

Rosen related that Canada had stricter censorship laws than the States; thus, he had to do some ‘translating into Canadian’. For example, “If a woman had lost her virginity at thirteen - a huge Canadian taboo, though probably the average age for nude models - in print she lost it a “very long time ago.””

Eventually, Rosen got a job at For Adults Only (FAO) where he had to acclimate himself “[...] to the pathological sensibilities of its 50,000 readers [...] What they got for their money was a Freudian journey through a world of fetishistic delights that included [...] young nymph[et]s who “sleep with but-plugs” [...]” (Per Rosen, FAO was edited by Izzy Singer, the author of Teasing Teenage Daughter.)

At Screw’s annual Halloween bash partiers gathered around the stage to watch, “[...] Goldstein [Screw’s publisher] maul the naked breasts of a beautiful, auburn haired woman. “She’s only seventeen!” Goldstein told his jeering colleagues [...] “I met her through a personal ad and I can’t wait to eat her [...]!”

This next excerpt, very interestingly, reminded me of the cameraless documentary The Allure of Schoolgirls (2017). Rosen related that Chip Goodman, the publisher of X-Rated Cinema, and the magazines readers went “berserk” over images of schoolgirls. And Rosen noted in a footnote that “[...] the Child Pornography Protection Act of 1996 [...] made it illegal for sex magazines to publish pictures of models of any age wearing schoolgirl ensembles.” 

Traci Lords

Rosen shared briefly that Trinity Loren “[...] moved back to L.A. on her own when she was about fifteen and soon after found her way into the porn biz.” And that “[...] when Loren was a child, her father probably molested her.” 

However, Rosen elaborate on Traci Lords, whom also entered pornography as a nymphet and was allegedly raped when she was ten by her sixteen-year-old boyfriend.

“Two months after her eighteenth birthday, Traci Lords [...] perhaps the most widely photographed porn model ever, confessed to the FBI and the L.A. County district attorney that she’d begun acting in X-rated films when she was a fifteen-year-old runaway [...] What her confession meant was immediately clear: With the notable exception of her last movie [...] Lord’s entire body of work [...] had been transformed, as if by magic, into illegal child pornography.”

Lords confessed to “[...] using a false birth certificate to fraudulently acquire a passport, using this phony passport to obtain a fake California driver’s license with a false date of birth - November 17, 1962 (making her six years older than she actually was) - and then using both pieces of identification to prove that she was of legal age as she systematically sought work in the porn industry.”

Despite Lord’s confession, the naive mainstream media (unsurprisingly) portrayed her as an innocent and “exploited” victim, which is a phenomenon that we see repeatedly on this blog.

Liara Roux's WHORE OF NEW YORK: (Pre) Teen Outdoor Lesbian Sex & Teen Escorts

Just like Vanessa Springora's Consent: A Memoir, Traci Lords' Underneath It All, and Kate Elizabeth Russell's My Dark Vanessa, Liara Roux's memoir, Whore of New York: A Confession, is peppered with (pre) teen sex and contradictions. 

The first contradiction is that, despite the book's title, Roux, who grew up on the UES of Manhattan, did most of her escorting slash prostituting, that commenced when she was a teen, in California, but the Whore of San Francisco doesn't sound as alluring. 

Catskills in Upstate NY

As for Roux's pre-teen sex scene, she shared that in fifth grade (≈ 10-years-old), she had (lipstick) lesbian sex with the "very beautiful" Melissa. Outdoors. In the woods. During a youth retreat in the Catskills. The nubile nymphets met by the bonfire before Melissa looked into Roux's and licked her fingers:

[...] Melissa. I would sometimes stare at her without realizing, thinking she would never notice.

One day, late at night, when the youth pastors had built a huge bonfire [...] I let her pull the marshmallow off the stick and watch her eat it. Bits of gooey marshmallow still clung to her fingers, and she looked me in the eyes as she licked them. “So good.”

[...] all I could pay attention to was how close her leg was to mine, how she touched my arm when she laughed, how she rested her head on my shoulder as the fire started dying down, her hand on my thigh in the darkness.

Subsequently, Melissa led Roux into the woods where they kissed, Melissa put Roux's young fountain into her bouche, and her hand upon Roux's mound.

One day, when we were walking to whatever activity was next, she asked me if I wanted to skip it [...]  As we got further away from the camp, she stepped off the trail. I followed her. We wandered through the trees, and I tripped over a rock hidden under the snow.

We got to a clearing and she plopped on the ground, then started making a snow angel. “What about your pants?” I asked. “Won’t they get wet?” [...] “They already are.” I blushed at the implication. Seeing my flushed face, she stood up, walked to me, and kissed me [...] I couldn’t hold myself back. I kissed her, putting my hands around her neck, pulling her in.

[...] I pressed myself against her and we fell in the snow [...] I rolled on top of her, kissed her again [...] She wiggled, unzipping her coat, unzipping mine, and our hands were on each other’s chests, grasping at softness. I kissed her neck; she moaned and put my breast in her mouth [...] After much maneuvering, she pulled off her glove and stuck her hand down my pants. The chill of her fingertips pressing into me.

“We walked back to camp, our faces flushed.”

And like Springora, Lords and Russell, Roux contradicts her stance on age-gap relationships. Roux appears to condemn heteroesexual age-gap romantic relationships, but she condones heteroesexual age-gap relationships between (married) johns and escorts\prostitutes. And she condones lesbian age-gap romantic relationships. #perplexed

As for heteroesexual age-gap romantic relationships, Jeremy Lin, an older writer, gave 16-year-old Roux a "thrill" due to his "sexual attention". And Roux entrapped* older literary men on Facebook with the promise of teen sex. 

As with most writing circles, there were certainly older men who loved the idea of access to all these young and eager teenage girls. Most of them were obviously awful, like Jeremy Lin, who wrote an entire novel based [Richard Yates (review forthcoming)] on an abusive relationship he had with a sixteen-year-old. I enjoyed the thrill of hanging out with him and his sexual attention, so I made a grotesque game of it: I would find an older literary man online, add him on Facebook, lead them on, let them think that I would fuck them, then disappoint them.

*I wrote entrapped, because if those writers had been exposed, they would have been accused of grooming poor Roux before probable jail time. Interestingly, on a related note, Roux noted: 

"No one I knew who started [escorting] while underage was honest with their clients about it. They always said they were eighteen or nineteen, if not twenty-one. They had fake IDs and everything else."

As for heteroesexual age-gap relationships between (married) johns and escorts\prostitutes, Roux, who started "devouring" information about sex workers - in high school, wrote that her favorite aspect of being a whore is giving (older) [married] clients pleasure:

That’s my favorite part of my work as well — making my clients feel pleasure.

Only last week I was sprawled on the bed of a luxury hotel in silk pajamas, eating berries while an older married man sucked my toes [...] He gave me a massage and admired my body. I came while watching him jerk off into a champagne glass [...]

Is it wrong that I feel comfortable fucking an older man who's paying me? 

Yet Roux admits that when she was underage (16), she was groomed by Anna, a 25-year-old lesbian, whom Roux latter "married":

The way my future wife, Anna, groomed me was more insidious. We became Facebook friends when she was in her late twenties and I was underage. She was lightly flirtatious, but nothing over the top. She acted kind and nurturing, helping me out with an art project I was working on for high school. I began writing for her art blog and she said she would mentor me. I totally had a crush.”

“One day she commented on one of my photos, “You look so young.” It made me feel nauseous, uncomfortable, for a reason I couldn’t quite put my finger on. I didn’t want her to see me as young.”

Lastly, Molly Young opined in her New York Times review of Whore of New York that the childhood section was the least interesting part of the book:

As with most memoirs, the “childhood” section of the book is the least interesting. Things get cooking when Roux finds her calling [as a Whore of San Francisco].

Times Square: School Girls and Teen Porn Galore

Jane Dickson's School Girls, 2023

We went to the Karma in Alphabet City slash the LES to see Jane Dickson's Promised Land, which we learned from the gallery's press release was inspired by photographs Dickson took from her Times Square apartment and/or from One Times Square. 

Specifically, we went to see Dickson's School Girls (2023), which is an oil stick on linen painting that profiles the Anco Theatre’s marquee where That’s My Daughter and Schoolgirls XXX were playing when both films took advantage of the allure of nymphets to sell tickets. 

The Rialto Theater | Anita: Swedish Nymphet (1973)

Of course, the Anco’s marquee wasn’t the only theater in Times Square that advertised nubile nymphets and/or salacious schoolgirls. For example, in Taxi Driver (1976), Travis (Robert De Niro), a New York City taxi driver, had a desire to save Iris (Jodie Foster), a pre-teen prostitute, from her abusive pimp. In one scene, while Travis was driving through Times Square, the marquee of the Rialto theater advertised Anita: Swedish Nymphet (1973) [Swedish: Anita – ur en tonårsflickas dagbok], which is about a 16-year-old nymphomaniac slash teleiophile. 

And the title made an appearance in the B-roll of Netflix’s Crime Scene: The Times Square Killer (2021). (The marquee of Rialto II advertised A Teenage Pajama Party (1977).)

The Rialto II | A Teenage Pajama Party (1977)

Lastly, we would imagine that Traci Lords was not the only underage teen to use a fake ID to break into the (early) porn industry.