American Gangbang

A thoughtful hilarious and compulsively readable memoir by an Ivy League graduate-turned-pornographer who sets out to bring sophistication and equality to sexual cinema—only to find that he can’t change porn but porn can certainly change him.. American Gangbang heralds the arrival of a profound and gifted new voice in narrative nonfiction. In 1999 after four years of studying at Brown University Sam Benjamin heads to California in a twenty-year-old Volvo dead set on turning himself into an artist despite his complete lack of talent. There stoned he has an epiphany—he will make progressive porn. And so begins his turbulent journey... In whip-smart lyrical prose Benjamin traces his three-year immersion into the world of Hollywood’s bleak screen glow–lit doppelganger: the southern California sex industry. His rapid ascent from the dingy storefront rental of a starving artist to the multimillion-dollar Malibu villa of a full-fledged porn producer confronts him with the uncomfortably alluring realities of Americas strangest industry: gun-toting actors high on terrible drug-induced potency; giggling actresses battling internal demons in wobbly heels and pink fishnets; the insatiable consumer demands to sink ever lower more exploitative nastier. The result is the titillating dramatic chronicle of a young man who invites the deepest most troubling parts of himself to rise to the surface in order to get a good look at them—only to find that what he sees makes his world seem suddenly very small. A provocative universal coming-of-age story American Gangbang explores with unflinching honesty the darkly rich junction of sex and self-discovery.