Phil Gramm's porno movie!Turns out that McCain surrogate/lobbyist/bank president/sub-prime mortgage crisis profiteer Phil Gramm, who famously referred to the United States of America as a “nation of whiners” last week, was actually doing his part to turn us into a nation of moaners back in the seventies as a producer of sub-Cinemax soft-core pr0n.

This popped up @ The Nation, among other places:

Before Gramm joined the Christian Coalition’s Ralph Reed to call for the defunding of the NEA, before he attacked an opponent for taking money from a gay rights group, and before he was interviewed by the white supremacist Southern Partisan magazine, Gramm was an avidly active investor in soft-core pornography movies.

Gramm’s journey into porn began in 1973, when his brother-in-law, George Caton, rushed to tell him about an exciting low-budget soft-core production called “Truck Stop Women.” A promo poster for the film boasted of its buxom stars: “No Rig Was Too Big For Them To Handle.” Caton, who was in charge of fundraising for the production, asked Gramm to become an investor. To entice his brother-in-law, Caton showed him scenes of Playboy Playmate of the year Claudia Jennings displaying her bare essentials (she is naked throughout much of the film).

These scenes “really got Phil titillated,” Caton told journalist John Judis in 1995. Gramm enthusiastically cut Caton a check for $15,000. Because the film was oversold, however, Caton returned his brother-in-law’s money, offering him an investment opportunity in an upcoming feature

That “upcoming feature” was originally supposed to be a film about beauty pageant judges who have sex with contestants, but that film was shelved at the eleventh hour in favor of another production called White House Madness, a satire of the Nixon Administration (of which, ironically, Gramm was a staunch supporter) that featured a troupe of drag queens (called The Cockettes) and depicted Nixon as someone who wandered around the White House naked. It was a box-office flop.

I don’t know about you, but “failed pr0n investor” is exactly the kind of thing I look for on the resume of a potential Secretary of the Treasury.

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