She was young, probably just barely legal and trying like hell to seem very cosmopolitan and sophisticated. When I say she was in pink I mean completely encased in pink, from her shoes,even to the book she carried covered in a pink wrapper.

She had answered my ad in the Village Voice and was there in my office applying for porn work. In those days I spent more time talking people out of doing porn than vice versa. Most had no idea what they were getting into and I didn’t want to ruin anyone’s life for the sake of a fuck film. But Lisa was undeterred. She wanted to be a bondage model.

This was not a sexy girl mind you, this was an almost mousy waif but when she talked about bondage there seemed to be a spark behind those big round eyes.

Within hours I had her tied to my bed and allowed her, through bondage, to release a very sexual animal from within. We had lots of fun that night and although we were never really lovers we did have sex occasionally thereafter and she often went with me to swing clubs, sex parties, and bondage clubs over the next few months, but more important I photographed Lisa over and over in various states of bondage.

It was during one of those first sessions that I realized why it was that although our sex was good together, we never became lovers. I hung Lisa up by her feet to a 10ft tall ladder and watched as she proceeded to climax totally untouched just from being hopelessly bound. I realized she wasn’t actually turned on by me at all, (superior stud that I was though at the time) she was turned on by my knowledge of bondage. I was a means to her fetish ends. As a man I was crushed (well sort of, as this was the late 70s and there was more sex then I could handle in my life anyway I quickly recovered) but as a photographer I was fulfilled. I had found the perfect bondage model. One who gave me instant feedback. A model who made my photographs better just by being in them. I loved the photos I made of Lisa more than any of the sex she ever supplied to my horny young self.

Flash forward 20 odd years and a small package arrives in my mail. It’s an autobiography by Lisa, with a picture of her I took on the front cover (not one of the best but she is fully dressed in the shot so I guess that’s why they chose it).

Does she remember me? I quickly flip thorough the book looking only for mentions about me. (Let’s be honest doesn’t everyone read a book by someone they know that way?) Wait there on page 68 my name and the note “more in another chapter”. Wait, there again on page 70 mention of having gone to Midnight Interludes swing club with me and several other people. Seventy pages later and not another mention. Was I such a small influence in the life of one of my favorite models?

I’m disappointed, and then I hit page 147 and Chapter 21, titled “Carter Stevens”. I blink. Carter Stevens, I know that name. My God she’s written an entire chapter about me??? She describes me as “fairly tall but fire plug stocky”, well, that’s a lot better than most people who seem to remember me as shorter and fatter than I really am. That’s a good sign. She found submitting to me “strangely satisfying” but thought it odd that she did. She summed up her memories of me as follows:

“We weren’t great friends or anything, but he was a nice man. Nicest pornographer I’ve ever known!”

Well, it certainly wasn’t a slam but it sort of felt like being called a polite rapist, so I went back to page one and this time I read the book from cover to cover.

Now, I’m almost sorry I did. Not that it’s a bad book. NO in fact it is the very opposite. I recommend this book to everyone. It’s a terrific picture of the kinky sex industry in New York in the 70s and 80s (and probably even still today).

No, I’m sorry to read it because it’s not a happy book and it doesn’t end happily either. The last sentence of the book sums up both the book and unfortunately Lisa’s life “I am not proud of what I have done.”

God, I was sorry to read that. I’m sorry to find out that Lisa was unhappy doing what she did and is still unhappy today. It bothered me to discover that a person who I knew and liked and who had lived a life in much the same world as I had spent mine had been so unhappy to have spent her time there.

It didn’t blast me out of the water, after all many I knew had died untimely, sad deaths but it didn’t please me to find yet another sad life among the ruins of the sexual revolution. Another life taking advantage of but not enjoying the freedoms we had fought so hard for before AIDS had made our victory hollow at best.

Lisa paints a grim picture of her life as a sexual rebel. She was indeed a willing, in fact eager victim of her oppressors, but although she lived a creative life on her own (she was a performance artist using bondage among other means as her medium whether she knew it or not) but she took no joy from her art. Her disclaimer (page 107) that “I get no pleasure out of being bound, in fact I am claustrophobic and hate to be restricted in any way.” is, in fact, totally at odds to the Lisa I remember, who turned that perhaps real fear into a self stimulating sexual high that was palpable to all who were in her presence when it came over her. That’s why my pictures of her are among the most erotic yet least explicit I ever did.

By all means read this highly fascinating account of a life spent in the short lived world between the sexual revolution and the rebirth of sexual fear, a life, perhaps, wasted in the BDSM “lifestyle”, spent in the shadowy underbelly of the New York sex scene but don’t expect any major revelations or self discoveries along the way for Lisa’s bottom line is “Then again, maybe I’m just fucking nuts.” Sorry Lisa, I would never have taken that first picture if I had known how little you would have enjoyed being my “ Bettie Page”.

Carter Stevens