Like high heels and wanton glances, Dian Hanson will never go out of style. The goddess of the pornography publishing world has reigned supreme since her days running Leg Show and Juggs. These days, Ms. Hanson finds herself writing, editing and archiving for Taschen Books (working with the likes of Terry Richardson and Roy Stuart). Lifelong friend of Robert Crumb, Vanessa Del Rio and Tempest Storm; Dian’s memoir is a tale that could only be described as a publisher’s wet dream. Her sense of loyalty to her peers shines via her unwillingness to sell others out to make a fast buck.

It’s clear; their secrets are safe with Dian. Her intelligence, candor and strength exude from being a groundbreaking force that continues to be reckoned with. Time stands still and while those around her might feel the pangs of creaking bones, Dian appears to have drunk from the chalice of Dorian Gray. Ms. Hanson has watched the pendulum swing hither and thither, meanwhile weathering all the storms the adult publishing world has to offer. I’m proud to say, my maiden interview voyage launched with the one the only, the legend Dian Hanson.

SexHerald: First of all, let me tell you that I’m very honored to have a chance to speak with you. I did a bunch of research last night about your career and you have had an amazing run in the pornography industry.

Dian Hanson: Yes, I love the old pornography industry. I thought I’d work in the pornography industry forever, but things intervene.

SH: So how did you get started in pornography? What was your entrée?

Hanson: I was always interested in it. You know, I was interested in it even before I knew it existed. I was really curious about the nude body and I was curious about breasts, particularly that I could see growing up then, maybe 1958-59 I became aware of breasts and women were wearing these kind of pointy bras at the time so it really helped me to become aware of them and I began drawing them at that young age, just trying to imagine what was under their clothes, what that thing was that was coming out of their chest and making my own pornography, so to speak and then tearing it up and putting the little scraps of paper down in the bottom of the garbage can so no one would know what I was doing.

I found my father’s girly magazines; it was very informative, I was just always curious. My father would sometimes show me things in Playboy, I don’t really know why, probably because my mother wasn’t interested in looking an he wanted to share something he found particularly interesting with somebody and it look like something that would be fun, just what you’re saying, it looked fun. It looked like something I wanted to know more about and then of course the hippie era came and you know sex was a positive thing and I just put it all together.

Pornography was a good thing and I wanted to be associated with pornography. And funny, my aunt has sent me some letters from my dead mother recently that she has, they have lots of correspondence and she sent me a letter from 1971, when I had just hooked up with my first husband, we were living together which was very shocking and my mother was saying, “Oh, I don’t know what’s going on with Dian, she just wants to shock us obviously, saying pornography is good, drugs are good, pornography is good. How can she say such things?”

And yeah, that was the point when we were really exploring pornography. And it was a goal, it was a goal to want to work in it because I thought here is something where I would have fun everyday. You know it was stimulating, I found it very stimulating, it made me want to masturbate, I learned to masturbate looking at pornography and I couldn’t imagine any better way to make a living and I knew people had to make a living at it, they were doing it. And I suppose if I’d been born 10 years earlier it would have seemed like an impossibility, but because of the era it was completely possible.

SH: So your parents were aware of your career?

Hanson: Yeah, not happy about it. Not happy about it. My mother would call me up and say, “You always liked the National Geographic, wouldn’t you rather work with them?”

"Well maybe if you guys were rich and we’d come over on the Mayflower I could maybe conceivably get a job there, I don’t know if you’ve ever looked at there masthead, but I don’t think it’s gonna happen. I’m a high school dropout and they’re not calling me up."

But she had lots of concerns. And my father would buy the magazines and she’d see a picture of me in there, you know while we were doing a photo shoot or something lifting some woman’s breasts and call me up and say, “You can tell me, you’re not a lesbian are you?” No, No we were just working. “Oh, good because I think I’d kill myself if my child was a lesbian.” "It’s alright mom, you don’t have to die."

SH: So do you feel your career has informed your personal life in a positive way? Have you ever felt like it was negative?

Hanson: To any degree that it was negative would be so slight not to be a factor. It has probably influenced, it has definitely influenced the men that have been attracted to me through the years. And there have been men who were too attracted to it and that was not good.

I was married to a photographer who kept wanting to take pictures for the magazine and then if I’d set him up to take pictures he’d get out of control and get drunk and come onto the girls and that was unpleasant and there have been other men who didn’t want to handle it, who didn’t like it and my husband now, who I’ve been with 12 years has not really loved it. He thought it was interesting in the beginning and then he sort of quickly got where he didn’t like the fact that I was working in this material.

So, but other than that I think it’s been good for my self-esteem, it’s certainly made me feel good about men. It was good to all these years to read the letters men would send me and see how romantic they were to see, to really learn what male sexuality is about. Everything I’ve learned has been encouraging to me. That men seem to just see sexuality differently. They kind of mix-up sex and love in a way women don’t women actually make more separation between sex and love than men do.

If a man has a really good sexual rapport with a woman he’s likely to fall in-love with her. Where as women, women think romance is walks on the beach and thoughtful cards and someone cooking them a dinner and someone cuddling them without having sex. And for men sex is involved is much more intimately involved in the love process. But it is true that men can have sex without love it doesn’t mean it’s always there, but then when they do love a woman their urge is to try and give that woman the greatest orgasm she’s ever had; and to feel that this is their way of showing their affection for her. They don’t, they would think that taking her for a walk on the beach would be a pretty pale way to show her their love compared to giving her a great sexual experience.

SH: Do you think it’s necessary to objectify women to sexualize them? Do you think it’s necessary that there’s some kind of a disconnection with that woman as a human being in order to see them as a sexual being?

Hanson:  I’ve never seen evidence of this being done across the board. All the years I did magazines, I got letters at least one a day from a man who had seen a woman in a magazine and felt he could see into her soul and see that she was a wonderful person and see that she might make a good wife for him and that he felt that he was falling in-love with her as a person. I never saw evidence that people were turning the models into objects and not seeing them as people.

It was important to them to know the models’ names, it was important to be consistent with the names, because they didn’t want to think that this was some nameless face. Well I’m sure there are people who objectify those that they are sexually interested in, but what I usually found was the opposite, that the readers wanted more information about the models as human beings, that they wanted them to be, they wanted to know them on an intimate level. They had their favorites; they wanted to see their favorites return. The models themselves have told me that these people would try to search them out and get to know them and know who there really were.

The whole idea of objectification was kind of invented in the 1980s wasn’t it? By the second wave of feminism and it was the idea that somehow once the woman is on a piece of paper she becomes an object, the paper is the object, the photograph is the object, the woman is not the object.

SH: Right, she retains her totality.

Hanson: She retains her totality and for the most part the viewers, the male viewers did not want to see them reduced to body parts. If you just took a picture of the breast, the buttocks, the legs, the head whatever and ran those separately they weren’t pleased. They wanted to see the whole thing. In fact, I was always getting letters saying, “Oh that model was cropped too tight, why don’t you have a picture of each one of them standing up, just standing so we can see exactly what they look like and have a sense of their height and their size and the whole thing.” They’re fantasy girlfriends and with everything that girlfriend would mean.

They would fantasize taking them to dinner, they would write about this often, “I fantasize about this often.” How many times did I read, “This letter, I’m sure us going to be different than most of the letters you get because I’m not gonna talk dirty.” Most of the guys did not talk dirty. They wanted, they were writing to these women because they had gotten an improbably crush on them from seeing their photos.

SH: Do you think it’s the government’s responsibility to legislate gay or even straight marriage?

Hanson: Well, of course there’s been an awful lot of that here in California since Proposition 8 was passed and my understanding of the reason for marriage is to legitimize children, is to make sure that children will be taken care of, that you can, if the parent dies that there will be somebody that automatically has responsibility for the child. That inheritance can be easily taken care of. There are legal reasons for it; the religious reasons have no place in government, whatsoever. So I think once you allow gays to adopt children, which has been going on for quite a while, then marriage makes sense because marriage and children have always gone hand and hand. So if you allow gay people to adopt children I can’t see how you can say they can’t marry. Because that’s what marriage is all about, is making the future safe for your children.

SH: So what do you feel are the sexual cultural differences in Los Angeles compared to New York?

Hanson: Everyone’s afraid of sex in New York. Everyone’s so pushed together in New York; people don’t have enough space, enough personal space in New York. Their apartments are too small, their offices are too small, the space around when they’re walking on the street is too small, people are always intruding, always bumping into you. And I think people are just desperate to draw a space around them and it makes it harder to hook up and let someone in to have a committed relationship you have to find a way for the two of you to live together in a space that is too small for one person. And I think just that makes people a little sex shy in New York. Certainly I lived there before AIDS and then after AIDS and AIDS hit New York hard. AIDS hit New York first and that had a big effect on people too. That New York was the first place where people became afraid to have sex and I don’t think that, that has entirely gone away. People out here will say that, “Oh, it’s hard to make people commit,” or whatever but it does seem that people are able to have more casual sex in Los Angeles than they do in New York. Less angst, maybe; they still don’t want to commit but there’s less angst about hooking up.

SH: So what are you working on now?

Hanson: Today I’m working on a book on Bob Meiser, who’s a gay photographer, he had the Athletic Physique Model Guild, he started the first Physique magazine in the U.S.; Physique pictorial and did that early black and white Physique work. Then in the 70s and 80s he did this extremely colorful, very quirky, funny nude work with men and this material has never really been published.

He’d never published his magazine in color and so very few people are aware of his color work which is almost psychedelically colorful, lots of gels and wacky sets and things like that so this is really a big pleasure to get to have something where there’s an enormous archive and people are unaware of it. They’re aware of the man, the man himself is very famous, but they’re unaware of this work, so that we can deliver something completely new, to a crowd who know him. I’m just finishing up the Book of Legs in my body parts series and just sorting through in fact, some Elmer Batters pictures here; while I’m talking to you, out of my archive. I’m just finishing my Big Tom of Finland book. There will be a Butt Book in the Butt Series and then I am by the way doing a Big Bush Book, yes it will be hairy pussies. Hair’s soft, who wants to get down there and run into a bunch of prickly stubble?