This tiny part of the book didn’t contain many more words than it took me to just describe it, but it was the one part that got paid attention to.
And that tiny part was the original cause of a big split that started happening in the gender/sexual-minority community where people started to identify themselves as either anti-beauty/pro–trans beauty or pro-beauty/pro–cis beauty, which basically meant anti-Henry or pro-Henry, respectively, and that split still exists today, and it is kind of interesting, but getting too far into it would be sideways to this paper at this point, so I won’t get into it too much.
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So when I said, “Most people focused on one tiny part” of Lamborgina C(unt)ock, what I meant was “Most people who read Lamborgina C(unt)ock focused on one tiny part of it.” Most people did not really read Lamborgina C(unt)ock, or even buy it.
Once it was published, though, Henry was again in the public spotlight, and most of the public was glad about that because it meant more chances to look at her. At that point, she was still on sabbatical, finishing up final revisions on My Procedures, and she began to advocate more actively for human rights, especially for the full legalization of prostitution, which, during her time out of the spotlight, had started to become a very different issue for people than it was before. First of all, a lot of people had started to come around to the idea that prostitution should be legalized, and a lot more people who already thought it should be legalized all along were being more open about thinking that. It’s impossible to know for sure why people were coming around to the idea and being more open, but it was probably just because they got used to thinking about it because of all the media attention that had surrounded Henry and the revelation of what Private Viewing actually had been a few months before, and that made it (prostitution) less taboo to think about and talk about than it had been before, the same way likable famous gay people and gay characters on TV kept making gayness less taboo to think about and talk about. But the thing that really made it an issue for people was a backlash thing. Or a backlash-against-a-backlash thing, depending how you looked at it.
Almost every week since Henry had disappeared, gallerists like Boyle and artists like Henry continued to be called out in the press for selling sex. Sometimes the accusations were true, and sometimes they weren’t, but the cops never got anyone convicted—they couldn’t get it done. The artists/prostitutes and the gallerists/pimps wouldn’t reveal who the johns/viewer-participants were, and the gallerists/pimps, if they even got questioned, either straight-up denied they pimped, or sometimes very mischievously said they were only pretending to pimp as part of a group–conceptual art performance about prostitution. The cops investigated, but could never produce evidence against them. Basically, the only way for a cop to possibly nail anyone involved would be to get approached by one of the gallerists/pimps and offered sex with an artist/prostitute for money, and that was never going to happen because the gallerists/pimps were just very smart and careful about who they approached (very wealthy people they’d sold art to in the past).
So what ended up happening was that in major US cities, law enforcement, responding to the outcries of religious/superstitious people who hated prostitution and women and freedom and equality, started very publicly busting the johns and pimps of more traditional prostitutes—usually the kind that worked out in the open, on the streets. That appeased some of the religious/superstitious people for a little while, but then, with all these johns and pimps of more traditional prostitutes getting punished while all the gallerists/pimps and viewer-participants/johns kept on getting away with pimping/buying sex, buying sex began to seem like this privilege that only certain really rich guys had a special right to, and having special rights was an extremely unAmerican thing, maybe the single most unAmerican thing, even to a lot of religious/superstitious people.*9 So fully legalizing prostitution became a class issue, or an economic issue (I’m still not sure I understand the difference completely, so…)—it became a thing where most Americans felt like they didn’t have equal protection under the law because they didn’t have as much money as some other Americans and/or didn’t go to the same schools or tennis or golf clubs as other Americans.
That got a lot of people behind the cause of fully legalizing prostitution, and Henry, as I was saying, became a more active advocate for the issue. She did fundraising events for congressional candidates, radio interviews, op-eds, and was basically the most famous and outspoken advocate for the issue, except for my father, who didn’t say a lot publicly unless money is speech (some people say it is), but donated a lot of money to congresspeople who supported legalization, and took a lot of private meetings with important people and so on.
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Henry’s memoir, My Procedures, was published in July 2001, and became an instant bestseller. It still is, today. The memoir is half about being a younger person, and the sexual relationships she had in her life—how she “proceeded” through them until falling in love with my father—and half about the surgical procedures she had done in Switzerland and Germany during her sabbatical described above. It was such a big deal that three editions were put out. The standard one had black-and-white nude photos of Henry before and after her surgeries, the “conservative” or “high school” edition had no photos, and the special deluxe edition, which sold the most, had photos in full color on glossy paper.
A few days before the book came out, Henry did her second 20/20 interview with Barbara Walters, the second-most-watched television interview of all time.*10 Most of the interview was about Henry’s sex-work history, the push for legalization, and some teasing-for-more-book-sales-type stuff about Henry’s surgical procedures. In the segment before the last commercial break, Walters asked Henry what had led to her decision to undergo the surgeries, and Henry explained that she had gotten the motor-insertion/contouring surgery because she’d wanted it for a while for what she thought were pretty obvious reasons: to enhance her and her partners’ sexual pleasure. She’d wanted the motor-insertion/contouring, she said, ever since she’d read about it a few years earlier in a medical journal while researching FABRYTAYF, and the only reason she’d waited so long to get it was that it was wildly expensive, and she hadn’t been able to afford it til after she’d met my father, who paid for it. “And it was worth every penny,” she said. “I can only hope the costs go down sooner rather than later so that more people will have the chance to experience it themselves.”
“And what about your penis?” asked Barbara Walters.
“Well,” Henry said, “I’d always loved having it. Ejaculating always brought me a lot of pleasure, but Jonboat, though he was fine with my penis—it brought him pleasure, too—he just wasn’t so crazy about how it looked, and I didn’t really care how it looked either way. I cared how it felt. So we found a team in Germany to reconstruct it so that it could look the way Jonboat wanted and continue to feel to me the way I wanted.”