Gloria Leonard, 1940–2014

last updated 8 January 2015

Throughout her career, Gloria Leonard was repeatedly asked the same question: How can you work in pornography and still call yourself a feminist? Leonard, a 1970s porn star who later became the publisher of the skin magazine High Society, had a simple answer. “I said the whole point of the women’s movement is for women to choose whatever they want to do,” she explained. “Why should my choice be any less or more valid than your choice?”

The Bronx, N.Y.–born daughter of a ladies’ clothes manufacturer, Leonard “took a decidedly atypical path into pornographic movies,” said The New York Times. She wrote liner notes for a record company, worked as a stockbroker on Wall Street, and was the production manager for a film company making commercials in the Caribbean. When that firm folded, she returned to New York as a 35-year-old single mother desperate for a paycheck, and signed up to appear in an X-rated film. “I was a fairly liberated lady,” she said. “This would be the supreme test of how liberated I really was.” That film, 1976’s The Opening of Misty Beethoven, was a box office hit that launched Leonard’s porn career.

Her onscreen success, combined with her business background, led Leonard to be hired in 1977 as the publisher of High Society, which became notorious for printing “naked pictures of actresses like Jodie Foster and Barbra Streisand,” said the New York Daily News. A sultry recording of Leonard’s voice on an answering machine previewing High Society’s next issue proved so popular that it inspired Leonard to create the magazine’s Living Centerfold Telephone Service, one of the first phone-sex lines, in 1983. Up to 700,000 people would call each day to listen to the pornographic recordings, “although she later claimed she never got a dime from it.”