I think the formative literary experiences of adolescence are far less uniform than we sometimes (condescendingly) assume. For example, Catcher in the Rye left me flat, Slaughter House Five didn’t really “hit” me until after my second reading in college, and no, I never had an Ayn Rand phase. No, I was a fourteen-year-old midwestern girl who was really into Spalding Gray.

My mother had his monologue collections, Swimming to Cambodia, Sex and Death to the Age 14 and Monster in a Box, which I devoured after seeing a recorded performance of Gray’s Anatomy on TV. Although hearing and watching Gray deliver a monologue is absolutely essential, his intimate, honest, and endearingly neurotic storytelling translates beautifully to the written word as well. (One wonders how much his acute dyslexia is responsible for his craft; reading was incredibly difficult for him, not to mention writing, and he attributed his strength in monologue to an adept, discursive auditory memory.)

But of course, Spalding Gray was not always the Spalding Gray, and in the early days of his career, in addition to summer stock and experimental theater, he had a little bit of a side career in skin flicks—two or three, depending on the source. Of course, given Gray’s avant-garde-ish background (and the fact that this was 1976), it’s entirely possible that this was all done in the spirit of radicalism and testing the boundaries of “acting”—the director of Farmer’s Daughters, Zebedy Colt was an early, outspoken gay arts pioneer and activist.

Or maybe Gray was just broke and needed the money

The clip below, from Farmer’s Daughters, is totally safe for work, and you get to hear Gray’s trademark Rhode Island accent on stilted, vintage, naughty dialogue! However, although it’s apparently possible to view the notorious Farmer’s Daughters in its entirety, it is not the sort of cheesy, novel smut people tend to watch for a retro laugh. It is fucked up. So fucked up, in fact, that I’m just going to link the plot here. Even if you do want the perverse details—imagine Wes Craven’s The Last House on the Left remade for a “raincoater”-crowd—I wouldn’t want to spring them on you before you’ve had your morning coffee…

Did Gray ever do a monologue about the making of Farmer’s Daughters I wonder? Probably not!