From New Times Los Angeles January 28, 1999:
“You need to understand Luke’s background to understand the foolish things that he’s doing,” offers Dr. Ford. “He was separated from his mother when she was declared to be a terminal patient of cancer when he was 12 months old, and so he had a series of [nannies] for a number of years. Each time he’d get his affection wrapped around one, things would change, and he’d have another person looking after him. This went on until I remarried, and by that time he was something of a psychological case because he’d been deprived over and over.”
Brutal honesty seems to run in the Ford family.
“He was fairly normal until he got chronic fatigue syndrome and he had years of nightmares, thinking he was in pits with snakes,” the doctor continues. “Then he had a car accident [in 1985] that injured perhaps his pituitary and that changed the shape of his face. He has behaved quite out of character since he had CFS and the accident.
“The psychiatrists say that if a child experiences deep anger before the age of five or six, that when they get a bodily disease they’ll be in trouble in a psychiatric way. We think this is exactly what happened to Luke. He is narcissistic, seeking excessive amounts of attention, and has chosen a calling that has given [him] that amount of attention. He’s just not acting sanely because he’s not well.”
And the doctor has an explanation for Luke’s embracing of Judaism as well.
“He wants to be someone in his own right, which is a normal desire, but it’s very difficult for a son growing up whose father is in public work. He didn’t want to be thought of as a clone of his father, he had to strike out in something different. Judaism for him is a psychological out from being thought of as a clone of his father. He’s not really behaving according to the ethics of Judaism at all. It’s only a front, though he may not know it’s a front.”
Still, it’s his son’s involvement in porn that concerns the doctor most.
“I’m afraid he’ll be shot,” he says. “He’s doing damage to people who have no scruples, so he’s in a dangerous position and I fear for him very much. We’d rather have him live a quieter life–we love
him dearly–but that would bore him to tears. If people understood his background perhaps they wouldn’t feel so harsh about his erratic behavior.”
When informed of this conversation, the son’s only comment is, “Oh, my poor father.”
A miserable kid, I thought frequently about suicide. I wanted to hurt my parents (not because they were horrible, rather they were the ones who cared the most about me) and I thought that suicide would be the single greatest way.
One thing, however, kept me from offing myself — that I hadn’t had sex yet.
I remember riding around in the back seat of a friend’s car one Sabbath morning in 1983. We were in Fort Bragg. It was raining. The roads were slick. And my friends thought it was great fun to go sliding across the road, making sharp turns, and driving recklessly.
I was scared to death. I’d been in several car accidents. I didn’t believe in screwing around on the road. But my fright was deeper than my beliefs. It was visceral. I was panicked and angry. I yelled out at my friends, “I don’t want to die. I haven’t had sex yet.”
When the car finally stopped, I jumped out and walked two miles home to the Albion Field Station.
With those same friends, I swung out on railings a quarter mile above the river, just dangling there. One slip would mean death. I got scared and wound up my part quickly. I don’t like playing in the death zone.
I don’t recall any specific day I learned about suicide, it was just a sense that I developed as a child that this was possible. It was the ultimate way to devastate your friends and family.
I was a vengeful kid, a little ball of hate who was willing to suffer greatly by moping around and wallowing in his misery just so long as I could inflict misery on others. I wanted to drive in the knife and twist it. I hoped that they would miss me when I was gone. I hoped that they would feel guilty.
I allowed myself to think about suicide as much as I wanted, I just never allowed myself to do anything about it. I never stood on cliffs thinking about suicide. I never ran a knife over my wrists. I never put a gun to my head.
A friend of mine from eighth grade told me a couple of decades ago that while driving his car one day, he thought about ending it all but what stopped him was that he hadn’t had sex yet.
I first encountered girlie magazines in fourth grade. My best friend Wayne went into his older brother’s trailer and came out with a bunch of magazines. We went out back of his house and lay down among the tobacco plants and we got to see heaven. This was my kind of paradise. My father preached about being with Jesus in Heaven. I just wanted to get with girls.
In real life at Avondale College where I grew up, everyone Adventist was modestly covered up. Girls were an unknown land. They didn’t display the lustful drives of us boys. To the extent that they did, they scared me and I ran away. But here in the magazines, I could see what the girls were hiding. That reduced their power over me. They were no longer a mystery. They didn’t have anything special that I had to treat with respect. Their femininity, their lady bits, they were all just laid out for me like a buffet. The truth was no longer hidden from. The cloth of innocence had dropped from my eyes. Everything that had been kept from me was now revealed.
My eyes had seen the glory of the glory of the girl. I was trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath were stored. My truth was marching on.
It was the single most exciting visceral passionate experience of my life. I’d never seen anything more wonderful. My pulse raced and my blood pounded in my temples and my face flushed and my groin grew and I was on fire. I was so alive!
This was what I wanted more than anything.
We didn’t own a TV. We didn’t go to plays or to movies. We didn’t have secular magazines and newspapers around the house. These adult magazines were all I had to let me know what was available in the wider world. They were the first bread crumbs that would lead me on a wild journey that would climax in the San Fernando Valley in the 1990s where I ate deeply from the Tree of Knowledge.
That afternoon in Australia in 1976, however, we caught by Wayne’s mom. I got frightened that my parents would find out. I was frightened by how they would punish me, how they would restrict my freedom in reaction to my transgressive ways. I feared the frost that would descend upon my home. I feared the hurt that such news would deliver. I didn’t want to have to look them in the eye after I had strayed so far from God. They would fear that I was lost.
I knew intimately the story of one home where the mother went rifling through the room of their teenage son, unearthing erotic literature, and the screaming fight that resulted and the lad leaving home forever at age 15 to make his way in the world.
I was not ready to leave home. I hated controversy in my own home. I wanted things to be nice and tranquil.
I knew that looking at girlie magazines was against God’s will. The Seventh-Day Adventist Church was clear:
“Seventh-day Adventists deem pornography to be destructive, demeaning, desensitizing, and exploitative.
It is destructive to marital relationships, thus subverting God’s design that husband and wife cleave so closely to each other that they become, symbolically, “one flesh” (Genesis 2:24).
It is demeaning, defining a woman (and in some instances a man) not as a spiritual-mental-physical whole, but as a one-dimensional and disposable sex-object, thus depriving her of the worth and the respect that are her due and right as a daughter of God.
It is desensitizing to the viewer/reader, callousing the conscience and “perverting the perception,” thus producing a “depraved person” (Romans 1:22. 28, NEB).
It is exploitative, pandering to prurience, and basally abusive, thus contrary to the Golden rule, which insists that one treat others as one wishes to be treated (Matthew 7:12).
Wise, indeed, is the counsel of Christianity’s first great theologian: “If you believe in goodness and if you value the approval of God, fix your minds on the things which are holy and right and pure and beautiful and good” (Philippians 4:8, 9, Phillips).”
This public statement was released by the General Conference president, Neal C. Wilson, who one day would end my father’s brilliant Seventh-Day Adventist career.
I got so scared by the magazines, so scared by my fascination with what I saw, so scared that my desire for this material was stronger than I was, so scared that my parents would find out, so scared that it violated God’s will (my greatest fear), so scared that even though porn was what I loved most in the world, it was the single most exciting thing, I didn’t look at it again until I was 16.
My father was no hypocrite. He was no Jimmy Swaggart. He never played around. He walked the walk. He practiced what he preached. I never saw him do anything bad (aside from that time in sixth grade when he yelled at me to take out the trash).
For a few minutes one afternoon when I was ten, I saw what I wanted most. Then I held off for six years revisiting that promised land.
I remember moving to California at age 11 and spending my summers in the Pacific Union College (PUC) library looking for raunchy material. I read books on Weimar Germany. I went through every issue of Time, Newsweek, Life and Sports Illustrated magazines. I found an issue of Life from 1964 Life that featured the topless swimsuit.
My friends at school often consumed harder fare like Playboy but I refused to indulge. I just sat there stiffly as they went through the pictures. I might’ve picked up the magazine once to read the pro football preview.
I didn’t want to violate God’s will.
In eighth grade, my friend would dumpster dive outside the Post Office and the PUC men’s dormitory looking for porn. Once the campus security drove up and the guy told my friend, “I know what you’re looking for, but as long as you don’t make a mess, I won’t bust you.”
After graduating eighth grade in June 1980, I flew east to join my parents in Washington D.C.. I was in airports frequently over the next two years and my favorite place to hangout was the newsstand. I loved to read Sports Illustrated and other magazines about the NFL. Sometimes as I stood there reading about sports, I’d peek at the older men, often in suits, going through Playboy and Penthouse. I allowed myself only the tiniest of glances at the naked flesh. I quickly looked away because I knew that was God’s directive.
I figured that any man who looked at a porn magazine in public was a low-life.
Something life-changing happened in my home that summer of 1980. For the first time, we got a TV. It was only a little black and white job, but I loved it and watched it all I could. It became the ultimate real. It showed the kind of beautiful women who fascinated me. They were reading the news and appearing in tampax commercials and in dramas and comedies like Three’s A Company, which overflowed with sexual innuendo. I loved Charlie’s Angels because there were so many scenes with Farrah Fawcett running braless.
Farrah’s breasts were very real to me, more real than God.
God is invisible. It’s not easy to make God real in your life. Yes, God is everywhere according to the theologians, but you’re going to sense God differently in different places. Before a TV or in a secular school or a sports stadium or bar or disco, it’s going to be hard to sense of God. Your sense will be overloaded by other stimuli.
By contrast, when you visit a church or synagogue or the home of a Godly person, you get a sense of God.
Most of the time, you have to put yourself in Godly places to feel God’s presence.
In the early 1980s, my family no longer belonged to an organized religious community. There were fewer places in my life during high school where I could sense God.
As I had fewer experiences of the divine, God became steadily less real to me. I replaced him with visceral entertainments. Give me a choice between watching TV and studying the Bible, and TV consistently won out whenever I could get away with it.
It was much easier to turn on the TV than to turn on my connection to God.
Instead of walking around with a sense of God as I had previously, I walked around with fantasies sparked by my TV and movie consumption.
I didn’t think about my parents much. To the best of my ability, I set about creating my own life.
My parents technically restricted my TV watching to an hour a day (aside from the news) but I could often get away with more watching. When my parents weren’t home, I would often gaze until late into the night.
Prior to 1980, God was real in my life because we didn’t have a TV and we belonged to the close-knit Seventh-Day Adventist community where life revolved around the divine.
After 1980, many of my most exciting moments were spent in front of the TV. TV became the ultimate real for me, not God. TV showed me a sexy exciting world outside of the church and away from my parents. I wanted to take up residence there. While still living at home, I could only take up residence in this fantasy world in my mind, but I planned to follow the bread crumbs one day to a place where women were hot and money was easy and life was thrilling. I wanted to matter in the wider world. I wanted fame and importance. I craved recognition.
My dad was written about in Time magazine and the Los Angeles Times and other publications. I wanted that coverage for myself one day. I imagined I’d become a great person, greater than my father.
Whenever I was bored and I could get away with it, I turned on the TV and visited worlds long forbidden to me. I learned about adultery and swinging and pornography and strip clubs. The Phil Donahue Show, alone, had it all. I was a regular viewer. The first 25 minutes were commercial free.
After my father was kicked out of the church’s employment in August 1980, my parents and I moved to Auburn, CA, where dad started Good News Unlimited. We no longer belonged to a close-knit religious community. We just had our little thing going. For the first time, I no longer attended a Seventh-Day Adventist school.
In tenth grade, I began public school.
God gradually became less real to me as my hormones became more real. My life was no longer wrapped up in the Seventh-Day Adventist church. There wasn’t a tight community to hold me to its bosom. My family was isolated. I was isolated. In my loneliness and misery, I sought distractions. I wanted to feel great.
On the plane flight to my sister’s wedding in late January 1982, I picked up a Playboy magazine for the first time. Then I was off to the races. Whenever I got to a newsstand away from my parents, I started going through all the nudie magazines such as Penthouse, High Society, Genesis, etc. I quickly learned the differences between them. Penthouse was my favorite.
I began masturbating in the beginning of my Junior year (September of 1982).
Later that school year, I began going through my neighbor’s mailbox and one Sabbath afternoon, I found a Playboy magazine. I took it and walked to this deserted shack. It was my first time alone with an adult magazine. I spent an hour or two not just looking at the pictures but reading the articles. I was high. After I was finished, I hid the magazine and began visiting it regularly.
At used book stores and newsstands, I checked to see if the clerks would give me a hard time looking at the adult magazines. Only the smoke shop asked for my age when I looked at their magazines. Everyone else didn’t care.
At the beginning of my Junior year, I bought a pornographic novel at a used book store. Then later that school year, I built up the courage to buy my very own Penthouse magazine. The clerk didn’t blink. I had crossed a boundary into adulthood. I had overcome my fears.
I started buying magazines and hiding them in the woods outside of my home. I found this old metal mailbox lying around in the bushes and I stored the magazines in the box and hid it.
On my walk home from school along this deserted road, I visited them almost every day. I’d sit on the ground or on a log or a rock and I read all the articles. Hustler often made me feel sick. It was perverse. Penthouse was my favorite magazine but I bought all kinds. When it was time to get going, I’d rub one out and leave. My head was clear. I wasn’t walking around with a loaded gun in my pocket. I could concentrate on other things.
I didn’t hear my father’s voice when I was lost in my porn reveries. I knew what I was doing was wrong according to God, but God was not so real for me anymore, thanks largely to my father’s decisions that got us all exiled from the Seventh-Day Adventist church.
To the best of my ability, I was trying to make my own way in the world without reference to my parents. They didn’t have much that I wanted to emulate. I knew that the answers I sought lay outside of them and outside of the church I grew up in.
I didn’t hear any voices in my head when I was using the magazines except the imagined sighs of the satisfied ladies. I did have a sense of ick however. I didn’t feel like I was doing something horrible, but it occasionally struck me as pathetic. My friends were doing it with the real thing, while I was only participating at a distance with pictures. I was kinda OK with that. I didn’t want too much messy reality, fearing I would lose control and do something stupid that would forever ruin my life, such as as conceiving a child or catching a disease. I feared the power of sex. I figured it was better to wait a while.
I didn’t want the whole degraded lifestyle that seemed to go with high school sex, the law-breaking and drug-taking and beer-drinking. I wanted none of that. My only imagined vice was sex. Otherwise, I was a good Christian.
On this old track above the creek on my way home from Placer High School were all sorts of used condoms. It was a hook-up lane, particularly on Friday nights. Occasionally, I’d sift through the trash looking for stimulating material. One day in an abandoned shack, I hit the mother lode, finding about 20 magazines. There was one pictorial that was the hottest thing I’d ever seen — three Scandinavian lesbians in a sauna.
I laid out all the magazines spread to my favorite pictures. It was a buffet of naked ladies who would not resist me. They were just lying there. If I could get lost in the fantasy of having sex with them, I felt powerful. As long as I was in reality, however, I felt ridiculous.
When my parents were gone, I’d sometimes bring my magazines home and lay them all out on the floor and spend hours with them, just have a binge and release all of my wicked impulses until I was sated and sick and raw, and then I’d just gather them up and go on with my life. Using this material didn’t build my self-esteem, but it didn’t destroy it either. I had a busy life, so I never let my porn hangovers get me down for long.
On those occasional four-hour binges, I felt sick afterward and worried I was warped and pathetic and perhaps even needed help, but then I made sure to get busy, to read some worthy book or to do homework or something constructive to rebuild my sense of self. My feeling of addiction to porn rarely lasted to the next day when life seemed to go on as normal.
I noticed that my jonesing for porn diminished the more I felt connected to other people. That happened particularly when I was back at my old stomping grounds of Pacific Union College, my last real community.
Luckily, I was never caught with the stuff. I had no desire to display this part of my life. I admitted to myself that using porn was low and animalistic and icky, but it was getting me through tough times until I could become an adult and take charge of my own destiny and get the real thing in honorable ways.
Phone sex came along in 1983 and I called some 1-900 High Society numbers and when the phone bill came, I told my mother that they were calls for college. I also called the numbers from my newspaper office at Placer High School.
I was the Editor of my high school newspaper, a reporter for the Auburn Journal and for KAHI AM 950 radio, and I was a TV commentator for the community access channel. I had a small number of friends, but as an ex-Seventh-Day Adventist, I was cut-off not just from my church but from the wider world.
I wasn’t successful with girls. I was awkward and weird. I talked too much and too fast. I loved to challenge and argue. I wasn’t easy to have around.
I salved my pain of constant female rejection by looking at nudie magazines. Bitch, I can see what you got right here. I can buy it any time I want for $4. You’re not so precious. You don’t have anything over me.
Adult magazines empowered me. They showed me everything that a real live woman has. I didn’t have to beg for it nor court it nor play by its rules. I didn’t have to settle for someone homely and at my social level. I could see the very best. I could see girls hotter than anyone who had shot me down.
I regularly went to R-rated movies (almost always on my own). I was obsessed with media. It was my crutch during this painful awkward time. I figured that as I got older and smoother and more adept and moved away from my parents, I wouldn’t need the media sex as much. I would get the real thing.
