Unknowing Ray Horsch – Episode 2: Performance, Podcast 172

When I first visited Ray Horsch at his home in Philadelphia to interview him, most of the conversation was about New York in the early 1970s. More specifically, Times Square. The adult movie theaters. The live sex shows. The people who worked in them. The strange, seedy ecosystem that flourished there long before Times Square became the Disney-fied tourist destination we know today.

Ray had been part of that world. And in talking about it, he also talked about himself – about performance, transgression, sex, violence, art, and the persona he had spent years constructing.

Listening now, the question running beneath much of it is one I could never have anticipated when I recorded it: Where did the performance end? And where did Ray begin?

If you know any information that may relate to the ongoing investigation of Ray Horsch or his son Eugene, please contact Detective Joseph Murray, at the Homicide Division of the Philadelphia Police Department, at 215 686 3334.

You can listen to the first part of this series here.

Please note that all unauthorized reproduction or use of the audio in this podcast is strictly prohibited.

This podcast is 35 minutes long.

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I first visited Ray at his home outside Philadelphia almost twenty years ago.

It wasn’t the house on West Chew Avenue that has since become the focus of the ongoing murder investigation. At the time, Ray lived in Chalfont, a quiet suburb some thirty miles north of the city. His was a large, comfortable three-bedroom house, with a big yard and an extensive basement.

I’d tracked him down because I’d started documenting the history of the beginnings of the adult film business in the 1960s and ’70s. On the face of it, Ray was a relatively minor figure in that story. He’d directed only one theatrically released adult film of note, back in 1973, The Erotic Memoirs of a Male Chauvinist Pig.

But when I looked for him, in the early days of the internet, he was unusual in that he had his own website. And it was the way he described himself there that caught my attention.