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Pure Filth
Jamie Gillis appeared in over one hundred films, and as such was a primary performer in pornography's "Golden Age." Gillis is also known for inventing the "Gonzo" genre of pornography, played out in the film Boogie Nights by Burt Reynolds' character.
Pure Filth appears as transcripts from the films Jamie produced during these early years of radical and highly personal pornography. Completed just before his death in February 2010, Gillis contributed an introduction to each transcript to shed light on his ideas and plans, as well as anecdotal details and personal commentary. The book has more to do with an artist's understanding of sex than the mere views of a flesh peddler. The careful language and brutal intelligence that Jamie brought to interviews are what separates the conversations from any other work that might have more academic or prurient pretensions.
Extreme novelist Peter Sotos, perhaps better known and appreciated in France and the United Kingdom than his home country, was a good friend of Jamie Gillis, and Sotos' unusual perspective makes this volume possible.
Pure Filth appears as transcripts from the films Jamie produced during these early years of radical and highly personal pornography. Completed just before his death in February 2010, Gillis contributed an introduction to each transcript to shed light on his ideas and plans, as well as anecdotal details and personal commentary. The book has more to do with an artist's understanding of sex than the mere views of a flesh peddler. The careful language and brutal intelligence that Jamie brought to interviews are what separates the conversations from any other work that might have more academic or prurient pretensions.
Extreme novelist Peter Sotos, perhaps better known and appreciated in France and the United Kingdom than his home country, was a good friend of Jamie Gillis, and Sotos' unusual perspective makes this volume possible.
336 pages, Hardcover
First published July 17, 2012
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407 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
August 18, 2022
I don't even know how many stars to give, I mean everytime I read something by Sotos I just don't know.
It's not exactly a biography, more of a transcript of the video by Gillis. But at the same time we get a bit more informations that a basic biography would give us, Jamie Gillis was a mysogynist without a doubt he really hated women and it shows, that some porn star accepted to be treated like that are beyond my comprehension.
It was dark very dark, and that's why I bought it. I never expected anything happy by Sotos, but it's clearly his softest work to date.
Overall I don't regret to have bought it, and the picture inside are giving the book an even darker vibe. I liked it, a lot. I'm crazy, I don't even know how can I like this stuff, but I do.
It's not exactly a biography, more of a transcript of the video by Gillis. But at the same time we get a bit more informations that a basic biography would give us, Jamie Gillis was a mysogynist without a doubt he really hated women and it shows, that some porn star accepted to be treated like that are beyond my comprehension.
It was dark very dark, and that's why I bought it. I never expected anything happy by Sotos, but it's clearly his softest work to date.
Overall I don't regret to have bought it, and the picture inside are giving the book an even darker vibe. I liked it, a lot. I'm crazy, I don't even know how can I like this stuff, but I do.
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December 23, 2019Pure Filth by Jamie Gillis & Peter Sotos
I give this book 9/10 on the fucked-up-scale.
I would say without a doubt that ’Pure Filth’ contains some of the most misogynistic collection of words ever printed on paper. Just wow.
The book starts off with a 30-page introduction by Peter Sotos, and it’s a surprisingly structured text in contrast to Sotos’ usual stream of consciousness tirades. This is understandable though, because the discourse must fit inside the contextual boundaries of a foreword.
And Peter Sotos, the enfant terrible of the literary society, really is an enigma even this time around. It’s difficult to decipher what he genuinely believes, and when he’s just adding to the myth of Peter Sotos the persona. However, he doesn’t disappoint and delivers a candid and thought-provoking set of pages as usual.
What follows is transcripts from various pornographic films made by Jamie Gillis. Both mainstream adult movies, and at least one adult custom video. It starts of relatively harmless with Gillis and adult actresses picking up random guys on the street for sex on camera, and then it gets gradually worse for every chapter. You can draw some parallels to the structure of Marquis de Sade’s ’120 Days of Sodom’, for the culmination in ’Pure Filth’ contains shit eating and physical abuse in glorious de Sadian fashion. Nobody died this time around though.
The two chapters ’Walking Toilet Bowl’ and ’Brown on Ebony’ made me actually nauseous for days (whenever I had the displeasure of thinking about these two transcripts). No other book has made me do that before. So another milestone for me.
I had never heard of Jamie Gillis before I acquired this book (which I bought simply because of the fact that Sotos’ name was attached to it), but from what I understand he was quite a big deal in the Linda Lovelace-era, before he eventually ventured into the fetish/underground market.
It’s seedy and perverse, although intriguing (for me) from a completely platonic point go view. But it’s also not fiction, and the transcripts are extremely vivid and disturbing. Why a human being would feel compelled to do what Gillis does is something one could ask himself. The intrinsic value of a human being is obviously nothing but an illusion in this world.
The book ends quite abruptly unfortunately. An afterword by Sotos would have been magnificent, or maybe special commentary to each chapter. But maybe that’s too much to ask for.
When my voyage through ’Pure Filth’ is over, I arrive to the same conclusion I constructed a long time ago: men are actual subhumans.
I give this book 9/10 on the fucked-up-scale.
I would say without a doubt that ’Pure Filth’ contains some of the most misogynistic collection of words ever printed on paper. Just wow.
The book starts off with a 30-page introduction by Peter Sotos, and it’s a surprisingly structured text in contrast to Sotos’ usual stream of consciousness tirades. This is understandable though, because the discourse must fit inside the contextual boundaries of a foreword.
And Peter Sotos, the enfant terrible of the literary society, really is an enigma even this time around. It’s difficult to decipher what he genuinely believes, and when he’s just adding to the myth of Peter Sotos the persona. However, he doesn’t disappoint and delivers a candid and thought-provoking set of pages as usual.
What follows is transcripts from various pornographic films made by Jamie Gillis. Both mainstream adult movies, and at least one adult custom video. It starts of relatively harmless with Gillis and adult actresses picking up random guys on the street for sex on camera, and then it gets gradually worse for every chapter. You can draw some parallels to the structure of Marquis de Sade’s ’120 Days of Sodom’, for the culmination in ’Pure Filth’ contains shit eating and physical abuse in glorious de Sadian fashion. Nobody died this time around though.
The two chapters ’Walking Toilet Bowl’ and ’Brown on Ebony’ made me actually nauseous for days (whenever I had the displeasure of thinking about these two transcripts). No other book has made me do that before. So another milestone for me.
I had never heard of Jamie Gillis before I acquired this book (which I bought simply because of the fact that Sotos’ name was attached to it), but from what I understand he was quite a big deal in the Linda Lovelace-era, before he eventually ventured into the fetish/underground market.
It’s seedy and perverse, although intriguing (for me) from a completely platonic point go view. But it’s also not fiction, and the transcripts are extremely vivid and disturbing. Why a human being would feel compelled to do what Gillis does is something one could ask himself. The intrinsic value of a human being is obviously nothing but an illusion in this world.
The book ends quite abruptly unfortunately. An afterword by Sotos would have been magnificent, or maybe special commentary to each chapter. But maybe that’s too much to ask for.
When my voyage through ’Pure Filth’ is over, I arrive to the same conclusion I constructed a long time ago: men are actual subhumans.
July 1, 2020
Perfect light summer reading.
September 24, 2015
Those expecting the usual Peter Sotos may be disappointed. Sure, his brilliance shines through in commentary, but the meat of this book is the transcriptions of Jamie Gillis' gonzo porn movies. One may think it would be boring, but it is far from it. The porn was amazingly personal, and the details (while often uncomfortable) elevate what he did to an art. Here they reduced to words on paper with images solely created by the reader's mind. The end result is nothing short of incredible.
If you are familiar with Gillis or Sotos you know that this will not be for everyone. The easily offended and those who suffer from herd mentality need not show up for the party. Those who don't mind being challenged, however, will find this to be a read unlike any other.
If you are familiar with Gillis or Sotos you know that this will not be for everyone. The easily offended and those who suffer from herd mentality need not show up for the party. Those who don't mind being challenged, however, will find this to be a read unlike any other.
January 16, 2026
Transcriptions of sadomasochistic adult films that just aren't my bag babyyy, pre-faced with short essays by Peter Sotos.
Does anyone know who signed the limited first editions /100? I got this on amazon for like £50 years ago and only just noticed today that the first page is signed lolll (looks neither like Peter or Jamie haha)
Does anyone know who signed the limited first editions /100? I got this on amazon for like £50 years ago and only just noticed today that the first page is signed lolll (looks neither like Peter or Jamie haha)
December 19, 2013
This one is a little hard to pin down since it's transcripts from some of Jamie Gillis extreme porn vids. It's good, it's interesting, it's thought provoking, it's more than a little disturbing and it's certainly not for the faint of heart.
July 14, 2015
I'm always thrilled when I come across something that actually makes me jump, screech, or force myself to stop reading ... AMAZING work by Peter Sotos here.
December 1, 2025
'Well... I'm trying to - I'm trying to put a happy ending on it. In case somebody finds this in a hundred years and says 'My god! He was the twenty-first century DeSade'! Well, maybe I am.'
sotos's real literary power is in pissing me off to the point that i myself start thinking in whitehouse lyrics. can i suggest you: get fucked! 'pure filth' is a tale of two scumbags: gillis, an aging (now dead) porno veteran writing little quips and musings about his torture and shit-piss fetish video output before realising later that he actually doesn't want them published; and sotos, a miserable loser curating this same content, on the way clarifying that he had found gillis's work on the way towards seeking his actual pièce de résistance (child pornography). both men fancy themselves the marquis de sade, gillis quite literally spelling it out to one of his abused actresses, sotos through his assembly of the different transcripts a bit like 'simple passions' to 'complex passions' (or 'circle of shit' etc. if you prefer pasolini's version). it is an empty exercise though as clearly neither of them truly care about it. two fuckers sliding down the staircase to hell, each at a different step, but the destination is the same. and see: why you never became an author
sotos's real literary power is in pissing me off to the point that i myself start thinking in whitehouse lyrics. can i suggest you: get fucked! 'pure filth' is a tale of two scumbags: gillis, an aging (now dead) porno veteran writing little quips and musings about his torture and shit-piss fetish video output before realising later that he actually doesn't want them published; and sotos, a miserable loser curating this same content, on the way clarifying that he had found gillis's work on the way towards seeking his actual pièce de résistance (child pornography). both men fancy themselves the marquis de sade, gillis quite literally spelling it out to one of his abused actresses, sotos through his assembly of the different transcripts a bit like 'simple passions' to 'complex passions' (or 'circle of shit' etc. if you prefer pasolini's version). it is an empty exercise though as clearly neither of them truly care about it. two fuckers sliding down the staircase to hell, each at a different step, but the destination is the same. and see: why you never became an author
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March 4, 2023If someone could even manage to get turned on by something like this, they should be admitted to a psych hospital.
I don’t even know how to rate this book, because I can’t even decide how I feel about it.
It sits in an ethical grey area that I’ve never been forced into in other transgressive literature. The script-like format emphasized the idea that Sotos posited in the book’s introduction that language alone can be the most degrading and traumatizing tool if it’s used like it is by Gillis.
I didn’t really understand what I was supposed to get out of it until the Africa interview. Just the fact that he’s capable of hearing someone’s traumatic life story and continuing to traumatize them makes him turn from scumbag to psychopath. It made me wildly uncomfortable, and if it didn’t I would feel even dirtier than I do in following this book from beginning to end.
I could never recommend this to someone, but I also wish I could explain all of the factors that have made me decide that I believe it has major artistic merit for how it makes you feel as a reader.
Just not rateable.
I don’t even know how to rate this book, because I can’t even decide how I feel about it.
It sits in an ethical grey area that I’ve never been forced into in other transgressive literature. The script-like format emphasized the idea that Sotos posited in the book’s introduction that language alone can be the most degrading and traumatizing tool if it’s used like it is by Gillis.
I didn’t really understand what I was supposed to get out of it until the Africa interview. Just the fact that he’s capable of hearing someone’s traumatic life story and continuing to traumatize them makes him turn from scumbag to psychopath. It made me wildly uncomfortable, and if it didn’t I would feel even dirtier than I do in following this book from beginning to end.
I could never recommend this to someone, but I also wish I could explain all of the factors that have made me decide that I believe it has major artistic merit for how it makes you feel as a reader.
Just not rateable.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
November 25, 2025
Read this because it was on a transgressive fiction/extreme horror list or something, I wish i had some idea of what I was getting myself into. This is despicable stuff , I have no idea what the merit of this was. Sotos long ass introduction was so self indulgent and rambling and Gillis is a straight up psychopath. After falling down the rabbit hole of the two authors and glazing through scripts of awful hateful misogynistic and racist garbage, I think they belong on a list. 1⭐️
January 20, 2024
“Good. Good. That's a girl. That's a baby. Yeah. Ok. Stand up, pig. Stand up. That's a baby. That's a baby. That's a good girl. That's a good girl. Look who's here? Look at yourself, cunt. Look at yourself. That's a baby. Good. That's a baby. That's a baby. That's a baby. Good girl. Good girl. That's a baby. That's a baby. Yeah. Good. Ok, now, look at me. Turn around. Good. Excellent. Excellent.”
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August 23, 2024If Georges Bataille wrote for the children of meth addicted hookers....
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