Episode Details

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.

It read: “Alternately an artist, filmmaker, composer, former Sesame Street program maker, writer, porn performer, drug smuggler, political activist, art forger, counterfeiter, pot grower, air show pilot, army deserter, fugitive, sociopath, ex-convict, and all-out villain, Ray Horsch’s life has been as colorful and obsessive as his art.”

I had no idea how much—if any—of that was true at the time. But it certainly made me curious. So I contacted him.

Over the phone, Ray was polite, friendly, and humble, and he invited me down to Philadelphia to spend the day with him and talk about his life.

The first thing you noticed about Ray was how he looked. You couldn’t really notice anything else.

He was in his sixties at the time, with long black straggly hair and an intense, piercing stare. He dressed entirely in black. And to complete the effect, he sometimes wore an eye patch—which, as far as I could tell, served no practical purpose whatsoever. It simply made him look more menacing. For Ray, that was probably reason enough.

Because Ray enjoyed playing the villain.

You’ll hear that repeatedly in these conversations. He wanted to provoke. His appearance did it. His photographs did it. His writing and films did it. Shock wasn’t incidental to his work; it was central to the persona he had constructed around himself.

Ray maintained that all of this was performance—that he was an artist who wanted to challenge and disturb, not simply through the work he produced, but through the character he presented to the world. Privately, though, he insisted that this f