Critics and commentators – everyone who was anyone – had already taken note of the experience of watching Deep Throat. Though only Al Goldstein had given it an unqualified rave, even those who disliked the film, such as Nora Ephron in “Esquire”, noted that it would be culturally derelict not to see it. For it was only with the explosion of hardcore features preceding and following Deep Throat that pornography became available to mixed audiences in public movie theaters. And not until the summer of 1973 did I see real unsimulated sex acts on a movie screen. Now that moving-image pornography is familiar fare on the smaller screens of computers and televisions viewed primarily in the home, it is hard to understand the impact of mass American culture’s first encounter with graphic sex in movies. To do so we have to again recognize, as with Thomas Edison’s projection of the first screen kiss, the power of big-screen magnification before a public audience. […] Deep Throat is about Linda (played by Linda Lovelace, originally Linda Boreman), an ordinary young woman with wholesome – not what would later become known as stereotypically pornographic – good looks. She is a typical product of the 1960s sexual revolution. She considers sexual pleasure important to her self-fulfillment, but has missed out so far. […] After experimenting with a number of men to no avail, she goes to a doctor (Harry Reams) who informs her that her clitoris is deep in her throat (one early possible title for the film was The Sword Swallower). Deep-throat fellatio is the ‘cure’ immediately performed on the doctor. Putting aside the many analyses that have been subsequently spun around this film, my own included, what I most remember about this screening was what most people remember about pornography when they first see it in a social group: how much we laughed. It would be a mistake to underestimate the function of this film’s sophomoric brand of humor in making feature-length, publicly screened pornography palatable to its initial audience. The film reassured us with the option of laughing rather than panting; or, if we did pant, the laughter helped disguise it. […] The very title Deep Throat, even before its Watergate resonance, added a sense of mystery and sophistication that lifted the film out of the Times Square circuit into a brief era of porno chic. Deep Throat would prove to be the largest-grossing independent film of all time.

Linda Williams, Screening Sex, Duke University Press, Durham-London 2008