FROM priest to pornographer is one of the more unusual career moves.But that is the path Michael Perry has taken. It brought him to Sydney this week with a thousand other sexologists for the World Congress for Sexual Health.
After 11 years in a seminary run by the Salesian order in New Jersey, the former Brother Michael left two months before he was to take his final vows.
He eventually became a psychologist in Hollywood specialising in sexual problems, and a director of explicit erotic videos with titles such as Lovers and their Toys and Erotic Voyages.
"My 86-year-old mother still thinks I'm doing God's work - and she's seen the videos I make," Dr Perry said yesterday. "It happens to be true. I'm still helping people."
It wasn't the vow of chastity that drove him out of the priesthood; that was a small price to pay for the privilege of devoting his life to God and teaching. In the end he rebelled against church authority.
When he left, a 25-year-old virgin in 1969, free love was in the air. Yet then, as now, he believes, many people suffered ignorance and guilt - and religion had a lot to do with it.
"I've made a good living for 20 years as a psychologist because sexual ignorance is pervasive," he said. "You ask 90 per cent of men what a woman wants, and they don't have a clue, and if a well-meaning man should ask a woman, she goes, 'I don't know. Try something.' That's a big help."
That's where his erotic videos come in. They are different from the pornography seen on the internet whose purpose is titillation, he says.
They use beautiful live models having sex but their purpose is instructional, he says. Some have explanatory voiceovers, designed to show people where to find the G spot, how to give sensual massage, or the "rare art of going down on a woman the right way".
Dr Perry, 63, who is married with two adult children, has a doctorate in psychology and studied under Wardell Pomeroy, the right-hand man to Alfred Kinsey, who pioneered sex research in the US in the 1930s. He thinks letting people fumble their way to a better sex life has its limitations.
"Why should young people have to reinvent the wheel? Can you imagine if we took that approach to teaching spelling?"
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