Newsweek on Pete the Porno Puppet

Newsweek has an article this week about XXXchurch.com and its anti-porn TV commercial starring Pete the Porno Puppet.

Part “Sesame Street,” part “Odd Couple,” Pete is the brainchild of two pastors and a pornographer. It may sound like the beginning of a bad joke, but to hear Craig Gross, Mike Foster and James DiGiorgio tell it, it could just be a match made in heaven. Gross, 28, and Foster, 32, are the founding ministers of Fireproof Ministries, a nonprofit Christian outreach group that has launched a crusade against the multi-billion dollar pornography industry. Not content to preach to the converted, the duo took a more unorthodox tack: they launched XXXchurch.com, a “Christian porn site” to educate Web surfers about the addictiveness of porn and the damage it can do to a person’s life. (Their first PSA ran on cable featuring a cast of dwarf actors, but the nonprofit organization Little People of America demanded Gross and Foster kill it because they found the tag line—“porn stunts your growth”—offensive.) They also host booths at adult film industry conventions in Las Vegas. “We debuted our site at a porn show,” says Gross. “We’re not yelling at people...We kept going back to these shows because they kept asking us back.”

Enter James DiGiorgio. Known to his fans as Jimmy D., DiGiorgio is the man behind Smash Pictures. Over the past 10 years he has shot such titles as “Sopornos #3” and “Nutjob Nurses,” but after seeing Gross and Foster quietly hold court at industry conventions for more than a year, he decided to find out what they were all about. He was charmed. “They’re kinda wacky, but they’ve got a great sense of humor,” he says. “It reminded me of the story of Jesus walking with the lepers.” After hearing about their first failed PSA, he offered his services for free. Their discussion went from filming a strictly anti-porn spot—a stance DiGiorgio (whose livelihood relies on a robust smut industry, which recently suffered a setback due to the discovery of HIV infections among some of the actors) could not wholly embrace—to focusing on keeping children from encountering sexually explicit images. “Now they were talking about something I can get 100 percent behind,” he recalls. “I have a grown daughter and an 8-year-old son who spends a lot of time online. So I said ‘hell yeah, let’s go for it. I am way, way, way behind that.’”

Previous Daze item about the XXXchurch.com/Jimmy D. collaboration. You can view the commercial online at XXXchurch.com. (They've been promising for months to post a "director's cut" with real hardcore puppet humping, but it's not up yet.) This page also collects various news clips about the commercial and a hilarious Daily Show with Jon Stewart segment.

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