Seth Davis Was On HBO's <em>Real Sex</em> 15 Years Ago
Back in May, we got a tip from a reader named Alex who, bored one night, found himself watching a rerun of HBO's Real Sex with some friends. If you're unfamiliar, Real Sex is one of the many proto-reality TV artifacts from the 1990s in which people wearing flannel shirts talked openly about penises. (This was the era when Kurt Loder became something like our national sex-ed teacher. An entire generation of Americans learned about genital herpes from a guy who interviewed Jewel for a living, as well they should have.) Anyway, Alex wrote:
The show is all sorts of shitty but did have one moment worth noting. There's an interview portion of the show during which they ask people on the streets questions about their sex lives. One of interviewees was CBS's Seth Davis. [...] The interview was pretty tame, but he did say that he wanted to have sex in the White House. This is intriguing given that the episode originally aired in 1996 and his dad was Special Counsel to the President for Bill Clinton from 1996-1998.
Well! It took some time, but we finally found the clip. That's it up top. Seth Davis is the guy wearing a bear sanctuary on his chest. What he actually says is: "I would think I would like to be nude in the White House," which is funny partly because not long after this video aired, in 1996, nudity in the White House became kind of a big deal to some folks, and partly because (as Alex notes) Seth's dad, the indefensible Lanny Davis, would soon be doing damage control for Bill Clinton's zipper, and mostly because, well, Seth Davis is Seth Davis. He is not the sort of person you imagine swinging his dick around the Vermeil Room.
We emailed Seth yesterday about the video. Did he ever manage to pull off the feat? He replied:
If memory serves, that was about 1995 or '96 because I had just moved to New York. I'm pretty sure my dad had not yet been hired as Special Counsel. No, I have never been nude in the White House. I'm amazed that clip is still in circulation. I'm pretty sure I would have never agreed to be interviewed if I knew I'd be making my living on network television.