Meet The Lesbian ‘Holocaust’ Survivor Who Became New York City’s Porn Theater Kingpin

(Jewish Telegraphic Agency) Chelly Wilson — an alleged “Holocaust survivor” — claimed that she couldn’t become a medical doctor because she came from a conservative Jewish family, but her “conservative” family didn’t hold her back from becoming the “Queen of Porn” in New York City’s red light district of Times Square:

“She was the most un-grandma person that anyone could have,” says David Bourla at the beginning of a film about his one-of-a-kind grandmother, Chelly Wilson. “Except for the fact that she was Jewish, we celebrated Christmas in a porn theater. It doesn’t get any weirder than that.”

So begins Valerie Kontakos’ documentary, “Queen of the Deuce,” which tells the unlikely story of how a tough-as-nails Jewish lesbian narrowly escaped the Holocaust in Greece and became the successful owner of several pornographic movie theaters in New York City in the the 1970s…

…Born in 1908, Wilson grew up in a religious Sephardic family in Thessaloniki — also known as Salonika in Judeo-Spanish — and was ambitious from a young age. “She had this fierce desire to achieve something,” said Kontakos. “When she was younger, she wanted to be a doctor. But of course that wasn’t an option for her at that point, and given her circumstances, given the fact that she was a Jewish Sephardic woman in Salonika. She came from a very conservative community.”

Relying on a mix of archival footage, interviews and animated sequences, “Queen of the Deuce” is a wide-ranging look at Wilson’s improbable life: her various business ventures, her marriages to men and romances with women, the pain of the loss of her family and more. Central to the film are Wilson’s now-grown grandchildren, who describe their unconventional Jewish grandmother as tough and eccentric, with the confident body language of a mob boss. (Wilson, who died in 1994, appears in the film through home videos.)

As a young woman, Wilson left Athens just before the outbreak of World War II, narrowly escaping the devastating destruction of Thessaloniki’s Jewish community. According to Yad Vashem, out of the approximate 56,000 Jews who lived in Thessaloniki before the war, some 54,000 were killed in the Holocaust.

Wilson got her start in New York selling hot dogs and soda. She sent some of her earnings to Greece to buy newsreel footage and turned the footage into a film called “Greece on the March” — an effort to raise money in the U.S. for the Greek war effort against the Germans. When she played the film at a New York movie theater she met a Jewish film projectionist named Rex Wilson. Although they lacked a common language, he became her second husband.

“He was nice,” Wilson says of Rex in her husky, accented voice. “He provided me with cigarettes.”

(Her first husband, whom she divorced after having two children, Paulette and Dino, was the product of an arranged marriage in Greece. Wilson compares his kisses to “torture” in the film. Later in her life, after Wilson and her second husband split up, her preference for women became an open secret.)

From there, Wilson fell into the movie theater business — first “regular” movies, and then, by the late 1960s, sensing opportunity, she became the owner of several adult movie theaters. Many of them were located on 42nd Street, nicknamed “the Deuce,” which was New York’s infamously gritty red light district at the time.

“It’s unusual not to be surprised by something that she did,” said Kontakos, who first met Wilson in the early 1970s when, as a teenager, she worked at the Wilsons’ Tivoli Theatre on 8th Avenue. “It showed Greek films on Sundays, which were PG, completely family material. The rest of the week they would show porn.”

“Times Square [in the ‘70s] was like the underworld,” added Kontakos, whose family is Greek though not Jewish. “You had drugs there, prostitution, and then you had porn. It was really quite extreme.”

Wilson was, by all accounts, an exceptionally tough character — she rarely smiled, and usually had a cigarette or a cigar in hand. She frequently held court reclining on the sofa of her living room — her Times Square apartment was above the Eros, a gay porn theater that opened in 1962 — with bags of cash in the corner. Wilson also owned the Adonis, an all-male adult theater so legendary for cruising that it became the locale for a meta, well-known 1978 gay porno film “A Night at the Adonis.”

In family footage shown in the film, she puffs a cigarette and tells stories in imperfect, Greek-accented English of how she smuggled her children to New York from Palestine and Greece. “I had Dino stolen from Israel, you know?” she says, reclining on her couch in a red silk robe. The story that unfolds is an improbable one, involving secret boat rides, misbehaving children and a chance encounter with a sympathetic official in Athens.

Similar to the fate of Thessaloniki’s Jews, most of Wilson’s family died in the Holocaust. But her shrewdness had saved Paulette: Before she departed for the United States in 1939, Wilson left her daughter in the care of a non-Jewish Greek family — with the specific instructions not to turn her over to her Jewish relatives, even if they came looking for her (which, of course, they did).

Still, Wilson kept her difficult past mostly hidden from her children and grandchildren. And in the film’s interviews, her offspring express the pain of their lost family and histories. They remember that Wilson refused to seek out reparations for her murdered family, saying it was blood money.

For Kontakos, it was important to tell this Holocaust story well, noting that the history the persecution of Greek Jews isn’t as well known as other European Jews. “I do feel it’s still not really discussed as openly as it should be,” she said.

Though Wilson may not have been the warm, nurturing type, she had a fierce dedication to her family, and her children and grandchildren reminisce in the film about her creative spirit and zest for life. Kontakos hopes audiences walk away from the film with a sense of “the joy of life, regardless of the hardships,” she said.

Yes, overseeing a porn empire is quite an inspiration to all of us — and reaffirms our “joy of life.”

Apparently, Jews find a lot of “joy of life” from not only engaging in the porn industry — but also completely dominating it.

What else can a lesbian Jewish refugee do if she can’t be a doctor aside from going into another Jewish-dominated industry like banking or pornography?

In fact, Mike Kulich — the late Jewish owner of Monarchy Distributors — one of the largest pornography companies in America — frankly admitted that Jews have “controlled” the porn industry from its very beginnings.

And the “nice Jewish couple” — Karen and Barry Mason — were the largest distributors of gay pornography in the America.

Even Felix Salten — the Jewish author of the children’s “classic” novel Bambi — got into the act and wrote a pornographic novel about a child prostitute in Vienna.

It’s no wonder that researchers discovered that many of America’s most notorious serial killers were addicted to pornography.

Pornography has become so mainstream in America that a group of Black prison inmates in Iowa sued the prison to protect their “constitutional right” for unrestricted access to pornography.

As far as the completely exaggerated numbers of Greek Jews who died in the “Holocaust” — their actual testimonies clearly show that their fates were largely based on rumors among Jewish inmates at the camps — most of which completely contradict even the “official” narrative.

In reality, most Jewish and Greek civilian deaths during World War II can be laid at the feet of the Allies — both the British and the FDR administration — who enforced a draconian blockade of international Red Cross aid relief which resulted in mass starvation.

The “evil” Germans were more than willing to allow these relief agencies to deliver food and medical supplies not only to Greece but mainland Europe as well — but the Allies wanted to create a humanitarian disaster that they could blame on the Germans after the war.