Coming Out Like a Porn Star

by Jiz Lee

  Me? I am a sex-positive feminist. I think women should enjoy sex as much as men. I’ve always considered myself free and open-minded toward pornography. Yet, during my first furtive experiences watching porn (either at a pajama party with my pre-adolescent friends or at college with my boyfriend), I couldn’t help but feel disgust. It was tacky and ugly, the women did not look like they were enjoying themselves, and the sexual situations were totally ridiculous.

  On the other hand, I was a cinephile. Whenever I watched a feature film with erotic content, I felt aroused and delighted. I especially recall watching Jean Jacques Annaud’s The Lover. It was clever, it was artistic, it was hot! So I wondered: Isn’t it possible to shoot real sex with such care for details, with more complex characters and situations we can actually relate to?

  When I started my career a decade ago, female voices were practically nonexistent within the porn industry. To me this was outrageous, leaving the most important discourse on gender and sexuality in the hands of only men who weren’t often the most talented people, and who were definitely total strangers to that exotic idea of women having the same rights as men.

  This inequality was never far from my mind, and deep inside of me, I knew that if I didn’t like porn as it was, I should stop complaining and start shooting the adult films I wanted. But I had studied political science, not filmmaking! So I moved to Barcelona in 2000 and began working in production houses. I served coffee, drove actors, bought batteries—whatever it took to be on a film set. I was also inspired to take filmmaking classes. In 2004 the opportunity arose to make a short film. “It’s now or never!” I thought. So I shot The Good Girl.

  My main character wanted to be pleased rather than please. She was a modern woman who fucked the pizza guy. It was adult entertainment but with a twist. The casting, the decoration, the clothes, the styling, the music, the script, the photography—all of these were key elements for me. “Why put so much effort into videos for jerking off?” many asked. “You are such a brilliant student, why are you wasting your life like this?” said others. Yes, I had doubts. But then I uploaded The Good Girl to the Internet, for free. As days went by, I saw the number of downloads grow faster and faster until it reached almost two million! OMG! I was on fire. So there were other people who felt the way I did, who wanted a different kind of adult cinema, and everything was still ahead of us!

  I sent the short film to the International Erotic Film Festival Barcelona (FICEB) where it won first prize. I immediately felt the urge to go back to the set. So I founded Erika Lust Films in Barcelona in 2005 and shot Five Hot Stories for Her. The title says it all! And little by little, my work attracted media attention worldwide and I got in touch with other filmmakers who were on the same wavelength. I managed to shoot Barcelona Sex Project (2008); Life, Love, Lust (2010); Cabaret Desire (2011); and the short films Handcuffs (2009) and Room 33 (2011). To sustain theoretically what I was doing and make it accessible to others, I also became a writer and published Good Porn: A Woman’s Guide (2008) and Let’s Make a Porno: A Practical Guide to Filming Sex (2013), among other titles.

  But now it’s time to “come out” to my daughters! I have two, Lara (seven) and Liv (four), who are very intuitive. Lara already asked me, “Mom, are the people in your films always naked?”

  My partner, Pablo, and I have already started to teach them about sex. We bought a great classic book, Where Did I Come From?, and they are loving it. All new trends say that it’s a lot better to start talking about sex and gender at their age than waiting until they are ten or eleven, when the shame starts shaping their preadolescence minds. It’s been easy coming out to my children, who are open to whatever we decide to teach them. It’s easier than talking with certain adults, who have very conditioned ideas and prejudices about sex and pornography. Because I not only have to teach my daughters about sex, but also teach them about porn. And this is a huge advantage they will have because many parents will have the sex talk but avoid the porn talk. And that’s a mistake because porn does matter. Porn is becoming today’s sex education, which is dramatically influencing today’s gender education.

  I talked about this and other relevant issues around the influence of pornography in our society in the TEDx Vienna Talk “It’s Time for Porn to Change,” and I am now involved in spreading this message: #ChangePorn #ChangeTheNarrative!

  ON COMING IN

  Gala Vanting

  Gala Vanting is an Australian erotic film producer and performer, professional BDSM practitioner, educator, pleasure activist, relational anarchist, and erotic imaginist. She draws from a diverse background in the sexuality field and brings a queer, nonbinary, feminist approach to her work. Central to all of this is the core value of intimacy and the democratization of sexy. You can find her at MsGalavanting.com, SensateFilms.com, and MsGalavanting.net.

  I have as many coming-out stories as I have relationships—romantic, bureaucratic, medical, familial, professional, sexual, commercial, and others. Long-term or fleeting, troubled or treasured. There are so many I’d like to document, and each of them speaks to the complexity with which our culture deals with the work I choose to do in the world.

  I tell the hairdresser, and she spills out all of her baggage about her own barriers to pleasure and wants to be in one of my films. I tell my (former!) high-school math teacher, and he buys me a lot of beer in a short period of time and we make out in the car park of a dive bar patronized by half of the high school football team from my graduating class. I tell my partner, and he thinks it’s pretty cool until three years later, when he insists that the end of our relationship rests on the fact that he just doesn’t see the mother of his children being a sex worker.

  But every time I think of a particularly memorable coming-out story, I second-guess my agency to tell it; when I come out with our story, I out others too. Changing names to protect doesn’t mean all that much once you have a certain degree of public profile, whether or not it’s attached to your legal name. If you know who I am, you know who you are in a story I’ve written for an anthology about the time I told you I was a porn performer and you proceeded to fuck me too hard because you figured that’s what porn stars like. (Thanks again for that UTI.)

  So who owns these coming-out stories? And who do I stand to hurt in the process of telling them? They’re written by us both, in the moment, as I choose how to filter my reality for your consumption, ye baristas and immigration agents, ye artists and accountants. But they’re also written by each of our individual and collective experiences, and how they have coalesced to shape that moment. And what’s the truth about how it all went down, anyway? I have my experience, and you have yours. In many cases, I’d suggest they’re at least somewhat disparate.

  Is it my place to share our private interaction with everyone whose eyes pass over this page? What’s at stake in me telling these stories? In what other ways do I come out when I write them as a whole bunch of things other than a porn professional? As a lover, a daughter, a whore, an owner of several fake teeth (it’s relevant, but I can’t put that one to print), the biological sister of a perpetrator of gendered violence, one of those girls who made ‘special friendships’ with male teachers and university professors, a would-be scholar, a welfare recipient, and so on. Telling these stories is revelatory in ways one wouldn’t necessarily expect. And sometimes it outs a whole lot more about the person receiving the information than it does about me, the humble messenger.

  As much as I’d like to live in a world where the virtues of what I do—as a porn performer and producer, a sex worker, an educator, an activist—are as obvious to others as they are to me, the degree to which I can be out in any given situation sits on a rather wide spectrum and is peppered with all kinds of privileges. In being willing and able to come out as often as feels safe and not too disadvantageous, I’ve done some work toward the creation of that world. I’ve challenged a few stereotypes and changed a few minds. Probably made some friends, or at least had some conversations th
at I wouldn’t have had otherwise. The novelty of the porn-industry-identified goes a long way. Or a short one, depending on who you’re talking to.

  A few years ago, I listened to my dear friend Sam talk about coming out to a room full of people gathered for our local monthly sex-positive event. Sam is a fabulous queer flying high in corporate education administration, who manages to bring their ethics and politics with equal force to high-rises and marathon board meetings as to kinky, gritty, queer spaces. They described the various othernesses and outings they’d experienced in their years: lesbian, kinky, queer, diversely gendered. On it goes. Many of us share this sort of serial and intersectional coming-out experience.

  What stood out for me about what they shared was their reframing of the whole matter of coming out in the first place. We, the Others, are quite occupied with the process of projecting ourselves out into the world, with the ways in which our various identities are either read or invisible to the outside. We’re concerned about the ways in which representations of our communities are interpreted, and sometimes we even try to exercise some control over this. We’re anxious about how those individuals we interact with will receive the news that we are what we are. We end up devoting a lot of time and energy to what’s happening outside, perhaps to the detriment of what’s happening inside; inside our lives, our relationships, our communities, our fucking, and our politics.

  So Sam decided to talk instead about “coming in”—coming into their own delicious confluence of identities, spending more energy exploring and loving it, filling it up, poking at its peripheries and looking for the give. Accepting it as the already-perfect starting point it’ll always be. Spending less energy iterating it to others or caring much about their response. Coming into a glorious shared space with others who share those intersections, and those who don’t care what kind of thing you are as long as you’re good people. Coming into an era of just being themselves.

  Not a dry eye in the house after that one, as you can imagine. What a beautiful idea. How freeing. And deeply self-loving. And queer as fuck. Since then, I’ve thought about how this idea might function for me. What might it look like for me to come in?

  Like many of my peers in the sex industry, I’ve cultivated quite the lovely bubble of sex-working, porn-performing, sex-positive, kinky folks who offer me something to come in to. Because I’m white, middle-class, first-world, choose a career in the adult industry, and so on, I am able to be out enough in the places I go to be able to identify others like myself, to form friendships and loverships and collaborations with them, and to be able to come in enough to feel (mostly) nurtured and supported in so doing.

  There are plenty of people who don’t have this option, and this is crucial to acknowledge. It’s important for anyone who hasn’t developed a nuanced understanding of the sex industry, some of whom may even be starting that process by reading this book, to know that some of us never even have the option to come out. That the act of doing so could have consequences that threaten physical and emotional safety, financial security, and one’s familial, social, and religious networks. Just the act of talking about this at all is a privilege, one I want to see more and more porn performers and sex workers all over the world be safe to claim.

  When I began my career in the adult industry as a porn performer, my mission was political. I wanted to diversify and destigmatize pornographic bodies, starting with my own. But, of course, I carried plenty of stigma in with me; no amount of unpacking I would have been able to do at that time would have prevented this. I performed for “alternative” sites, which I thought gave me virtue, a virtue framed by de-valuing those involved in the ‘plastic’ production of that wicked mainstream porn industry, as though they were somehow less human than I was. Then I realized that whores of all stripes were heroes—whether they made pictures or films or sexy dances or real-life encounters (thanks, Annie Sprinkle). I remembered that watching porn performances by Cytherea had sparked a small revolution in my own sexual expression. I began to acknowledge that mainstream porn had the capacity to offer just as much as alternative or niche imagery to our collective sexual consciousness. And this was part of the process, for me, of coming in: knowing and owning the history of my peers and my industry, learning to accept their diversity, and placing myself in a context of sex work that wasn’t so wrapped up in stigma.

  One of the sentiments most frequently expressed by those who’ve come to be aware of my porn work is, “Wow, you just don’t seem like a porn star.” They reiterate that myth of the virtuously unmodified body, the “natural” girl next door. They marvel at my ability to articulate myself in discussions about the industry. They like it when I sound academic, until I tell them that I quit my BA to take a job in a porn company: I’m a drop-out for smut. They see my body hair and congratulate me for not conforming. I use the words “ethical” or “feminist” or “cross-genre” to describe my work, qualifiers that I do believe are applicable, and it becomes more acceptable to them. At the same time that I’m providing an accessible point of entry for them to humanize porn professionals, and potentially making my future interactions with them much less strained, in my mode of coming out, I’m also allowing some of their core stigmas to perpetuate.

  I should probably mention here that it’s not always like this; my mileage has varied on others’ responses. But I interface with that much less often these days, because I’ve become more skilled at deciding when to offer some version of disclosure, and when to just say, “I’m a filmmaker.”

  Once I began to consider this process of coming in, I started to quietly shift my focus away from needing to be a palatable representation of a porn performer to those on the outside. I became less available for the labor of answering countless repetitive and stigmatic questions about my work. I began to devote energy to contributing to the community of my colleagues and allies to make coming in a more active and accessible process for all of us. I helped to cultivate peer support networks and worked to uplift the work of my colleagues. I started to care a lot less about how people responded to what I entered as my occupation on forms. Sometimes I’d even declare it in a completely matter-of-fact, almost deadpan way. I told my osteopath, “I’m a sex worker,” and that’s all I told him, and I chose not to own any of his discomfort.

  More often, these days, I put the onus on them: your stigma, your labor. My work is to love and care for and celebrate and come into myself and my smutty community. This is not to say that I don’t have those conversations anymore. I’m just more choosy about where and how I have them, and what basic conditions I require from others in order to engage in them. This is why there are still members of my very immediate family to whom I can’t talk about work because I can’t even remember what I told them I do. And why my partner’s mom thinks I make music videos. Not everyone has what it takes.

  The experiment of refusing to frame my multi-whore identity as peripheral—to insist on its centrality and normality—can be hard to wrap one’s head around. The suggestion that I could spend my time digging into that identity, and all my others, with gusto and fascination and self-inquiry, and to make that process as loving as possible, is something you perhaps don’t have to think about so much, ye baristas and immigration agents, ye artists and accountants. Have you ever reflected on how weird it is to, say, go to the same place at the same time every day, to have someone else regulate the amount of time it should take you to, say, eat a sandwich or complete a task? Have you ever been called to question whether or not your work was ethical or valuable, whether it could make or break your eligibility to love, procreate, choose where you live, feel self-worth? Why don’t you ever skip a beat when you tell me, “I’m in finance”?

  What if I concerned myself more with coming in to me than on how to best come out to you?

  COMING OUT WHILE TRANS

  Emma Claire

  Emma Claire is a transsexual dyke, porn performer, dominatrix, sex worker, activist, and smut maker. She works at St. James Infir
mary, the United States’ only peer-based sex worker clinic, advocating with clients and on policy, such as fighting against the bill mandating condom use in porn before the California legislature in 2014. She is currently producing and directing TransLesbians.com, a site run by queer trans women portraying hardcore trans lesbian sex.

  All coming-out experiences I have been a part of have been seriously loaded. My experience coming out has been no different. It’s been layered. Layers made of years, experiences, trauma, and whatever force that binds me to my ancestry. It’s also been informed by intersections of my roots in class privilege as a white person, and as a dyke-identified transsexual woman. For those of us who have come out many, many times in different ways, we cannot divorce these experiences from who we share our lives and our occupations with—whether that be sex work, porn, or something decidedly less stigmatizing.

  When one asks about coming out in my life, I go back to when I was eighteen years old, freaking out because I had just hooked up with a boy for the first time in my life, and I thought I had gotten a sexually transmitted infection. I turned to my mom, and she was only somewhat helpful. She didn’t validate my experience, she didn’t ask me about my sexuality, but she also didn’t tell me how messed up it was to get drunk the first month of college and hook up with your dorm-mate. She told me to wait and see what was going on and simply said, “Just please be careful,” as if I knew what that meant besides wearing a condom. I ended up having an ingrown hair and an embarrassing nonrelationship with my dorm-mate. Since then, I came out in succession to my blood family as bisexual, then queer and nonmonogamous, then as a transgender girl, and most recently clarified my gender expression and sexuality as a trans dyke. Coming out has never been so much an end goal as much as a continuous process—a kind of evolution/devolution of my body and self.