Coming Out Like a Porn Star

by Jiz Lee

  Even though I’ve never received another complaint and haven’t heard from customer service in over three years, I’ve always been curious: Who is “Concerned Customer” and what does he or she have against me, or against porn? I also occasionally wonder if something like this will happen again. But if it does, now I know that it’ll lack teeth. My employer has my back, and there’s no reason to be nervous anymore.

  A few weeks later, I wrote about my visit to customer service on my blog. Within hours, someone posted the following comment from a fake email address:

  Author: queefs are more entertaining than this blog

  E-mail: lolz@yahoo.com

  Comment: bitch, bitch, bitch . . . just shut up and eat a dick you stupid whore.

  If you were a shitty employee, they’d fire your ass. But since you must be doing something right, they will tolerate stupid shit like this. Which is very unusual for most places.

  Now aside from your gripes about your CHOICE of side job and its cons, are you going to prattle on about some stupid shit related to your boyfriend? I can’t wait for your ass to get dumped, then your blogs will haunt you.

  Whoever “lolz” might be, he or she has my pity. My ass hasn’t been dumped; in fact, Dirk and I are well into our fourth year together and are now engaged to be married. I still love both of my jobs, my family, my friends, and my life, and anyone who knows me knows that I’m happier than I’ve ever been. What I’ve come to understand is that anger such as lolz’s often hides a much deeper layer of self-hatred, isolation, and shame. I truly feel sorry for him or her, and I hope that someday he or she is able to find inside his or herself the same kind of joy that I’ve finally found after all these years. Everyone deserves that, even him or her.

  Also, I guess lolz forgot that he or she was writing to a software engineer. The next time he or she posts a vitriolic, anonymous message to my blog, he or she might want to consider masking his or her IP address. How’s the weather in Pittsburgh, lolz?

  MOM, I’M A PORN STAR

  Jesse Jackman

  Jesse Jackman is a writer, senior software engineer, and logorrheic dork savant who moonlights as a porn star—although he prefers the term “erotic illusionist.” He blogs about his experiences as a fortysomething gay pornographic actor at JesseJackman.xxx, and is also a regular Huffington Post contributor (huffingtonpost.com/jesse-jackman). Jesse lives with his fiancé Dirk Caber, a classical musician (and fellow industry performer), in Boston, Massachusetts.

  When I plunged into porn at age thirty-eight, a lot of questions weighed heavily on my mind. Now that I was an adult film actor, would I be able to find love? How would this affect my day job? What would my friends think? And what would my mother think?

  I’m the only child of a single parent. Mom calls me her “angel lamb,” and I think she still sees me as the innocent boy I once was. As a gay man growing up in ‘80s suburban America, though, I’ve experienced plenty of guilt, self-loathing, and shame. Not wanting my mom to see me as anything less than perfect, I’ve always hidden those feelings from her, hoping to stay impossibly angelic in her eyes.

  My employer and friends were all accepting, even enthusiastic, when I came out to them about my new side job. I decided, though, that I would wait until I retired from the industry to tell my mom that I’d been making adult films, if I ever told her at all. My rationale at the time was that I didn’t want her to worry about my health (despite my studio’s strict adherence to safer sex practices), but in retrospect I realize that was just an excuse. My real fear was how she’d react if she found out that her angel lamb is actually a gay porn star. Would she be disappointed in me? Would she be ashamed?

  Well, she did find out. And her response was amazing.

  It was a grey and rainy October afternoon. I was driving through my mom’s neighborhood and stopped by her house to take a nap. She wasn’t home. After a short snooze, I realized I needed to check something online. I went into her study, turned on her computer, and to my utter horror was greeted by a browser window that was open to a very familiar website: my blog. My very X-rated blog.

  It’s difficult to describe the sensations I experienced in that moment. My heart sputtered. I was instantly nauseous and felt like I was in free fall. The ramifications hit me at once: If she’d seen the blog, she knew everything. She knew that I was a porn star, that my husband Dirk (whom I’d met through my studio) was a porn star, and that my frequent trips to California were not just to visit friends. I felt completely exposed, as if the walls of the house had crumbled around me and I was left standing there alone and (figuratively) naked in the oak-floored study of my childhood home.

  But then I got to thinking: My blog talks extensively about how porn has changed my life for the better. I’m happier now than I’ve ever been. I’m excited, empowered, and confident. And if I’d never worked in porn, I never would have met my amazing husband. If she had indeed read all this, she’d be sure to realize that my foray into porn has been a remarkable, life-changing adventure.

  Wouldn’t she?

  I knew I had to talk to her. Dirk arranged to fly home early from his trip to Los Angeles, and we had dinner with my mom the next day. Pork loin, edamame, sweet potato soup. Delicious, in a way that only a mother’s cooking can be. When we finished, I glanced at Dirk. He nodded encouragingly. I felt like the walls were about to start crumbling again, but I started in.

  “Mom, there’s something I want to talk to you about. I stopped by the house a few days ago and used your computer, and it was open to—”

  “Your blog.”

  Gulp.

  Her next words flooded me with relief.

  “I’m so happy we’re talking about this.”

  It turns out she’d known the whole time. Our bank accounts are linked because we co-own some property; several months earlier, she’d noticed a deposit from a source she didn’t recognize—my studio—and traced it back to their website. At the time, Dirk and I had just released a BDSM film called Loud and Nasty, and our images were plastered all over the studio’s homepage. With video! And in this particular video, Dirk shocks me with a violet wand, a device that’s used to deliver high-voltage electric charges to its intended “victim.” Mom said that it looked like I was being tortured, and she felt like a part of her had died.

  Dirk and I couldn’t help but laugh, though. Granted, it does look like I’m being tortured: I’m restrained, struggling, and doing a lot of screaming. But we explained to her that everything we did was consensual, exciting, and a tremendous amount of fun. Boundaries were respected and nobody got hurt. She still seemed skeptical, so we showed her a behind-the-scenes photo from the set of our “torture” scene:

  When she saw the image, she understood. Dirk and I were in love. Nothing else mattered.

  In essence, I’d come out to her a second time. It felt like a giant boulder had been lifted from me—just like when I told her I was gay some fifteen years earlier—and once again she was entirely caring and supportive. I don’t think she fully understands my decision to make porn; she has difficulty grasping how I can be so open about something as private and intimate to her as sex. But that’s not really the point. The important thing is that we actually talk about stuff now. If I can tell her I’m a friggin’ porn star and she still loves me, then I can tell her anything. And I do. I tell her about my fears and pain and shame, and also my joy and love and passion, in ways I never would have dared before. She has shown me nothing but love in return. And I realize now that the walls of her study weren’t the only walls that crumbled on that grey, rainy October afternoon.

  PORN MADE ME LIKE MY PARENTS

  Joanna Angel

  Joanna Angel is an adult film star, director, producer, and owner of the world’s largest alternative pornographic empire, BurningAngel Entertainment, that pioneered “alt-porn,” with a network of websites and hundreds of DVDs to its credit. Angel has appeared in every major adult magazine (Adult Video News, Club, Hustler, Picture Magazine, Adam F
ilm World, and Xtreme, to name a few) and has graced the pages of several tattoo magazines. She has stormed mainstream TV and radio outlets, featured on Fox News, Playboy TV, Fuse TV, G4 TV, KROQ Radio, SIRIUS Radio, TLC’s LA Ink, had a speaking role on Adult Swim’s Children’s Hospital, and starred in the drama Scrapper. Angel has appeared in the New York Times, Newsweek, the Village Voice, the New York Press, Esquire UK, Details, and Penthouse, among others. Heeb Magazine featured Joanna as their cover girl, naming her one of the “Top 100 Up-and-Coming Jews.” The New York Post featured her as one of the “Top 25 Sexiest New Yorkers,” and she has made CNBC’s yearly “dirty dozen” (a list of the twelve biggest adult film stars) several times. Angel is a self-made star who has made her mark on the industry, and this is only the beginning!

  I am quite sure that the relationship I had with my parents growing up was far from normal. But it was also far from dysfunctional. People often assume that porn stars come from extreme family circumstances—trailer-trash homes, meth addiction, physical and sexual abuse. The story might be that a woman’s porn career is the happy ending, her escape from a fraught home life. On the flip side, people could also think of a porn star’s career as the tragic end for a normal girl with lots of “potential” who threw her life away. Neither of those stories describes me. My upbringing wasn’t tragic or scarring, and it also wasn’t picturesque or affluent. But I think I can safely say it was unique.

  I’m a first-generation American on one side and third generation on the other. My mother is Israeli, and she moved to America just shortly after marrying my father, a Jewish American man from Ohio. My mother is a Sephardic Jew with Iraqi roots. Her parents fled Iraq with their six children and initially settled in a refugee camp in Israel, where they gave birth to two more children, one of them my mother. My mother’s childhood involved sharing a tent with a family of ten. My father, on the other hand, had a fairly typical, fairly happy childhood in Midwestern America in the ’50s. When two people from such different corners of the earth reproduce, the result is sure to be some shade of weirdo.

  Growing up, I lacked whatever fear other kids had of their parents. If I did the right thing, it was because I felt like it, not because I was trying to please my parents. My English surpassed my mother’s at an early age, which I guess gave me the sense that I was in charge. I helped my mother study to get her driving license. I translated signs at the supermarket for her. I taught her some basic American etiquette—for instance, shaving the mass of hair growing from her armpits before accompanying me to the local swim club (shaving razors were completely evil in her book, but she agree to get rid of the hair with homemade wax she made out of sugar and lemon).

  What my parents really had to offer me was unconditional love, which wasn’t exactly what I was interested in as a preteen. I was much more interested in getting a boyfriend, beating Super Mario Bros. 3, and obtaining a T-shirt that changed colors when you put your hand on it. I didn’t hate my parents, but I didn’t admire them, either. I didn’t particularly respect them, and I certainly didn’t fear them.

  One day when I was fourteen, I carelessly lifted my arms and revealed to my parents the belly ring I’d recently gotten. My mother cried. As usual, I was mostly unfazed by my parents’ anger and disappointment. The same was true when I started to come home reeking of cigarettes and when I was caught shoplifting at the mall. They didn’t approve, but I wasn’t seeking their approval, and life went on.

  It was around that time that I met the people whom I would come to truly respect, the way kids are supposed to respect their parents. It was the world of punk. These were people whose approval was incredibly important to me, whose morals and values and traditions I followed dutifully, even religiously. This world dictated how I dressed, what I ate, what I studied in school, where I hung out, who my friends were, and what movies I watched. It was about so much more than just music. Punk gave me an identity and a purpose throughout high school, and then a real community in college. I didn’t go to football games or frat parties; I went to punk shows. Punk became my family, and the family I’d been born to became more and more distant. My parents didn’t understand me! They didn’t know me. As far as I was concerned, they weren’t my real family.

  With the growth of the Internet, this punk family grew larger and larger. And like any large family, people fought, people disagreed, random people were married in who probably didn’t belong there, and some people were disowned or ostracized.

  Message board threads argued on and on over what was punk and what wasn’t. Some punks prided themselves on doing drugs, while others went straight edge. Some punks were atheists, and some were hardcore Christians. Some were vegan, and some considered cows just a means to an end—the end being a spiky leather jacket. I stayed out of most of the punk drama. I read the message boards to find out about new music, where shows were, and on occasion to stalk a cute guy in a band. I was vegan but not straight edge. I was active in both animal rights and human rights groups, went to protests, and my record collection contained all the essentials. I was never the target of any message board that questioned how punk I was. That is, not until I started a porn site.

  BurningAngel.com launched on April 20, 2002. My roommate Mitch and I started it ourselves. We had no funding, no investors—just us. I thought it was a pretty anticonformist move to start a porn site and work for myself instead of getting a “real job.” No animals were harmed in the process of making our website, and no sweatshop labor was used. The launch of the website contained five different photosets of girls I knew from my own little punk community, and the photos were taken in my bedroom and basement by a guy who’d borrowed a digital camera from someone. In addition to the photos, I also included an interview with a local hardcore band. I truly didn’t think I was violating any punk laws. I was proud of what I’d created and I assumed my entire world would be proud too. I had always supported my friends when their bands went on tour or when they put out their own records. Even if I didn’t love the way a band sounded, I supported them if they were part of the punk scene.

  The day of the launch also happened to be 4/20, and there was a party at my house with bands playing in the basement. The party had already been planned by one of my roommates before we ever knew it would coincide with the launch of BurningAngel. So what started as a celebration of pot accidentally morphed into a celebration of porn.

  There was a lot going on that day, and at that time in my life I didn’t even have my own computer. I used to use my roommate’s or I would go to the computer lab on campus. Before I got dressed for the party, I went downstairs to my roommate’s computer and checked two websites. First, I checked my own. My programmer friend had been telling me for weeks, “I think it will be up tomorrow,” so I wanted to see if it was actually live or not. The good news: It was. Just like that, with a refresh of the page, I was naked on the Internet. The next site I checked was my favorite punk message board. I summoned my e-stalking powers to see if a guy I had a crush on might be coming to the party, which might determine how much effort I would put into my outfit. The bad news: The boy was not coming to the party. He couldn’t afford the gas or something. And then the even worse news revealed itself: a nasty thread titled “Porn’s not punk” with over 400 responses.

  Photos had been taken directly from my website and pasted into the message board. This was technology that I didn’t even know about at the time. How the hell did they do that? Then I started reading through the comments. Some were long-winded philosophical rants about domestic abuse and feminism. Some declared that it’s not punk to make a profit off of punk (mind you, at that time our net worth was about $20). Some comments were much more straightforward: “She’s fucking ugly.” Mitch found me there, crying, with my eyes glued to the screen. I wanted to respond to the commenters. “No,” he told me. “Just stop looking at it. People will be over it by tomorrow.” I walked away from the computer and drowned my sorrows in a vegan pot brownie.

  The evening proceede
d to get more and more uncomfortable. Suddenly, all these people I thought I knew felt like strangers. Everyone was talking about me—well, maybe the pot brownie had a little to do with my thinking that. Everyone who approached me had something to say to me about porn. They loved porn. They thought porn was horrible. They respected me, they were disgusted by me, and they wanted to know how to get into the industry. When asked by someone if porn empowered me, I responded: “I really don’t know! My website has been up for six hours!”

  I went downstairs to the basement to watch some music. It was a local band I’d always liked. The lead singer was a girl who was in the Women’s Studies Department at Rutgers. Before her set, she gave a long speech about sexual abuse and how it was tied to porn, and then in a nutshell she said that porn had no place in the music scene. My heart stopped. Was she directing this at me? Or did she just happen to choose today to air her grievances about pornography? Did she know that this was my basement she was singing in? Did she know how many shifts at Applebee’s I had to work to afford my $220 portion of the rent, which included basement access? The next band played, and before their set, they dedicated a song to “a certain girl who stands up for what she believes in.” Was that who I was now? A girl who believed in being naked on the Internet? What the hell had I gotten myself into?

  I ran up the three flights of stairs to my bedroom and shut the door. I panicked on my Ikea twin bed, and the walls seemed like they were closing in on me. (Okay, so maybe the pot brownie had a little to do with that too.) I wasn’t ready for this. I wasn’t expecting any of this. A part of me wanted to take down BurningAngel, move far, far away and never speak of this again. And another part of me felt that this strange thing I’d started had the potential to become something really amazing. It had to be one or the other. I had to make a choice. And then I thought to myself, for the very first time in my life: I need my mother.