by Jiz Lee
I drove to my mother’s home the next morning. I didn’t tell her I was coming, and she was thrilled that I’d come. When I walked through the door, she gave me a big hug and immediately cooked me a meal. She lectured me about my veganism and told me I should really consider trying to just eat fish or eggs because my diet didn’t have enough protein. Then she asked me to help her write a letter to the police department because earlier that day she’d gotten a ticket she didn’t think was justified. She said, “My English is not very good, and if you can write them, I am sure they will understand.” Then she told me about how a recent storm ruined parts of her basement and she was hoping to get money from the insurance. It was a regular day at home, and it was comforting. I had already told my mother several weeks beforehand that I planned on starting a porn site, and she certainly wasn’t thrilled about it. But she was able to put that aside and just be my mom; she wouldn’t even know how to not be my mom, even if she wanted to. My mother definitely hated porn and me doing porn. She still does. My decision to do porn probably hurt her more than anyone else in my life—certainly more than the punk kids at Rutgers. But having a daughter was more important to her than fighting. That was the moment I realized how important and rare unconditional love really is. I spent the next few days being fed and tucked into bed. I felt more like a child than I ever had in my childhood. When I left, I hugged her and said, “I love you,” which was something I’d never actually said to her before.
It’s been about thirteen years since the launch, and this college experiment has since grown into a real alternative community that has changed the face of porn. And by the way, the punk world and I are on perfectly good terms. Even most of the message board trolls would agree with that nowadays.
Not too long ago, my mom came to visit me in Los Angeles, and she stumbled on my Fleshlight. She obviously didn’t know what it was—she was fussing with it, trying to get the “flashlight” to turn on. “Joanna, how do you work this?” she asked. Then we exchanged a look, and I could see that she realized she didn’t want to know anything more about it. She set it back down and we went about our day.
This is my life. It hasn’t always been easy, but it’s mostly been a blast.
Thanks, Mom.
BRANDED: THE PRECARIOUS DANCE BETWEEN PORN AND PRIVACY
Kitty Stryker
Kitty Stryker is the production assistant at TROUBLEfilms, Courtney Trouble’s queer porn femmepire. Particularly interested in the intersections between explicit materials, politics, and ethics, Stryker has written for the Guardian, the Daily Dot, the Frisky, Fleshbot.com, and more. She blogs at KittyStryker.com.
I decided to become Kitty Stryker when I was about 30,000 feet above Ohio, or maybe Minnesota. I wrote up a list of what Kitty Stryker was like—who her friends were, what she did for fun, her life goals, what sort of people she dated. I was leaving behind Katy, an insecure goth who spent most of her time behind a computer screen and masturbating to a long-distance relationship because Katy, I reasoned, was Unknown, and therefore Boring. Instead, I was going to be the far more glamorous Kitty, who was extroverted, who was invited to all the parties and went on all the dates, who was in the spotlight. Kitty Stryker, I decided, would be Known. I was determined, on that plane ride as I moved my life from the East Coast to the West Coast, to step out of the shadows.
Little did I know the path that would take.
Google my name and it’s all me. I’ve been living my life under my porn name since before I did porn, and it seemed like diluting my brand to pick another when I was already writing about sexuality and speaking on sex work. The photos you uncover will, for the most part, not be pornographic, although I’ve been in the industry for several years. You’ll find photos of me riveting a forty-foot-tall rocket ship, or cosplaying as Tank Girl, or experimenting with shades of lipstick that make me look dead. Kitty Stryker, as a persona, has been pretty multifaceted from the start, as I consciously wove together my sex work and everyday selves into one being.
It seemed like a good idea at the time.
I knew that being outed as a sex worker could be problematic when it came to family, lovers, other jobs. I figured that in order to blackmail someone, they had to feel ashamed, so I made it my quest to be as open about my work in the adult industry as I could possibly be. I was privileged in that my family knew and accepted my career path, and I only dated people who knew what I did for work. I didn’t feel I had anything to be embarrassed about, and so I refused to be embarrassed.
But interestingly, it was in the financial arena that I had to be the most secretive and careful.
My legal name is a blank slate, and I keep it that way for multiple reasons. As a woman on the Internet, having my legal name out there can lead to me being harassed near my home, stalked, and threatened with various types of harm for writing about my experiences. As a sex worker, the threats become a lot more serious, with a lot less sympathy or room to pursue legal assistance. I’ve had text messages asking me if I found it strange how many women end up in dumpsters every year, followed up by, “I know where you live.” Yet Facebook insists users give out their “real name” (by which they mean the name on a legal ID). PayPal will give those who donate to you the name you use on your account, and will delete you if they don’t think the name you’re using is a legal one. Many crowdsourcing sites will similarly demand that you use the name that checks can be written out to when using their services.
Despite my work in porn being completely legal, my openness about it puts me at risk for having my bank account shut down, as Chase threatened last year. PayPal has long had a history of freezing funds to any account they suspect as being adjacent to the adult industry, and other payment processors—Google Wallet, Amazon Payments, WePay—have followed suit, erring on the side of shutting out sex workers rather than risking the rage of Visa’s extensive and punishing fees. My legal name being linked to my work name could shut down multiple methods through which I pay and am paid for everyday things, like the therapeutic massages I get for my injured back, or being able to raise money through a fundraiser for my Consent Culture project.
This creates quite a bit of tension. In order for me to advertise my brand (which is myself, as a porn performer and now director), I need to utilize social media. For that to be effective, I can’t really afford to hide my face alongside my porn name. Realistically, anyone with some time on their hands and a bone to pick can report me for being a sex worker to these payment processors and shut down necessary streams of income—even though the income going through those venues is not for explicit materials, but for eBay items. By branding myself the way many entrepreneurs do, I am branded as “the wrong sort of worker”—yet I cannot avoid it and survive in a competitive market. And so I take the risk and pay the price.
Our economy is pretty terrible right now. Everyone I know has multiple hustles going on, often instead of a traditional nine-to-five job. Some are starting small businesses out of their homes, selling stuff on eBay, making mobile apps, crafting things to sell on Etsy. And of course, more and more people are trying their hand at something in the adult entertainment arena to help them get by—perhaps camming here, maybe filming a porn there, possibly stripping or selling their dirty socks. Yet we live in a culture that stigmatizes us permanently for dipping a toe into sex work while simultaneously insisting sex workers should leave the industry and do other work.
With PayPal and WePay controlling most of the online payment market and Facebook harassing people for not using “real names,” having a scarlet letter banning sex workers past or present from using these resources can mean that any other sort of small business idea is made impossible for us. I may want to stop doing sex work and write instead, but if I can’t process online payments because of my porn work, I can’t utilize Facebook or other social media outlets because my brand name isn’t legit enough, and companies won’t hire me because they can Google my sex work history, then I’m stuck in the business whether I like it o
r not.
It’s strange, being so comfortable with being out as Kitty Stryker but so paranoid about being outed by my legal name. I don’t believe that showing your privates in public should mean you sign away your right to privacy, though. We all deserve time off, and a secret identity that’s just for us.
THIS IS WHO I AM
Lily Cade
Lily Cade is an adult film actress, an award-winning porn director, and “Porn Valley’s gold star lesbian.” She’s been shooting smut since 2008 and specializes in intensity, hardcore strap-on scenes, and adult movies with real stories. She also runs her own website at LilyCade.com.
I’m Lily Cade, and I’m a lesbian and a porn star. Back in the day, when I’d meet other gay people, one of the things we’d ask each other was, “What’s your coming-out story?” I encounter this less now, or less quickly, in a friendship. Maybe it’s easier to come out now, or I’m just older and coming out is less proximate to myself or the people I hang out with. Still, it’s one of those things. It’s part of the gay experience. It’s been part of my experience as both a lesbian and a pornographer.
The first time I came out to anyone I was in eighth grade, at a sleepover with friends from my small, Catholic middle school. We were playing Truth or Dare, which I both loved and hated. I loved dares and other people’s secrets but I hated being asked incessantly about which boy I liked when the answer was none of them and would always be none of them. I was dared to run naked down the street yelling, “The British are coming!” and as I stripped to complete the task the other girls stopped me and gave me a truth instead. “What’s your deepest, darkest secret?” My chest felt tight and hot and over the pounding of my heart I said, “I’m gay.” Everyone was silent for a moment. They didn’t ask too many questions—I think it made the others feel weird, but it also made sense—and we really didn’t talk about it again.
After that, I just was gay. I usually didn’t go around telling people, but if you asked me I’d be honest about it. I’d often answer questions in a way that made it obvious, without exactly saying the words. Someone would start to ask me, “When you get married—” and I’d stop her and say, “Well, that’s not legal for me.” I cut most of my hair off around the same time I confessed my homosexuality; I didn’t shave my legs until I got into porn; and when I wasn’t wearing school uniforms I mostly wore clothes that hid the female body I wasn’t entirely comfortable with. I think it was pretty obvious to everyone, except my mother, who was the one person I ever worried about coming out to in the first place. I knew she wasn’t going to kick me out or stop loving me, but I also knew my mother wasn’t going to like it.
Mom was entirely oblivious to the lesbian subtext of my life, even though it was really on the nose. For some reason, I decided it was very important that she be the one to prompt the coming-out conversation. As high school wore on, I started to become frustrated that it had never come up, and I began to push her as hard as I could without directly admitting my lesbianism. I would stare pointedly at waitresses’ asses. I would bring up gay rights issues in the news. I would talk about how much I liked the liturgical dancers at our church because you could see through their dresses. None of it worked, and finally on my last day of high school a friend of mine saw me off with, “See you later, dyke.” My mother overhead this and asked me why someone would say that to me. I told her, “Because it’s true!” My mother pulled the car over and in a panic, bellowed, “Is that what you think?” I said, with all the drama befitting a seventeen-year-old lesbian, “No Mom, it’s not what I think. It’s what I am!”
She didn’t really accept that I was gay until I got married. She used to introduce Sten—then my girlfriend, later my wife—and me as “her,” which would prompt us to make out so she’d have to admit it, because the only thing worse than one gay daughter is two gay daughters who are fucking each other. She wouldn’t let me come out to my grandparents, even though having to lie about so much of what I was doing—”No, I don’t have a boyfriend; I’m just focusing on my studies right now”—made me less close to them, until I graduated from college and the presence of Sten had to be explained. She claimed they would be devastated, but in fact, they didn’t care and told my mother they’d known for years. I think, in the back of my mother’s mind, that she thought the whole gay thing really just might be a phase. The wedding changed things. She threw my reception. She was great. She likes my wife. She’s entirely over it, but it took her years to stop feeling uncomfortable about it.
I got into porn in 2008, at first on a whim, and then semiprofessionally until making it my full-time career in 2010. This is what I do. I’m a performer and director and the owner of LilyCade.com. For the most part, I’m out to everyone. I don’t always tell the cashier or the taxi driver who makes small talk with me, but the only name I go by is the one I use in porn. I don’t have any interest in developing relationships with people who can’t handle my career, or my sexuality for that matter, so I’m upfront about it. The only person who doesn’t know what I do is my mother.
I had a few coming-out moments with regards to porn. I hid my involvement in it from my roommates at first because I wasn’t sure how they’d take it. I didn’t tell my sister until I was sure this job was important to me, not something I was doing for extra cash and sexual thrill, but something to which I was going to devote the major part of my energy. Just like with being gay, it eventually became necessary to continue the relationship that I not attempt to hide a big piece of my life. Lying all the time is exhausting, and it makes it hard to connect with people and difficult to be around them.
Coming out is about telling people (or maybe also yourself) something about yourself that you’re worried will upset them. It’s an admission of a part of oneself that not everybody understands. I know that my mother wouldn’t understand. Like when I worried about telling her I was gay, I used to have a significant amount of anxiety about her discovering my job. I thought it might make her hate me. I’m pretty sure she is going to yell at me if or when she finds out about it. Even talking about sex bothers her. She gives me shit about wearing “low-cut” tops, meaning anything that shows any cleavage. The one time I told her that I was nude modeling for a life drawing class, she freaked out at me on the phone and then brought it up all the time. She stills asks me sometimes, when I tell her some tame version of what I’m shooting, “Will you be naked?” I know that telling my mother I do porn would upset her and make her uncomfortable, and I feel less invested in making her get over that discomfort than I did with being gay. My job isn’t about her, and it’s totally about my sex life. I get naked and fuck chicks. I certainly don’t tell her about doing this sort of stuff off camera. At times, it can be frustrating when she asks me what I’m up to and I have to fudge the details, but it’s not nearly so hurtful as hiding a lover. Porn is what I do. It’s not who I am.
Our relationship is changing, though. We’re both getting older and I’m much more able to simply tell her that her opinion of what I do is not my problem. At the same time, I have more compassion for her than I did when I was a rebellious teenager. At times she drives me completely insane, but I can see that she means well. She loves me, and she always will no matter what. I’ve been doing this so long now that I’m no longer scared about her finding out about it, although I’m not yet at the part of the story where I actually want her to know. I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it. There’s enough other stuff that I do—and enough details we can soften—to just not talk about it. In my ideal world, I’ll let her know someday that I used to be a porn star and hope she’ll find it amusing and not just uncomfortable.
WHY I LOVE HICKIES AND QUEER CRIP PORN
Loree Erickson
Loree Erickson is a queer, femmegimp porn star academic in a doctoral program at York University in Toronto. She is the creator of want, an internationally award-winning porn film, and a community organizer. She loves travelling to lecture, making queer crip porn, and facilitating workshops on a variety o
f topics including collective care, disability justice/radical disability politics, and all things related to sex and disability. She is also a fan of sun, sparkly things, and social justice. You can find her at FemmeGimp.com.
I’ve never been good at being in the closet—any closet. When I first went to college in Richmond, Virginia, I immediately started volunteering with the Queer Student Alliance. I was tasked with calling people to remind them of the upcoming meeting. It wasn’t until I was halfway through the list that I realized I maybe shouldn’t be leaving messages. Then there was the time I left a message on my friend’s parents’ answering machine telling her, “The Lesbian Avenger meeting starts at seven—(awkward pause)—so you probably wanna come over afterwards since you are not coming to that meeting because you are definitely not a lesbian.” Certainly not my smoothest or proudest moments. I have reimagined my ideas of normal so completely that I forget what is not considered commonplace in the mainstream world, that is, until I’m faced with the overt homophobia, femmephobia, and whorephobia I often experience as a white, academic, queer, femme porn star who is visibly disabled and an exhibitionist.
My body has taught me so many lessons. A great deal of these lessons have come through having a body that connects with and relies upon other bodies in order to perform daily tasks: go to the bathroom, get out of bed, take a shower, and so on. I can’t even begin to name all of the ways these embodied experiences have enriched my understanding of bodies and how bodies relate to each other, ways they’ve helped me refigure ideas regarding care and independence, as well as providing opportunities to confront body shame. From an early age, I was used to being naked in front of and with other people. I often joke (with a modicum of seriousness) that being an “out body” combined with my exhibitionist leanings served well as a foundation for becoming a porn star. That I don’t have a choice but to be out about certain needs of mine definitely feels like it has created a comfort with outness that I bring into making porn.