by Jiz Lee
Picture, if you will, a sassy blonde with tits spilling out of her leopard-print tank top and fishnet-clad legs held tight by a red and gold miniskirt. She’s cruising down the sidewalk in her power wheelchair with a smile on her face until a voice calls out. It’s some variation on the same refrain: “Slow down there, speedy” or, “You’re going to get a speeding ticket, if you’re not careful!” I don’t endorse the nonconsensual shouting of sexualizing salutations, but I equally tire of desexualizing patronization. This is as much about the privilege of my white skin as it is about sexism and disableism. And then there is also the infamously insulting, “You look too good to be disabled” sentiment. My crip of color friends who are also visibly disabled often describe the ways that they are routinely hypersexualized. After all, as Jin Haritaworn pointed out to me, hypersexualization and desexualization are just opposite sides of the same coin.
Because of homophobia, transphobia, and ableism, people often don’t see my queer sexual and romantic relationships, repainting them as family or care relationships. Certainly, the expectation is that we aren’t banging. I am, after all, the asexual poster child, white, innocent, and wholesome, and therefore deserving of being saved. For many people, the only understanding of disability they have regular contact with is the sad, unlovable person in MDA ads or cystic fibrosis poster campaigns. Poster children never grow up and they certainly don’t grow up to be porn stars—but of course, this one did. This constant desexualization is why I love hickies and why I started making porn. I first started taking dirty pictures of myself as a way to finally see my body, my self, as hot and sexy. I started making porn to expose people to bodies that flaunt asymmetrical curves, bodies that move differently than the nondisabled desirable norm. I started making porn to give other queer crips a chance to see something a little closer to their lives depicted on screen.
I call what I do “porn” because I love how it causes a rupture. Ideally, people can no longer pity or patronize me after they know I make porn. Take the following (sadly typical) exchange with a stranger: “So what do you do?” (Pity and lowered expectations dripping from her voice.)
“I’m doing a PhD.”
“Oh! That’s so nice!” (Like the university was just letting me do a PhD to be nice.)
“Yeah, I make porn and then write critical cultural analysis of the ways porn made by and for queer disabled people transforms and interrupts systems of oppression.”
(Stunned silence.)
In workshops and in classrooms, I use the porn I make to teach the necessary and important skills of reimagining disability, desirability, bodies, and what we think of as sex or sexiness. The students I present to consistently challenge whether the videos I am sharing with them are indeed porn. I think this is due in part to the context of an academic environment, but certainly another aspect of their resistance to my work is that they’re unaccustomed to seeing hot, antioppressive porn that features nonnormative bodies and sexualities. The two main reasons students give me for why the videos I make are “not porn” are (1) they’re “not offensive,” and (2) there is no “explicit fucking.” I find both of these responses incredibly significant and telling. I firmly believe that the ways (primarily mainstream) porn has become culturally linked with oppression and dehumanization in the popular imagination serve to undermine the historically rooted potential for porn as a vessel for transformation and resistance. Also, for most people, porn is seen as being fairly self-evident, the old “I know it when I see it” approach. This approach, which is also how many people understand disability, serves to render both as fact, not cultural constructs. This thinking serves to undermine the fluidity and complexity of both porn and disability. Furthermore, when students only understand sex as penis-in-vagina intercourse, they are not only missing out on some really fun and sexy activities, they are reinforcing larger structures of cissexism, heteropatriarchy, and disableism. At times, I strategically use disableism and the ways that my work is not considered porn to mitigate whorephobia. Whereas sex work and porn are criminalized, pathologized, pitied, and seen as illegitimate, my porn video has been purchased by many university libraries, taught in several courses, and screens in numerous spaces that typically avoid association with porn. It is still a work in progress, and probably always should be, to navigate this particular intersection of marginalization and privilege. I remain committed to organizing and talking publicly about the ways we need to fight back against the marginalization of all sex workers. I am incredibly indebted to sex workers in my communities who have shared with me their knowledge and expertise in resisting whorephobia.
I use my given name rather than a porn name partly because my first porn, want, was made as part of an activist video production class. I certainly did not expect the work to become as widely known and awarded as it now is. My academic work has always taken knowledge, wisdom, and inspiration from my life and community, meaning that even if I used a porn name, I would still be talking about and analyzing the porn that I make (and support others to make) in my academic work under my given name. Furthermore, due mostly to the hypervisibility that comes with being visibly disabled, I’ve never really found anonymity or confidentiality to work in my favor.
At times, I really wish I could choose to use a porn name, if only because there are just so many creative possibilities. There are also times my life would be easier if I could separate my porn life from my other life. I am currently attempting to get permanent residency in Canada and doing so as a queer, disabled, poor person is already a giant challenge, as I will inevitably be considered a drain on social resources. I’m sure being a porn star won’t boost my attractiveness in the eyes of Canadian immigration. An additional struggle is that my family knows I make porn. Mostly it works out fine, in the sense that my WASPy family, for the most part, has a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy in effect. My dad will ask how my school work is going, but he never asks what I’m actually studying or writing about. My mom for years referred to want as my “racy video.” Then, one day, I caught her in a good mood and we started talking about my work and what it can accomplish in transforming cultures of undesirability. At the end of the conversation she said, “So you’re a porn star. Well, I’m very proud of you.”
Echoing Nic Bravo’s critique of National Coming Out Day in her blog, Stick Up for Yourself, Son, “Coming Out is based on a presumption of being able to pass as normal, as cis/straight/binary/whatever. The focus on Coming Out narratives belies the existence of queers who *really* exist on the margins, who don’t get to come out because they read as abnormal all the time” (http://stickupforyourself.nicbravo.com/). Like I said, I have never been very good at being in the closet, in part because I have never been able to pass as normal. Fortunately, I’ve never wanted to be normal. I’d much rather flaunt all of those messy, beautiful, complex, tough, and tender things about me and the people I love that transform and disrupt!
NAMING
Lorelei Lee
Lorelei Lee has been an adult film performer since 2000 and a director since 2009. Her writing has appeared in Salon, The Rumpus,Wired, Denver Quarterly,The Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. She is a contributor to The Feminist Porn Book and the cowriter of About Cherry, distributed by IFC Films. You can find her tweeting about politics and books @MissLoreleiLee, and about naked people @XOXOLoreleiLee.
In Las Vegas, I was twenty-one. We’d been there three days, and I was learning my new name. A stranger was teaching it to me in the ballroom. The women changed their clothes again and again; they passed in parades of Technicolor latex, in white dresses and nurse hats, in fishnet and lace. On a table nearby, a woman climaxed. I was at the booth with Seven. We posed beside a table of free sample DVDs and a television that played ten-minute loops of us being tied and untied. She wore a black silk overbust corset and sucked on a cherry Blow Pop. Pink rope impressions were pressed into her wrists and shoulders. I thought she was the most beautiful woman I’d seen. I was wearing her boots. They we
re a size too small, knee-high, stiletto, black patent. My toes had been numb for hours. You couldn’t have paid me to take them off.
A man said, “You’re Lorelei.”
I paused a moment before saying, “Yes.”
He said, “I’ve seen you.”
That was the first time.
If you talk to a performer—say her name is Lily Black (remember, I am making this up)—at some point, Lily might say, “Sometimes I have to take Maria out for a night. Sometimes Maria needs a night out.” When she says that, she’ll be talking about herself. She isn’t crazy or confused. She knows exactly who she is.
I know exactly who I am.
We calculate and divide to keep ourselves safe—in the tangible ways, sure, but also safe from unguarded inquiry.
Every time I meet a stranger, I do this math: How much do you know about me already? What, if anything, do you deserve to know? At a holiday party surrounded by women my age, by mothers in Saturday lipstick, I won’t lie exactly, but I will evade. If you tell me a dirty joke, I’ll pretend I haven’t heard it before. I never cash my checks with the teller anymore. My name is the last thing I will tell you.
It isn’t that I don’t trust you—but I don’t. It isn’t that my birth name doesn’t fit me anymore—but it doesn’t. Everything I’ll tell you is both true and not true. There are a few things I was born with, but most of what I own, I made up. Most of what I own, I earned. Day by day and scene by scene. This isn’t about confusion, it’s about context.
I’m thirty-three, and for fourteen years, I have sold my naked image. I have made my body public. At this point, I have been a whore for nearly as long as I wasn’t one. I’ve spent my entire adult life hustling. Pornography has made me who I am. I am Lorelei Lee—and also, I am not. I’m big sister to four siblings, thirty-three-year-old child of a single welfare mother. I’m a queer woman, a porn star, a dominatrix, a stripper. I’m a wife in Saturday lipstick. I’ve done nearly everything a person can do without clothes on. I am paid to lie to you, but I often tell the truth.
For a while, there were places where I would use my birth name, and there were places where I would be Lorelei. I divided it up—public and private—until the division became more rigid, the private more precious. There was a day when I decided not to be promiscuous with my origin. There was a day when I decided that I had earned my new name. It belongs to me now.
Here’s what I’ve learned: Our names are constructs, just as our bodies are. It was by stealing a name, by hiring out my body in performance, that I truly began to own both.
I took on the name Lorelei at twenty-one. It was three years after my first naked performance, when I’d used a name the producer had given me. When I was nineteen and naked in a stranger’s house in Chula Vista, spreading my legs on a washer-dryer, they called me Carolyn, but that name was never mine.
I sold cigarettes in bars as Lulu. I’d grin out from my pink dress, click my high-heeled shoes and proffer my heavy box of chewing gum and tobacco, king-sized candy bars and light-up silk flowers, pressing my breasts into the goods to make them cost more. I’d say “I’m Lulu,” and the tourists and the boys stumbling into bachelor parties at the North Beach strip clubs would say, “Did your mother give you that name?” And I would lie and lie. The dancers on break, smoking in the doorways, bought packs of Parliaments with ten-dollar bills they peeled off hairband-secured rolls of cash.
“I’m Lulu,” I’d say.
“Me too,” they’d reply.
I became Lorelei tied up in someone’s living room in Sacramento, wearing three-dollar thongs from the sidewalk bins on Mission Street. I became Lorelei in a red leather jacket and nothing else, squatting on a staircase of perforated metal in the dark, holding for the flash. I became Lorelei in Chinatown, high on Vicodin just to alleviate the boredom of posing. I became Lorelei in a basement in Livermore, faking orgasms badly in knee socks, fucking myself in an old elementary-school desk chair with a cheap plastic vibrating dildo. I became Lorelei on my knees in front of four naked men in a shoot house kitchen, clinging to pink satin beside a swimming pool at a Los Angeles mansion, tied in rope and hung upside down from a tree in upstate New York, on a green felt pool table with spit sprayed across my face and loving the strangeness of strangers’ bodies in close-up, loving the seamed scars and discoloration and dimples and forgotten hairs, scent of salt and flowers and smoke, infinite variation. I became Lorelei in cars, in trains, and taxis and buses, hungry and tired at 2:00 a.m., at 6:00 a.m., at 3:00 in the afternoon, fingering a new white envelope of hundreds, pulling a twenty for cab fare from a just-counted stack, pressing my forehead to the cool windshield in slow traffic on the 405 with five days’ worth of thousand-dollar checks in my shoot bag. I became Lorelei in the restaurant at the top of the Hard Rock Hotel in January, fist-sized goblets, plate-glass wall glossing the neon, white linen in my lap, when I leaned over to Seven and whispered, “I will never wait tables again.”
Naming a thing makes it real.
In Las Vegas, I was twenty-five, in a rhinestone dress on the red carpet, holding Annette’s hand. The line of photographers held out their microphones and flashed their camera lights.
The reporter from CBS This Morning said, “Are you a porn actor?”
I said, “Sometimes I act, and sometimes I don’t.”
We were scared and young. We wore cheap silk and paste jewels. I thought Annette was the most beautiful woman I’d seen. I was still so easily shamed. If you called me a whore then, I’d flinch.
My entire family saw that red carpet footage. They called my mother and asked her, “Does she hate herself?”
I resent even having to tell you that the answer is no.
Here’s the thing about coming out: It doesn’t happen just once. It isn’t a thing you do and get done. It happens again and again. It happens over and over and over, and it is never over.
I earned my name in Washington, DC, where the summer steamed the bushes and sent waves of green heat into my face, evoking my childhood. I had traveled there to be a witness in John Stagliano’s obscenity trial, and my attorney argued that I should be allowed to use my name in court, that my safety relied on it. The prosecutor objected, said that to use my name would “legitimize” me. As though illegitimate were my appropriate status. I’m still angry. Every day, around the world, the legitimate humanity of sex workers is dismissed. We are told we should be punished and then policies are enacted to punish us. Or we’re punished by those who know that committing violence against a whore is too frequently state sanctioned. I know, she was just doing her job. The judge never ruled on my name. The case was dismissed before I could be called to testify.
I earned my name in 2008, traveling ill-dressed through six weeks of winter with the Sex Workers’ Art Show, ice under my flats in Ann Arbor, in Williamsburg, in Asbury Park. Twelve of us traveled in two vans. All of us artists, all of us sex workers. All across the country we danced and sang and took our clothes off, we covered ourselves in glitter and lit ourselves on fire and read our stories out loud. ABC News called us a “traveling sex show.” Protestors sang hymns in a circle outside one auditorium. At the College of William and Mary, police officers positioned themselves in the front rows of the audience, in case we might need arresting. All of it—every snow-calmed college campus, every Holiday Inn with its basket of apples, every epithet and dirty joke reversed, every roadside toilet, dusk rush of dark trees past the passenger window, Midwestern strip club cup of ginger ale, backstage sequin and chalk dust and sweat, and the terror and thrill of standing up on that stage night after night to tell one true story to hundreds of hushed faces—all of it was hard and beautiful. At Harvard, the walls were old brick and polished wood, a gleaming gold-pale I will forever associate with academic wonder. If you licked those beams, they’d taste like money. A flavor recognizable only after you’ve starved for it.
Before we left, I had considered using another name, a third name, a writers’ name. But Annie Oakley, the v
isionary woman who ran the show, told me she had already sent out materials that said “Lorelei.” That I ended up using the name I’d already made, the name I’d been earning for years—the name under which I’d done a thousand things the world still wants to shame me for—this experience changed my life. This six weeks of coming to know myself as an artist, of learning my name one more time, this time as an artist’s name, this, finally, is what allowed me to understand that I was never splintered, that whatever I am—slut, whore, sister, freak, artist, wife—all of it is truly, wholly me.
If you call me whore now, I’ll tell you: You have no idea.
And still, I may be making a mistake, telling you anything.
At a bachelor party in 2010, I’m giving a lap dance. I kneel between a man’s denim legs, look up at him. He says quietly, searching my face, “Do you really like this?” He says, “What’s your real name?” I smile, bat my false eyelashes and cover his face with my breasts.
Whatever name I choose, that is my real name.
HOT PINK HANDBAG AND OTHER GARISH THINGS THAT CRY OUT, “TAKE ME!”
Lyric Seal
Lyric Seal is the porn alias of Neve Be, a punk performance artist and writer, choreographer, filmmaker, educator, advocate, and spacemaker creating [queer] family and home between the Bay Area and Seattle. The great, great, grandchild of the author of The Velveteen Rabbit, and the child of an art teacher and mystic scholar, they grew up on fairy stories, are a bit of a character, and are, with love, becoming real. Raised on a river in New Jersey dairy country, they honed their powers and gathered their heat. They would go on to attend New Jersey Governor’s School for Creative Writing and later Hampshire College for literature, disability and performance Studies. Their favorite pro-body groups to work for are Pink and White Productions and Sins Invalid. You can find their writing in Maximum Rocknroll, Plenitude Magazine, ModelViewCulture.com, and on CrashPadSeries.com’s blog in the advice column Slumber Party! Their first book, Taking it Lying Down/Crawling Like an Animal is coming out through ThreeL Media in Summer 2016. You can find them on Facebook and on Twitter @FancyLyric.