by Lynsey G
The fallout continues to rain down on the industry as of me writing this, but no legal actions have yet been taken against Deen. And sadly, though the industry seemed to have abandoned the popular actor, “the well-hung boy next door” is still working steadily in porn. He’s been producing more of his own films and working less with other companies, as fewer are willing to hire him, and fewer women are willing to work with him. But while his name appears to have been tarnished, especially amongst the feminist community, his sexual skills have not. In an industry that prizes the rare men who can handle the rigors of the job, his abilities seem to have spoken louder than his alleged transgressions.
With Asa Akira in the VIP booth at a strip club in New York City
(PHOTO COURTESY J. VEGAS)
With one of my biggest porn crushes, James Darling, at the Feminist Porn Awards in 2014, with Carlyle Jansen photobombing
(PHOTO COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR)
CHAPTER 13
Editor in Chief
IN SHORT ORDER, I SIGNED with William Morris Endeavor and began contract negotiations—through my newly acquired TV agents (one in New York and one in LA), literary agent, and entertainment lawyer—to write a television pilot based on my experiences in and around the porn industry. The production company was keen to find me a co-writer with more experience writing scripts than I had, which is to say any experience. They wanted the writing and production staff to be entirely female, and I eagerly agreed, but that slowed the process down. As it turns out, finding a female television writer is difficult enough. Landing one who wants to work with a newbie on a show about pornography? Even tougher.
The “new girl” glamor I’d briefly enjoyed died off quickly when I turned down the other agents; I felt the goodwill dry up, and I hoped to lean on the agents I’d signed with to bolster my self-esteem. But after one quick meeting for coffee near the art gallery, both of my New York agents retreated into e-mails and phone calls to keep me posted on contract negotiations. I didn’t get so much as a fancy lunch.
I started talking with my literary agent about what I was willing to put into a book. The magenta-glitter feeling came roaring back; I was encouraged to write a fictionalized memoir, ostensibly to avoid exposing people’s identities. But I suspect that she was really hoping I would embellish and multiply my few stories about partying with porn stars, up my flirtations with Sean Michaels and Mr. Marcus into more intimate encounters, that kind of thing. I didn’t blame her, necessarily; my life was not very exciting, so she thought my “character” could live in a hipper neighborhood and spend a lot more time rubbing elbows and other body parts with the porn elite in more screen-worthy places than expo show floors.
Hollywood and often pornography may revolve on the act of faking it, but I didn’t jump on the bandwagon for my book. The truth of the matter, I found myself reiterating, was that my interactions with the industry were limited because there wasn’t much activity for me to participate in where I lived. There were a few porn stars with big names in New York, and there were some companies that shot content in the city, but for the most part, the hub of the straight industry was—and is still—in Los Angeles.
Most porn is filmed in California because, while pornography that doesn’t qualify as obscene is protected by the First Amendment everywhere in the United States, it’s not strictly legal in most places. In the late 1980s, pornographer Harold Freeman was dragged to court by the state of California and charged with pandering—procuring people for prostitution—for hiring actors to perform in his films. Freeman was convicted and sentenced to probation, but he appealed his case to the California Supreme Court, which ruled that not only does hiring actors for pornography not satisfy the state’s definition of prostitution, but even if it did, the First Amendment would need to be amended to cover pornography: The potential deletion of an entire genre of free expression would run flagrantly counter to the Constitutional right to freedom of expression to be allowed.
The State of California turned to the United States Supreme Court, hoping that it would side against smut, but Sandra Day O’Connor put the kibosh on that notion, denying a stay and finding the lower court’s ruling appropriate. This effectively gave a Federal nod of approval to the filming of pornography in California—the only state in the nation to expressly allow porn. (That is, until 2008, when New Hampshire followed suit in a similar case. Oddly enough, however, the industry has yet to flock to the Granite State to take advantage of its legal bounty.) The American porn industry, accordingly, moved to California and set up shop as a legitimate industry, primarily in and around Los Angeles.
So, whereas it’s not illegal to shoot porn in New York, like many did in the seventies, it’s not strictly legal, either. Folks shooting explicit content in my fair city, accordingly, tended to do so quietly. Whereas porn companies in California can and often do shoot with film licenses, in complete compliance with the law, New York pornographers have less legal protection and could easily find themselves brought up on incidental charges.
Although I knew some performers who split their time between New York and LA, there wasn’t much of a local industry scene for me to take part in. The yearly Exxxotica convention in New Jersey and a rotating schedule of porn folks visiting New York for strip club gigs, public appearances, or surreptitious shooting or escorting jobs provided me with an oft-interrupted flow of interviews, but as far as spending quality time with porn people, my repertoire of stories to sensationalize for a “fictional memoir” was pretty lame.
Much as I love glitter, magenta has never been my color, and I dug in my heels about making things up just to appease my literary agent’s ideas about what it means to work with pornography. Porn stars are just people whose day jobs look markedly different from what most of us are used to. (As Kaylani Lei put it in an interview, “Although yes, it is sex, and I get to sit and cum all over somebody, I still have to wake up to an alarm clock and drag my feet in the morning to get to work on time.”) But this doesn’t mean that spending time with them—in a formal interview setting or at a private after-party—implies wild exploits. Sure, it can. Sometimes it does, especially during conventions. But the same might be said for bankers or restaurant industry workers.
Nevertheless, buoyed by the fact that I had agents and lawyers screaming on my behalf (or so I was told) at television producers in Los Angeles, that I was getting increasingly positive feedback on my writing for McSweeney’s, that WHACK! was gaining more readers every week, that invitations to attend strip clubs as a VIP for porn star feature-dancing gigs were piling up, and that I could no longer stand the stuffiness of the art world, I quit my job at the gallery in the summer of 2010. This was a classically terrible move, but I’d had enough of laboring endlessly as a receptionist for little acclaim and even less money.
Around this time, I was appointed editor in chief of WHACK! I would be responsible for managing all the content on the site, where we had recently taken on several new writers. I would be assigning stories, scheduling articles, reviewing and editing content, and basically taking the reins of daily operations. By this time we had more or less given up on pornocracy. We’d done what we could, but despite the great footage we’d already gotten and our hard work at WHACK!, there simply was no money coming in for the web series. We’d gotten so busy at WHACK! that, furthermore, we had no time left over to focus on much else.
Excited about my new title, I decided to look for review material that would make me think harder. I’d already begun to branch out from the gonzo content I’d been reviewing for the print magazine, instead taking in higher-end fare from big companies like Wicked, Vivid, and New Sensations. Feature films had been taking off as the gonzo era played itself out, and they were doing well in the pirate-strewn landscape. As Tracy Clark-Flory wrote for Salon, “If the sex scenes are made sexy by the larger, complex narrative at hand—rather than the shorthand of X-rated clichés … they won’t end up as free jerk-off material.”
These were movies: They ha
d plots that were mostly coherent; they took the time to explain who the characters were and why they were going at it; they featured professional lighting, camera work, sound, and editing. They weren’t all masterpieces of philosophical exploration, and many of them played into stereotypes about gender roles and sexuality that I found patently offensive, but after years of compilations like Elastic Assholes #6, I was ready for something a tad more mentally stimulating.
But, when I got honest with myself about it, the feature films often left me wanting, too. The plots, though mercifully existent, were often worn-out tropes clearly aimed at women transitioning from romance novels into pornography with their partners. There were exceptions, but in many of these films, the sex felt over-produced and restrained, as if it were trying not to scare anybody. And the performers tended toward the notorious pornland Barbie-and-Ken look, which did nothing for me. Watching their clean-shaven white bodies gyrating in perfectly choreographed, softly lit rhythm gave me none of the illicit charge that gonzo packed, not to mention any variety in sex acts or body types. I also found the writing dull, as if it were trying to emulate romantic comedy scripts. Both genres frustrated me in the naïve and damaging ways they portrayed men and women, and particularly in the ways they related to one another—wild generalizations and the application of gender norms that had no basis in my reality flew all over the place, presented as “facts of life” that I found ridiculous. Ugh. I was ready to look elsewhere.
Parody porn offered an alternative to typical feature films, so one of my first moves as editor in chief was to seek them out. The porn parody genre was nothing new—it goes back almost as far as porn itself and has been consistently popular due to hilarious titles (Hung Wankenstein in place of Young Frankenstein, or its later cousin, Fuckenstein, anyone?). But in the mid- to late 2000s, they hit a real stride with the porn-viewing public and became big business. Now that consumers could purchase films easily online, one hardly had to go out of one’s way to nab a copy of Whore of the Rings (or its sequel, Whore of the Rings 2, which I feel really could have capitalized on the imagery in The Two Towers more effectively, don’t you?). And with the couples’ porn market growing as more women showed more interest, parody porn offered the perfect middle ground between dirty and funny, exciting and safe. Director Will Ryder told me that parodies were a sure thing: “We don’t have to sell the characters … They’re already sold. We just have to re-create them in a way that’s believable and introduce vaginas into the picture. And we’ve won.”
I screened several parodies with a mixture of excitement and trepidation. Not Jersey Shore: Jersey Whores touched on the reality TV milestone, but let’s be honest: does anyone really want to see those people get busy? But I was eager to try Sex and the City: The Original XXX Parody—I’d been a fan in college, where my roommates and I would watch the show on Sundays until our hangovers dissipated, and the chance to see my old favorites engaged in a four-way orgy drew me in. Said orgy was sadly disappointing, though, as that movie fell into the trap of trying not to offend its lady viewers with “weird” sex. Boooooring.
But, in a few notable cases, parodies were able to transcend the couples-friendly dead end. Sometimes the strength of the script was notable. (The Big Lebowski XXX is, to date, the best porn parody I’ve seen, followed closely by The Graduate XXX, largely due to the writing.) And in others, the silliness of the setting (for instance, a bonanza of boning between virtually every character in the Batman universe in Batfxxx, and a similar sexual spree in Bonny & Clide) translated into fun scenes where spontaneity and chemistry were allowed to shine.
But as editor in chief of WHACK! I felt compelled to keep looking for the porn that I knew had to exist out there, somewhere. The porn that wouldn’t just suffice, but exceed my expectations. I sent out feelers to a variety of studios and distributors looking for something new. I’d been aware of indie porn for a while, but I had never pursued it because in my estimation, if the gonzo gag-and-spit-fests I was familiar with were any indication of the quality I could expect from studios with low budgets, I didn’t want to go there. I had let my squicky feelings about the questionable ethics of low-rent gonzo porn seep into my understanding of film production. The wires between “this looks cheap” and “this looks painful and sort of violent” had gotten crossed, and I’d written indie porn off without thinking about how it’s the ethos behind the production, not the money, that informs the content.
In my quest for the perfect adult film, I came across the term “queer porn” (not to be confused with gay male porn, which is its own distinct industry), and something clicked. The images on the websites were of gorgeous, often androgynous humans with tattoos and piercings and cool haircuts whose bodies were different from the ones I’d grown accustomed to in my reviewing fare. They looked sexy, and interesting. Like the people I was personally attracted to. And most of it was marketed as feminist. I needed to get my hands on some of this.
Most of the porn companies that fit under the umbrella term “feminist porn,” many of which also identified as queer, were bootstrap indie outfits with relatively tiny distribution chains, but I managed to nab a review copy of Pink & White Productions’s first DVD, The Crash Pad, for review. It was a collection of scenes from a series that has now been filming for over a decade, and the DVD—now just one of a large collection—was an iconic moment in barrier-breaking, alt-lifestyle-depicting, incredibly hot sexual entertainment in 2005.
Although I was a few years late to the party, when I reviewed The Crash Pad in 2010, I thought I’d left naivety behind years earlier. But as soon as the action started, I realized how wrong I had been. How much I had yet to learn.
There was something different going on here, something powerful and refreshingly real that I didn’t have a name for at the time, but which left me sitting slack-jawed, uncertain whether my brain or my nether regions were more excited. I was witnessing queer sex in a subversive, individualistic, raw way that set me on fire. It felt like the actors were hardly aware that they were being watched, not because they were told to forget about the camera but because they were so into each other. I’d witnessed scenes like this in the porn I’d already watched, of course: stand-out sex scenes in which the actors were deeply involved in what they were doing and loving every minute of it. Those scenes were capable of transporting the viewer, and I’d been transported before. But never by performers who looked or behaved like these. Their bodies were less manicured, more hairy, less toned. And they were grinning, laughing, wrestling, connecting with each other. And they were fucking with ferocious, joyful abandon in ways that I had never seen before. Sure, I’d seen strap-ons and cunnilingus and so on, but let’s just say that queer sex has its own designation for a reason.
The vast treasure chest of sex acts that are considered queer allows for things that heterosexual people just don’t often think about. We’ve all been told that “male” people like things one way and “female” people like things another way, and when they get together sexually, they do things that conform to those preferences. And the majority of mainstream porn portrays these ideas in a variety of unsurprising ways that reestablish masculinity and femininity within the prescribed roles that society has placed upon them: dominant/submissive, active/passive, pleasure seeker/pleasure giver. You know the drill. (Har, har.) But in queer porn, these standardized roles are tossed out the window in favor of whatever works for the people in the scene. The “script” often used in straight porn (tease, blowjob, maybe cunnilingus, penetration, switching positions, maybe anal, cum shot, done) doesn’t exist. Orgasms might be multiple, or nonexistent. Play is encouraged. Cum shots are rare. Self-expression is encouraged. And that expression, in turn, encourages people like myself to explore and express themselves in new ways. As Joanne Spataro wrote in Tonic, queer porn helps its audience by “giving queer people a voice not only by showing actual queer folks making love, but empowering them to have more control over how they are viewed.”
In other words, T
he Crash Pad blew away everything I thought I knew. New questions emerged, centered mostly around three questions: Who are these people? How could I get to know them? Where could I find more of their porn?
WHEN I READ IT NOW, the review I wrote in 2010 feels adorably adolescent. It has the breathlessness of new discovery without any depth of understanding. Not only had I been unprepared for the hotness of The Crash Pad, I didn’t even have the language to translate my experience properly. I cringe to admit that called the performers, all of whom had vaginas but few of whom identified as women, “ladies” and “chicks.” I was unaware at the time that many of these people were genderqueer—meaning that they don’t identify exclusively with the labels “male” or “female,” much less with terms like “chick” that can be perceived as condescending. There’s nothing wrong with what I wrote, necessarily, but it feels juvenile from the distance of a few years.
I mean, I actually wrote the following sentence: “These ladies are so dedicated to getting each other off that some of them are covered in sweat by the time they’re finished.” What I either didn’t say specifically or, more likely, didn’t understand was that the “sweat” was female ejaculate in prodigious quantities, which had been obtained via vaginal fisting between two genderqueer partners, neither of whom identified as ladies. Color me embarrassed.
In my defense, the DVD version of the scene in question had been edited to obscure the fisting and the squirting. This DVD was the first produced by Pink & White for distribution to a wide audience, and it could have ended up on the wrong side of the Atlantic or in an obscenity trial if it went too far in what it showed. (The online versions of these scenes show the—really hot—nitty gritty, because materials distributed online are much more difficult to subject to “community standards” of obscenity—more on that in later chapters.) But still, as someone who had taken in hundreds of hours of pornography and written about it at length, the tone deafness I displayed in my first-ever queer porn review is embarrassing.