by Lynsey G
Terminology in the queer community, particularly the queer sex work community, is a complex and ever-evolving tangle of ideologies and expression. Explaining it is a task I can’t properly undertake here; as a writer and a lover of language, as well as a queer woman with a lot of opinions, that’s a rabbit hole I should probably steer clear of. Still, it’s important to touch on some of these ideas.
For many queer people, who have for most of their lives dealt with oppression, repression, ignorance, and the outright denial of their existence and experience, naming is important. It is a way of fighting back against a world that has tried to silence and erase us. Words like “queer,” “trans,” “squirting,” and “fisting” aren’t just accurate; they’re important. They establish the speaker’s recognition of these identities and acts as real, legitimate, and active in the world. As performer, activist, and educator (and super-hot human) Jiz Lee wrote in their essay about fisting in Best Sex Writing of the Year, 2015, in naming and recording queer sex, “We’re representing marginalized communities, taking power through creating our own images of desire.” For people who have never had access to media that represented people like them as sexual entities, pornography can be of great importance—a gift that can show them that they are sexy, too. Buck Angel, a trans man who has lived his sexual life openly as an example to others, once told me, “[Porn] is a big support in helping other people to become their true selves. When you embrace your body and your sexuality it can really make a big difference in your quality of life.”
Much has been made in recent years about the rising tide of “political correctness” in language, by those who feel uncomfortable substituting “transgender woman” for “shemale,” or “person of color” for any number of terms that have long been used by people in power to humiliate people who don’t look, talk, think, or live like them. But the point in these corrections is not to make everyone “PC” or to water down a once-colorful language. The point is to treat other human beings with respect, and when those human beings have legitimate reasons for detesting terminology that has been used for centuries to oppress them, it’s a sign of respect to use the terminology they choose.
When I wrote my review for The Crash Pad, I didn’t know who these performers were or how they identified. And frankly, if I had, I would have been confused because at that time I was only vaguely aware of the many identities that existed in the queer community. I knew about trans people and lesbians, but I wasn’t hip to words like cisgender, genderqueer. Nor did I understand the importance of recording and naming queer sex acts like fisting. I just threw around the words that I thought applied to acts and identities and left it at that. But it was the beginning of a long journey that I’m still on, and I’m really thankful that, though the review probably resulted in its share of rolled eyes, the people who were involved in making The Crash Pad, and the rest of the queer, feminist porn world, didn’t write me off as a lost cause. In the years since, I’ve interviewed and befriended many of them and their protégés. They’re marvelous humans, and they make outstanding porn.
In an interview in 2013, queer porn star James Darling echoed a sentiment that queer and feminist porn, and my own way of thinking, reflected: “I think porn is a really important part of our culture … Authenticity in my performances and the porn that I produce [is] very important to me.” Many others agree. And so, in an effort to subvert the mainstream porn script, many queer, feminist pornographers focus on authenticity in their content. Authentic representations of performers’ personal identities and desires.
But the word “authentic” is a slippery one. Authenticity has become a sought-after attribute in everything from cuisine to art to porn in recent years, a buzzword that makes people like me feel hip when it’s applied to their dinner or their latest Etsy purchase. But defining it is another matter, particularly when it comes to performative sex on camera. After all, any constructed situation, no matter how real it feels, is still constructed, right? Particularly in porn, even if artifice has been removed as much as possible to allow for an “authentic” sex scene, the action is usually happening in a prepared location. The toys and lube and water and snacks are all set up nearby. There are lights and at least one camera. And, as particle physicists will attest, the act of observation is not as passive as we once thought.
Does this mean that all porn is by definition inauthentic? Are the moans from the actors suspect because they might be quieter if this sex had happened privately? Does someone’s writhing in pleasure not count because it might be exaggerated for the camera’s benefit? Should we discount the very real excitement that exhibitionists derive from mugging for the camera, just because there’s a camera there in the first place? Well, no. But there’s no clear delineation between authenticity and inauthenticity. It’s not so simple.
It would be unfair and inaccurate to say that all mainstream porn is inauthentic, and just as inaccurate to say that all queer or feminist porn is authentic. Most porn performers do what they do because they like it, and that means that most of their performances are genuine representations of them having sex that they enjoy, at least to some degree. That doesn’t mean that they’re always having sex the way they do at home, or the way they feel like doing it at the moment of filming, but by and large the people you’re watching in porn films are doing something that makes them feel pretty good. There is usually real pleasure exchanged, but one can feel the presence of the camera and the expectations it brings with it.
On most porn sets, performers are expected to “open up” their positions to the camera, resulting in poses that look great but don’t feel so fantastic. Women are reminded to keep their faces turned to the camera even when it’s uncomfortable, to curl their toes, to arch their backs. India Summer, in an interview for WHACK!, told me, “Here is a good rule of thumb: The hotter a position looks on your screen, usually the more uncomfortable or athletic it is for the performers to do. Try putting yourself into camera-friendly positions and then going at it hard and fast for extended periods while maintaining balance, poise, and posture … Try having the stamina, energy, and intensity it takes to get through a normal or long adult-video sex scene and still photography shoot.”
Keeping oneself truly aroused and interested in the goings-on under these circumstances is not easy, and as a result, too many porn scenes end up feeling flat, uninspired, impersonal. In a word, inauthentic. But in The Crash Pad, every scene hit a similar level of ecstatic passion that made me giddy. Many featured real-life lovers with established sexual chemistry that glowed, or performers who had been paired up at their own request, guaranteeing that sparks would fly. Even better, the director, Shine Louise Houston, was careful not to actively direct the scenes, and to this day she maintains the same style. Nikki Darling, a performer who has since worked on the Crash Pad series, had insights into the process: “There is something magical in the technique that Shine uses, which is very voyeuristic … The scene is what you and your scene partner negotiate beforehand, and then move forward with doing. And Shine happens to capture those things very well and very beautifully.”
The Crash Pad also opened my eyes to the possibility of showing clear, ongoing, and enthusiastic consent during a porn scene. Whereas in most porn I’d seen, consent was merely implied when the woman, for instance, crawled across the floor, drooling, to get to the exposed cock waiting for her on the couch, in this new world of queer and feminist porn, permission was often asked for and verbally given. Seeing this negotiation on camera tickled a part of my brain that I hadn’t been entirely aware was starving for attention: I knew without a shadow of a doubt that the people in these scenes were having fun. Their facial expressions, their body movements, and their words all added up to explicit consent. I’d become accustomed to assuming consent was given, knowing as I did that the people I was watching in mainstream films were being paid and had the ability to dictate their own terms on most sets, but in many scenes in which negotiation and consent were edited out, anything l
ess than exuberant, authentic-looking ecstasy could feel a bit icky. How could I be sure that everyone was okay? But when the negotiations were included in the film, there was no guesswork, and I felt the PTSD-ridden parts of my brain latch on to this new form of erotic entertainment with glee.
And feminist porn went above and beyond showing consent in explicit terms: In these scenes, rather than editing out every application of lube, the bottle would sometimes stay in the shot for a minutes at a time, along with negotiations between actors as they decided what position to try next, who should be on top, or what toy to use. I was floored. Feminist porn director Jennifer Lyon Bell told me once that in sex, “the tiny awkwardness or confusions along the way actually add to the excitement rather than subtracting from it,” and The Crash Pad really proved how true that could be.
In short, queer porn changed everything for me. Questions that I had been asking already about the morality of the things I was watching deepened—I became more concerned with the ways in which performers were depicted in their films. Was their consent clear and ongoing? Were they aware of the ways in which they were being portrayed? Did they agree with them? Did they care?
Even as I began to grow more critical of issues in mainstream porn, I branched out to write for more magazines, since my receptionist income had ceased and the magazines I was writing for were tilting once again toward bankruptcy. The shadiness of my encounters with Charles, the editor at the first magazine, had become more pointed—we would meet in public parks or on street corners, rather than at his new office in far-off Jersey. He would arrive at the predetermined time in very dark sunglasses and a hat, and he would pass me a black plastic bag full of DVDs, say a few pleasantries, and then walk quickly away, as if we were involved in a drug deal. The weirdness of these interactions spooked me and seemed to cast a darker shadow onto the magazines themselves, which were getting creepier. The one for which I wrote DVD reviews was getting thinner with each issue, with the ads in the back taking over a higher percentage of the pages and fewer sets of raunchy original photos leading up to them. The photos themselves seemed to be of lower quality, even, although I may have just projected my newfound sense of squeamishness onto them.
But at another magazine, for which I’d been writing set copy about young women’s “first times” that were then tacked onto “barely legal” photo sets, my uneasiness was definitely warranted. The photos I saw applied to my words had always come as a surprise (“Oh, come on, that’s not Monica! Monica doesn’t have freckles!”), but they had changed in tenor. They models were supposed to be barely legal, but some now appeared to be of actually questionable legality. The sets on which they were photographed were looking cheaper with every issue. When I came across a photo of a cringe-smiling young lady whose figure had yet to fully develop in front of a library scene that was clearly just a large photograph glued to a wall over some natty, stained carpet, I finally contacted my editor to ask where the magazine was getting these photos. The answer I got was a shrugging “Eastern Europe, I guess? They’re cheap.” And, I thought, much more difficult to trace to their sources.
Things were bad. There was so little money to be made in traditional smutty magazines that in order to avoid bankruptcy, editors were cutting corners in the most important parts of their businesses: the labor they contracted to make the smut. The consent behind these photos was questionable, and that made me extremely unhappy.
This is where independent queer and feminist porn producers were again winning the day: The female and feminist consumer was—unlike many others who were streaming porn from tube sites—willing to pay for rarefied good porn. Dollars were willingly shelled out for content that focused on real pleasure and clearly established consent. And although few of the small studios making that kind of material were raking in the cash, they were still able to continue to create high-quality content that their customers appreciated and continued to buy. While the greasy magazines I wrote for were drying up, queer feminist porn was revving its engines.
Women and queers in porn, both on the production and consumption ends, are essential to the continuation of the industry in both feminist and mainstream sectors. In 2010 the market had begun to adjust to the new age of women watching porn with the feature films and parodies that I’d been reviewing, and in the niche queer and feminist markets. Since then it has continued to grow. There are now more studios making porn for women and queers and feminists than I can even begin to mention. Pink & White Productions, which made The Crash Pad, has grown and now provides an umbrella distribution organization for smaller producers of indie smut through PinkLabel.tv. Jiz Lee, the online marketing director for the company, told me, “Many queer and indie films have difficulty finding online hosting due to censorship of sex acts, inappropriate language or categorization [or] tagging of performers of color, older performers, transgender [performers], or people with disabilities, or experimental content that doesn’t quite fit the typical porn consumer model … If we can curate unique and excellent adult films that generate revenue for the artist to continue their craft, we hope to ensure a bright future for our work to thrive.”
Porn for women from Europe and Australia by way of filmmakers like Erika Lust, Jennifer Lyon Bell, Morgana Muses, and Ms. Naughty has taken worldwide audiences by storm. Nica Noelle, with her companies Sweetheart Video and Sweet Sinner (among others) has been making award-winning, best-selling movies for women since 2008. Tristan Taormino’s feminist and educational series for Adam and Eve has been wildly successful. Sssh.com, founded by AVN Hall of Famer Angie Rowntree, has been operational for two decades and continues to expand.
All of these studios, and many others, focus on consent in their scenarios, on representing multiple kinds of bodies, gender identities, racial backgrounds, and sexual orientations. Rather than lumping performers neatly into categories by body type or race, they tend to adopt an “anything goes” policy, pairing actors who want to work together in the hopes—which are often met—that their chemistry will deliver a blistering-hot sex scene. As filmmaker Marie Madison told me, “Hook people up who are hot for one another and you’ll feel the heat without having to even turn the lights on.” Viewers the world over tend to agree.
At AVN in 2016, Ryan Driller, an actor who had just won the XBIZ award for “Best Actor of the Year,” told me that, “Although [for] almost all porn, even if it’s female friendly and female designed, I’d say the primary consumer is men, I think by 2020 … it’ll be fifty-fifty in a lot of different places. I think you’ll have studios that will have a predominantly [female] viewership and female customers. I think it’s just catching on with the female psyche and the female population.”
With punk porn princess Joanna Angel at an industry event
(PHOTO COURTESY J. VEGAS)
CHAPTER 14
Racism in the Industry
WHEN THE WHACK! STAFF went back to Exxxotica New Jersey in November of 2010, we saw familiar faces, went to parties, and interviewed plenty of porn stars. But the most memorable part of the weekend, for me, was sitting at the bar one night, talking with a friend I’d made the previous year. We’ll call him Seth. While the after-party raged around us, Seth and I drank whiskey gingers and talked about the industry he’d been working in for nearly twenty years.
At that time, Seth had performed in around fifteen hundred adult films, pseudonymously starred in numerous showcase series from several production companies, directed over two hundred films, won five AVN awards, and been inducted into the AVN, XRCO, and NightMoves halls of fame. Yet, near the close of 2010, he told me that he was contemplating retiring from adult entertainment because he felt undervalued. Sure, five AVN awards sounds impressive, but when I checked them out I discovered that every scene for which he’d won an award had been a group scene. Which is to say that he hadn’t yet been recognized by the industry’s most prestigious award-giving organization for his own performances.
I encouraged him in whatever pursuit he chose and assured him tha
t he had so much to offer that if the porn industry wasn’t giving him the respect he deserved, someone else would. But he was already in his early fifties, and although he’d held jobs prior to porn, he felt he was approaching old-dog-new-tricks territory. But his frustration over a lack of appreciation, it seemed, was only part of what was bothering him; He suspected that he was having a hard time collecting on the “legend” status he so richly deserved because of his race.
I’ll take a moment here to recognize the fact that I have no idea what Seth’s financial background looked like, or what series of events led up to our conversation. But no matter what the details behind the scarcity of financial rewards for his long and distinguished career in adult entertainment, I saw in Seth’s laments a microcosm of a larger trend that cannot be ignored. Earlier that day at the convention we had both seen large, expensive booths representing major studios owned by white men. Many of those men had started out as performers, then moved behind the camera before going on to much profit and acclaim. But Seth and I had seen zero similar booths owned by black men. Or by black women. Or by Latin or Indian or East Asian men or women. You get the idea. While there had been a good number of actors of color signing autographs, we were both aware that the percentages were off.