by Lynsey G
And for all this talk over TS porn, it’s important to note that as far as mainstream porn is concerned, there’s only one kind of trans person worth filming: trans women. Although a growing number of trans men, like two of my favorite humans, Buck Angel and James Darling, are making their own content and demanding more visibility, the trans male porn market is still virtually nonexistent. Basically, the straight white cisgender guys who run most of the porn industry don’t want to deal with trans guys as sexual beings, convinced as they still seem to be that the people who buy porn all look and think exactly like they do. They’ve relegated trans guys to indie porn and the occasional novelty item, even as awareness of trans issues has bloomed across the American consciousness in recent years. It’s depressing to see, but it’s also amazing to watch as trans guys in porn develop their own markets and show the mainstream world a thing or two about what people really want.
But the world of niche porn is still dominated by inequality; similar issues are found across most niche categories. BBW (big, beautiful women) performers, for instance, are not as numerous as their thinner counterparts, but their fans are extremely loyal. Though the category itself is established enough to prove that it makes money, very few studios were willing to shoot BBW content until well into my time as a porn critic. There was no recognition for BBW actors in industry awards ceremonies. In the late 2000s, however, BBW performers with strong fan bases and a lot to say about the way they were being represented began to pop up around the industry. And when women like Kelly Shibari and April Flores pop up, they refuse to be overlooked.
April, with her late husband, filmmaker Carlos Batts, has made dozens of films and an art book, Fat Girl, in which April featured as a muse and fashion plate. April has written for numerous publications about her activism as a woman of size who demands to be seen as beautiful and sexy. She has performed primarily but not exclusively in indie porn projects, where larger women are more frequently portrayed than in mainstream porn, earning herself a “Heartthrob of the Year” award at the Feminist Porn Awards in 2010. And, at the inception of the long-overdue “BBW of the Year” AVN Award in 2014, April took home the first statuette—and the second, when she won again in 2015.
Not long after April’s entrance into the industry, Kelly Shibari began performing when her work on Hollywood productions dried up during the writers’ strike of 2007 to 2008. She told me that when a friend encouraged her to try porn, “I said, ‘There’s no fat girls in porn.’ And he said, ‘Yes, there is.’ I said, ‘Oh, no, it’s like a circus freak thing.’ At that point what I’d known about bigger girls in adult entertainment were like those postcards that you see at the beach, where there’s like five-, six-hundred pound women just laying on the beach kind of blubbery, you know. It was more like a gag.” She found one company—The Score Group—that presented its models with more glamor. So she sent in photos, got hired for a shoot, and began breaking boundaries for plus-size performers like she was born for it. Since then, Kelly has become an outspoken advocate for plus-size women in both pornography and the mainstream, starring in everything from educational porn films to her own self-produced content, making a cameo appearance on Sons of Anarchy, and becoming the first ever plus-size woman to appear on the cover of Penthouse Forum and in the pages of Penthouse.
These two performers, and many other plus-size performers in recent years, have spoken up about representation in pornography, and everywhere else. And yet, despite the great strides that have been made (you’ll find much less cetacean language in the marketing these days, for example), plus-size models still have only a handful of production companies for which to work.
At AVN in 2016, Tim von Swine told me, “I’ve been working with a lot of plus-size girls. The plus-size girls genre is never going to go anywhere, and I’ll tell you why. There’s not enough companies that shoot it to put enough money [into it] for all of them to take it as seriously as it needs to be [taken] … I love the fact that these girls are willing to take their clothes off on camera, and get bent … They love it. They want to do more of that stuff, but there’s no one around to do it.”
To further salt the wound, BBW performers also earn less than their smaller contemporaries. In an article for xoJane, Kelly Shibari estimated that rates for plus-size scenes cap out at around four hundred for boy/girl pairings. For comparison’s sake, slimmer women earn up to fifteen hundred for the same kind of scene.
Familiar supply-and-demand reasoning stands behind the lower rates for BBW performers, as it does in any niche category of pornography, and it stands up to the same level of scrutiny: It makes a modicum of economic sense, but that sense doesn’t make it right. Performers in all niches have become more vocal about how they would like to be represented more respectfully, and in many cases these efforts are being rewarded by updated terminology, stronger recognition by the established industry powers, and greater visibility in the mainstream media. But across the board, niche models are still paid less by fewer studios and then marketed to consumers in ways that often go against their wishes.
Updating the terminology and representation for performers is an important step: Calling the stars of a film “differently abled,” for example, rather than “crippled” isn’t a particularly difficult transition, and switching out the “shemale” button on your website for “trans” presents only minor confusion for users. But categorization is still necessary, especially in the case of niche studios that cater to a specific customer base whose loyalty has been hard-earned by years of consistent output of a specific type of content. Especially since tube sites, where pirated material can be posted for free by any user, are happy to categorize videos however the person who uploads them decides to describe them doing away with categories that keep videos firmly in their given niche is not a viable option for most.
There are a few brave souls trying to prove that categorization doesn’t have to be demeaning, though. Many queer porn outlets, like Pink & White Productions and Foxhouse Films, label their performers and scenes according to the wishes of their performers. And TrenchcoatX, an indie company cofounded by Stoya and Kayden Kross, has reinvented the standard porn labeling system in favor of gender nonbinary, nondiscriminatory terminology like “breasts: natural or augmented,” “pubic parts: mostly internal or external,” “heterosex,” “the help (dildos/toys/etc.)” and so on. As reported in The Nation, “It is an attempt to recode a landscape of commodified sexuality that promotes retrograde categories as titillating transgressions.” And, so far, it seems to be working.
The integration of different types of scenes into more mainstream content is another option, and it’s one that some studios have tried. Not every scene featuring a black male actor, for instance, needs to be labeled under “interracial” because most consumers have no aversion to seeing performers of color in their smut. However, those specifically seeking that kind of scene might balk if their favorite category were done away with, leaving them casting about for the content they want. And so many sites persist with the outmoded terminology.
Perhaps a shift from within could start with payment. It would be like a dream, from a social justice perspective, if the entire industry switched to an equal-pay-for-equal work model in which everyone, regardless of their physical attributes, were paid on the same scale. Some indie and feminist porn companies already operate on this model, like Pink & White Productions. But, given the subjective nature of porn performance, this could be impossible to nail down across the wide expanse of the porn industry. What a standard boy/girl anal scene is worth to one director might be very different from what it’s worth to another, depending on that director’s customer base and budget. And it would hardly make sense to offer a brand-new performer the same rate as a veteran of the industry with multiple years of experience and a few awards under her belt.
As it stands, performers can command their own prices, and many do, according to experience level, skill set, and how often they want to work. But if their price is too hi
gh for directors to pay, they can be left high and dry; one must be competitive to get cast. Having a good agent to stand up for you helps with that. But base rates are base rates, dictated by supply and demand, as well as by what producers and their bosses consider appropriate. Anyone who wants to be hired as a new performer needs to get in line and work their way up. And in that line, white, thin, able-bodied women are at the front, and everybody else is behind them.
Cindy Gallop and her MakeLoveNotPorn.tv team are attempting to provide a new business model that could help level the playing field, if her company proves that it is sustainable and profitable: profit-sharing with performers. When profits are split down the middle between the website administration and the people doing the labor on camera—as they are at MakeLoveNotPorn.tv—regardless of their race, class, size, ability level, gender, or any other identifier, there is no way to discriminate or to cut pay from anyone. “I would urge the porn industry to have the courage to believe that you can do things differently, and do them differently … Within the porn industry, as I say, there is now enormous room for individual creative vision,” says Gallop.
As with so many things, the most radical change may have to come from a larger shift in the way that sexual value is assigned culturally. It’s no coincidence that the recognition of trans and BBW performers as important members of the porn community has come at the same time that widespread acceptance of transgender people and people of size has swept the American mainstream. With advocates like Laverne Cox and Melissa McCarthy gaining visibility in Hollywood, the movements backing them are changing the way that Americans see people who look and identify differently. Once the world has had some time to get used to the idea that white, able-bodied, skinny, cisgender women are not the only people who can be accepted as sexy, the porn industry may find itself eager to catch up with the times by expanding its definition of who belongs in “mainstream” porn, and who deserves to make competitive wages. As fervently as I believe that my friends in queer, indie, and feminist porn who proudly own their beautiful, unique bodies and desires deserve to be paid just as well as the hottest mainstream porn stars, the rest of the world has not quite caught up with our way of thinking just yet.
At the AVN Awards in 2011, I looked for my new friends from the fringes of the industry, but I was disappointed to see very few in attendance. Most of them would have been welcome at the awards ceremony as audience members, but there were very few awards available for people working in their niches, and there certainly wasn’t space for them on the media-friendly red carpet outside. As the parade of “normal” people plodded across the stage before me, I sighed and downed more whiskey.
CHAPTER 16
The Gay Divide & the
Condom Wars
IN THE YEARS BETWEEN my review of East Coast ASSault and the 2011 AVN Awards, gay porn had almost never crossed my radar. I occasionally partook of a few clips of men going at it during my guilty Internet wallows, but I had never been given any to review for the print magazine. Nor had it ever been offered by any of the companies that sent me review material for WHACK! I’d noticed at Exxxotica and the Adult Entertainment Expo that there weren’t many gay models on hand, and it began to dawn on me that for some reason, gay porn was a mystery to me.
My inquiries were met with vague answers: “Gay porn is a separate industry,” or “Our readership just isn’t interested in gay stuff.” I’d been willing enough to focus on straight and queer porn, since I had my hands more than full enough covering the news, politics, and pace of those segments of adult entertainment for WHACK!, writing reviews and set copy for print magazines, finishing up night classes in publishing, working two part-time jobs, and juggling two committed relationships. My swing party attendance had fallen off, as I’d recognized that I just didn’t have it in me to write a whole book about the swinging lifestyle, and my McSweeney’s column had wrapped up. But I’d filled the gap in my writing life by joining a poetry group that hosted costume parties, and by starting my own blog to continue where my McSweeney’s column left off. So, though I was interested in finding out more, I assumed that my experience hadn’t yet converged with gay porn, and left it at that.
It wasn’t until I attended the 2011 AVN Awards that I realized just how segregated gay smut really was from the straight stuff. I’d expected there to be some mention, during the long evening, of the gay industry’s achievements. Even a token mention, like a single award presented for best gay actor, or one of those less-exalted awards not given out during the ceremony. But as the night dragged on and I ingested whiskey to keep myself from falling asleep (not the best strategy), it became clear that no mention of gay sex was forthcoming. How odd.
Even more odd, now that I got to thinking about it, was the fact that when I’d done Internet research on most of the male porn stars I’d interviewed thus far, I’d come across quite a few old photos of them having sex with men on what were clearly gay porn sets. Yet when I talked to them about their careers or read interviews and Wikipedia articles about them, the subject of their dalliances in male-on-male action almost never came up. Something was clearly up, but I hadn’t spent much time trying to figure out what.
We must keep in mind that “gay,” here, does not refer—at all—to women. There were plenty of awards doled out for “bisexual” (two women with one man) scenes and “girl/girl” porn. But “gay” is a term, in mainstream pornography, reserved specifically for homosexual cisgender men. Furthermore, “queer” applies only to porn made outside the confines of the mainstream industry, usually blurring lines between genders and sexual orientations and rarely including cisgender men. So when I say that gay porn is its own cloistered world, I’m talking about something very specific.
In 2011, there was—and still is, as of the time I’m writing this—astonishingly little overlap between the two industries. Despite many similarities in corporate structure, performer pay rates, filming techniques, and more, they remain separated by a number of issues.
Although there are certainly exceptions to the rule, and the rule itself is changing as time goes on, the majority of straight mainstream porn coming out of Los Angeles is still filmed with a straight male viewer in mind. Most of this material is also filmed by straight males who, like many of their brethren in America, have been brought up with the idea that the slightest whiff of homoeroticism is tantamount to a revocation of their “man card.” (God I hate that term.) As feminist pornographer Jennifer Lyon Bell told me once in an interview, “American culture is practically phobic about showing imagery of intimate male sexuality outside of a gay context,” and her assessment speaks directly to the almost hysterical fear of male sensuality in straight porn, in which male actors are often pared down to torsos with penises attached, rather than human beings with feelings or even faces. Bell continued, “We’ve trained men to be silent and invisible during sex, and it’s a damn shame.” Part of what makes it so unfortunate is the fact that, over the decades, the San Fernando Valley has become a bastion of chest-pounding hetero dudes whose fear of being labeled gay isn’t just a social concern. For most of them, it’s a career decision to be as straight as humanly possible—any implication of homosexuality could tarnish their reputations and possibly damage their careers.
This strict delineation of sexuality has resulted in a just-as-strict separation between straight and gay porn, even though they are basically the two pillars of the mainstream porn world. Two large industries with decades of history, which operate on similar models, and that share remarkably similar internal politics. As the authors of A Billion Wicked Thoughts put it, “Except for the fact that the male body is the star, gay porn looks and feels exactly like straight porn.” The main difference between them—aside from the fact that there are no women performing in the gay industry—is that men make considerably more money in gay porn because the demand for male performers there is exponentially higher. It’s also much less difficult for an aspiring male performer to get into gay porn, where there exists a
mirror of the “new girl” rapaciousness in the constant search for fresh faces and bodies. And although “maleness” (whatever that means) is highly prized in gay porn, there’s a less overwhelming atmosphere of conservative masculinity in the air. The demand for men of different types, from domineering alphas to sweet submissives and everything in between, means that a guy who doesn’t necessarily fit the no-homo mentality of the straight industry can still get hired for a gay porn shoot, so long as he can perform.
Meanwhile, landing a spot in straight porn is difficult, to put it mildly. Producers and directors are hesitant to give new talent a try, due mostly to the fact that it is extremely rare for a guy to be able to get and maintain an erection, on demand, with a camera on them, along with the eyes of a director and any other production crew that might be on set—much less be capable of ejaculating at the right time. The stable of male stars who work in the straight industry is kept small, with reliable, tried, and true performers filling in all the gaps (zing!).
“The reason why you see the same guys in porn over and over again is because you can trust those guys to come in and do [their] job,” Tee Reel explained to me. “To be a guy working as a full-time job is very difficult. You can come in and do a couple scenes and be a part-time performer, and somebody might test you in a gangbang or a blowbang to see if you can keep your dick hard around the guys, if you can stay focused, and then they’ll give you a shot working on a one-on-one. That’s how most guys get in.” At least one straight male performer has told me that he did his first few porn scenes for free because getting paid work was nearly impossible. In other words, the best way to land a spot in the straight porn industry as a man is to already have a track record of successful performances. But getting those successful performances in the first place can be tough. For that reason, many straight guys start out in gay porn, where the requirements are a bit less stringent. But, if he has his sights set on transitioning into straight porn, he faces the scrutiny of the super-hetero crew on that side of the fence.