by Gerrie Lim
This could even be fun, I thought, as I drove down Pico Boulevard from my apartment in Santa Monica for the first of the three days I had agreed to volunteer for. I could have cruised down the Santa Monica Freeway and then changed to the Harbor Freeway and made my way towards downtown Los Angeles, but I deliberately took Pico despite all the traffic lights, simply because I wanted time to think. Los Angeles is a decentralized landscape, a hundred suburbs in search of a city, connected by a massive system of six-lane freeways with cars speeding over the usual sixty-five miles an hour limit, but you could also navigate your way on what we called surface streets, particularly if you needed to ruminate. Looking back, I believe I had intuited that I was about to behold something cataclysmic and tumultuous, possibly even life-changing, and so I wanted to stay centered. I had then belonged to a Buddhist vipassana meditation group for five years, and I wanted to slow my mind down, breathe deeply, and Zen-out the half-hour drive.
I also wanted to read the funny billboards and, with the neighborhoods turning gradually Latino as one went east towards downtown, check out the semi-rundown bodegas and the drug-dealing cholos along the way. I wanted to think about entropy and the need for rejuvenation.
When I got there, it took me forever to find the booth. It wasn’t in the main halls at all, but tucked away in a far corner under a large green tent with an over-18 age restriction sign outside.
We were in the porn section!
We were all there under the aegis of Spice, so our booth was right there with all the big porn companies that were promoting their newly concocted CD-ROM projects too. VCA Pictures, for instance, had its girls signing their interactive discs at its booth, and so I got to meet the irresistible Juli Ashton, star of New Wave Hookers 4 and Butt Detective, who would go on to fame and acclaim as the host of Playboy TV’s Night Calls and, in 2000, land a historic US$25,000-a-movie contract-girl deal. I remember getting very turned on when I read an interview with Juli, a former junior-high-school teacher, in which she revealed that she had screwed half the guys in her college dorm, at Colorado State University. (Sad to say, I’d only slept with one girl throughout my undergraduate years, so I was duly impressed.)
But what really sent me over the edge was meeting a sweet young thing named Taylor Hayes, who was also signing autographs for VCA, standing next to Juli, and who would later become one of porn’s biggest stars too. She was a newbie then, and told me she had only been in the business for two months and had only done four films. Fame was only starting to knock on her door, since she had just been in a Penthouse magazine layout, under the name Taylor Lynn, “a 22-year-old Virgo” and “a make-up artist” who was “in constant demand working for advertising companies and film shoots.” I asked her for an autograph each time I went over to see her, and she obliged each time, pulling from the stack of glossy black-and-white VCA Platinum promotional photos, in which she stood wearing very little, in a pose leaving no room for doubt.
“Gerrie—All my hot, wet, sex! Love, Taylor Hayes.”
Followed by “Gerrie—Thanks for all those multiple orgasms! Keep them cumming!”
She signed with a zesty flourish and much giggling, every bit the porn ingénue enjoying the attention. I was completely swept away by her natural ease, at the obvious way she embraced being a celebrity. I had an inkling that this girl was going to go far. When I asked if she liked having sex with girls, she just nodded and said: “Yum!”
Five years later, I ran into her again, at a Vivid Video shoot. (She would outgrow VCA and eventually sign on to become one of the fabulous Vivid Girls.) I reminded her of our first meeting back in 1995. She gasped. “Wow, that was such a long, long time ago!” She said she was pleased that she had helped inspire me to continue exploring porn.
Sometimes it takes only one girl, the right girl, with the right attitude, to take you to the next level. Windows open, vistas are revealed, and no recovery is in sight.
Taylor Hayes was a trip, but I was never to recover after I met Sara St James, who added something truly potent to the mix. I’d spent quite a bit of time talking to her at her booth. Dirty-blond and foxy, a California girl to the bone, she was there under the auspices of a B-movie studio for which she performed schlock-horror fare in various states of undress, under the name Jacqueline Lovell. She’d also posed nude for men’s magazines like Hustler and Mayfair, as Sara St James. “I’m sure you’ve seen me,” she said. “I’m everywhere.” But she hadn’t done a true-blue porn movie, hadn’t gone all the way, and told me she wasn’t ever going to. She’d had sex with lots of guys, but never on film.
Well, actually, she conceded, there was this one thing.
“I have a masturbation video,” she whispered. She looked at me with her piercing green eyes, and I knew we were in the zone; she was sharing a secret of sorts with me.
She told me to call her agency, Pretty Girl International, and wrote the number on a card, along with the name of her agent. “Call him if you want to get it,” she said. “Tell him I sent you.”
I was stunned. I wasn’t used to this yet. Here was a girl telling me I could watch her masturbating and she was even telling me how to get it?
Of course, I did call her agency and I did get the video. And it was a revelation. After frigging herself into screaming oblivion, Sara lay back smiling as the camera zoomed down, to offer close-ups of her still-throbbing, very swollen clitoris.
There was no turning back now. I needed to know how all this happened, how a whole industry even existed that made such visual phenomena possible. And thanks to Sara St James, I was on my way.
The Japanese call it mizu-shobai, the “water trade,” sometimes also called the “floating world.” The liquid analogy is rather apt, since it refers to the various subcultures of the sex industry—the brothels, hostess bars, massage parlors, strip clubs, and the like. The taxonomy of commodified sex fascinated me. Where did the line blur, from glamour models who merely posed nude to porn models who actually performed sex? There were so many areas of overlap in between, and I liked the armchair philosophy I could deploy in delineating the differences.
Much of this derived from a bizarre time in my life, when I made the fatal mistake of dating a stripper. Truly, I must have been out of my mind. (To those of you fantasizing about falling in love with sex workers, I only have one word of advice for you: “Don’t!”) She was a lovely girl, tall, big-boned and blonde, and hailing from deepest New Jersey. We defused our illusion (or at least my illusion, since I stupidly initiated the supposed relationship) quite acrimoniously, while attempting to vacation together in New York in the fall of 1994, during which time we hardly spoke to one another while sharing a room at the ultra-swank Paramount Hotel, on West 46th Street in mid-town Manhattan. I spent most of those evenings drinking alone at the famous Whiskey Bar next door, a famous supermodel hangout owned by Cindy Crawford’s husband, Rande Gerber, but the only people I remember meeting there were the members of the band Arrested Development. I thought my own emotional development definitely arrested.
Two days after I’d returned to Los Angeles, assuming we’d never meet again, she called me to apologize. And to say she’d just had “a dream about you and me and a dead rat.”
Charming. We would not speak again for another eight years.
However, in happier times, we would actually discuss our favorite porn stars. I had never done this with a woman before, so it was quite fun. I was particularly intrigued by her insistence that she did not want to be a porn star herself. She wasn’t into anonymous men enjoying her from the privacy of their homes. As a working stripper, she needed to see the men she was disrobing for, to look into their eyes and confront the blind lust she inspired. Sexual empowerment for her, as a “self-actualized, sex-positive feminist,” as she called herself, meant spreading her thighs and “showing pink.” But, she averred, “Guys I can’t see renting videos to watch me at home, that’s just not my trip.”
I was fascinated with these kinds of metaphysical boundaries,
born of variations of the proverbial forbidden fruit.
Long before the dead rat appeared to darken her dreams and spook the hell out of me, I’d spent a day with her in a jacuzzi at a house belonging to one of her friends, a bucolic retreat full of S&M paraphernalia, high up in the Hollywood Hills. We soaked in the warmth of the sunny day, both of us naked (we’d had sex the night before, so this was literally the morning after) and we talked about who we liked seeing on video. She had a thing for Tiffany Million, but she didn’t know much about Nikki Dial, my favorite porn star at the time. But we both agreed that Traci Lords was, objectively, the best.
In a surreal turn of events, I actually met and interviewed Traci herself some months later. It was my first full-on interview with a celebrity porn star. I talked to her for a whole hour, and remember her being extremely vivacious but pained about her past. She abhorred porn and told me she thought it was boring. But, when I probed further, she admitted that she was pissed off about not being paid for the two films of hers that were still circulating legally, since they were shot when she was over eighteen. (Actually, there is only one film—Traci I Love You, made in 1986, which also exists in a shorter, edited version under the title A Taste of Traci, hence the popular belief that two films were still out there.) Every other prior porn flick she had done had been pulled from the shelves, following police raids, and she had been accused by many people in the industry for lies and backstabbing and giving the industry a bad name since she was legally under-age for most of her career. (The legal age of entry for porn stars in the United States is eighteen.) She had started in porn at age fourteen and was done by age eighteen. Wow, what does one do for an encore?
In her 2003 autobiography Underneath It All, she dismissed Traci I Love You in a mere two pages, pleading the influence of vodka. However, she acknowledged that filming did take place in Paris the day after her eighteenth birthday. When I met her at the end of 1994, she told me it still bothered her that the film was still in circulation. “I feel like I’m extremely exploited by it. I’m just talking from a personal experience about the way that it’s been handled and the people that distributed it and the way that I had been constantly fucked, which is the best word for it, financially, emotionally, in every possible way. I’m supposed to be making money out of it. I’m not, and I have yet to do anything about that, but that’s a whole other issue.
“The reason that I hate that tape,” she explained, “is because I feel I was not in a place to make that decision when I made it, and I regret the fact that I made that decision at a point in my life when I was too fucked-up to know what I was doing. That’s why I regret it. I’m not trying to pretend that I wasn’t a fourteen-year-old porn star. I’m not denying it. I’m not hiding it. I’m not ashamed of it. I’m not particularly proud of it all the time. I have really conflicting emotions with it.” This, she added, was manifest in her fear of video stores, since she had been recognized in too many of them, thanks to her visage on so many porn titles. But “it’s not about witnessing my own face on a box cover, which doesn’t happen anyway because they’re all off the market except for one. It’s not about that. It’s about my own head trip, of my own discomfort in my own skin, with fame. I have a hard time with that part of it.”
However, that was the very part of it that most fascinated me. After all, we wouldn’t have been sitting there talking in a private room at a record company office on the Sunset Strip if she wasn’t promoting her debut CD called 1000 Fires, an electronic dance album that was, I thought, actually quite good. (Unfortunately for her, it would tank on the charts despite some favorable reviews.) On one song, she publicly admitted that she had been raped when she was eleven, and I talked to her about that—about the mechanics of making public one’s private life for mass consumption.
I think in retrospect that I have always taken perverse pleasure in that supreme irony inherent in porn—that a porn star makes public her private parts yet keeps her private life personal. I somehow must have realized very early on that the commercial packaging of sexual expression entails some very deft strokes, pardon the pun, since it subverts the very notion we are all schooled to believe—that sexuality is an intensely private thing, almost something to be shunned in decent company. Yet the very raison d’etre of the water trade is the exact opposite—show everything, since all they have is your body and they can’t touch your soul.
Theoretically, anyway.
Four years later, at the end of 1999, the best kind of Christmas present arrived for me. I received an email from Sweden telling me I had just been nominated for an AVN Internet Award. (AVN is the acronym for Adult Video News, the bible of the American adult film industry, and its Internet version AVN Online was the magazine I would eventually work for two years later.) To say that I was thrilled beyond belief was sheer understatement, much less the fact that it was for work done on the personal website of Linda Thoren, a relatively unknown Swedish porn star. The whole experience was a major watershed experience for me, and the beginning of my real induction into the world of adult cinema.
Linda had been the lynchpin that scored me my coveted gig as the “Cinema Blue” columnist for Penthouse Variations magazine, Her film Flesh for Fantasy was the very first one I ever wrote about for the column, and I essentially got the assignment because that film was directed by Nic Cramer, who had won “Best Director” at the AVN Awards for two years in a row. The magazine wanted me to capture his genius at work. I was already Linda’s online editor, and that indirectly got the editors at Penthouse to take notice of me. Work begets work, even if it was work most people would scarely believe.
Linda’s website was nominated in the “Best Personal Sites” category, and the culprits jointly sharing the credit were Linda, myself, and her fellow Swede, Bengt Gronkvist, our webmaster. As far as we were concerned, we were already winners in our own minds, since Linda was relatively unknown and a true-blue newcomer to the professional porn ranks, and all the other nominees were big-name porn stars: Jenna Jameson, Julia Ann, Lori Michaels, Alexandra Silk, to name a few. Neither Linda, Bengt nor and I attended the awards ceremony in Las Vegas, in part because we knew there was no way we could win. (The eventual winner, deservedly, was the hot favorite, Danni Ashe, for the second year running.) But we did toast our good fortune with a very nice bottle of wine on the deck of Nic Cramer’s Malibu beach house, where Linda stayed whenever she stopped over in L.A., and as the waves lapped the shore we sipped and reminisced about the past year.
I wasn’t fully aware of it at the time, but working with Linda had given me my first intimate glimpses into the inner workings of an industry that didn’t ever open its doors readily to strangers. This, in turn, offered me all the insight I would need to cover the business itself. The real wonder of it all, though, was the fact that it exemplified how the Internet truly defied geographical borders. Linda had only been signed to a contract with the American studio Sin City since May and, at the time when we started working on the site together, she was still living in Stockholm, as was Bengt (who updated and maintained the site from her office there). I was, at the time, living and working in (of all places) Hong Kong. We were thousands of miles apart, but what we managed to do transcended time and distance.
All this was quite something to behold, for someone hailing from a country where porn is banned. My first actual exposure to porn was when I was fourteen, when someone sneaked an issue of Penthouse into school and we passed it around at the back of the classroom. This was a big deal when you’re attending secondary school in Singapore, and even more so when you were like me, in St Joseph’s Institution, one of the top schools in the country and a proud bastion of the Christian Brothers brand of Catholic education (where sex, basically, was simply assumed not to exist). Penthouse was banned in Singapore because the government authorities were like the Christian Brothers, but with less of a sense of humor.
But, really (and figuratively), who gave a toss? Not us. Not when someone’s dad had obviously snuck one
in past the airport customs folks, and his son was now everyone’s new best friend. And in that issue of Penthouse, the US edition of July 1974, I discovered that there was a thing called “X-rated movies” from a pictorial featuring a gorgeous German girl, a redhead named Brigitte Maier. She was almost famous, since she would go on to star in Sensations, the porn classic directed by the Italian auteur Alberto Ferro (more famously known as Lasse Braun), which premiered to some controversy but also much acclaim at the 1975 Cannes Film Festival.
And so, my curiousity was piqued, thanks to the fact that I had actually bothered to read the text accompanying her photos. (Now, seriously, how weird was that?)
I think, in retrospect, that I always associated porn with a certain elegance, thanks to Brigitte Maier, and also with a certain European je ne sais quoi, whereby eroticism is more naturally and stylishly expressed (certainly more so than most American porn, a view I still hold today). In any case, whatever Brigitte Maier had, I saw the very same thing in Linda Thoren. Linda had won the “International Starlet of the Year” award at the 1997 Festival Erotica in Barcelona. I discovered that factoid from reading an interview with her, in the British magazine Bizarre. It was a short interview accompanied by a single topless photo of her, but I had an inkling this girl was bound for glory.
She had appeared in twenty-two porn films since her debut, Private Triple X #10, in which she had sex with three guys, shot in 1995 on her eighteenth birthday. She recalled it in her charmingly mangled English, on her personal website: “This was my first real pornshooting. I was barley legal and horney as a stray-cat. The shooting took place in Paris and I was banged by three guys in every hole I got—and I loved it. I think I came four times during one scene. Now, when I think back, I still think it’s the best scene I ever done. At least, it’s the most genuine. I didn’t think for one second of camera-angles—I just fucked.”