In Lust We Trust: Adventures in Adult Cinema

by Gerrie Lim

  There was a naïve innocence to that which I must have liked, for I emailed her after an online search revealed that she was selling a home video of herself masturbating, for US$35 payable by international check, available by writing directly to her. Growing up in staid, strict Singapore had only made me develop a sense of rebellion, and I just loved this very kind of devil-may-care attitude, the kind that flips the birdy at tsk-tsk social judgement. I didn’t ask Linda to sell me a copy of her video, but I did offer to copy-edit all the editorial areas on her site, mostly correcting her English.

  She agreed and, in the course of our discussions, she also asked me to ghostwrite her monthly letter to her fans. Linda basically wanted someone to write as her, to express her thoughts in her own voice, but entirely in English for her American fans to enjoy; these guys were, after all, the very target audience for her website, a need made more pressing by her new contract signing to Sin City. We concocted this scheme: half of this would be free for everyone to read but the really sizzling stuff would be reserved only for her website members. (This is lesson number one for those interested in the editorial side of porn: most of the stuff you read is always made up or retold with the poetic license of the pornographic imagination, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.)

  In exchange, Linda offered me any number of videos of hers that I wanted. She even sent me by airmail, as a token gesture to seal the deal, a videotape of three scenes she had shot but which were not yet released commercially. The tape made its way from Stockholm to Hong Kong. “To my hero Gerrie,” she signed, on the glossy photo of her enclosed with the plain black video box.

  Hero? I’d never been called that before. But, hey, to actually get to pretend to be a sexy Swedish porn star once every month, and with her cooperation too? Sure, I could do this. I knew I would spend the rest of my life regretting it if I turned it down.

  Each month, Linda and I would email each other and we’d discuss what aspects of her life should be revealed to her fans. And then, after we agreed, I would craft her “Letter of the Month,” as she called it. For instance, here’s what I wrote for April 1999:

  Hi everybody, I’m Linda Thoren, how are you doing? I’m now back in Sweden after a hectic month in Los Angeles, where I worked on several new movies (with Sin City, Pleasure Productions, Wicked Pictures, VCA, and Penthouse Video). Right now, I’m on my spring tour of Sweden. The schedule is listed on the homepage, so check it out and come see me strip! I had a really busy time in L.A. but working my ass off (so to speak) seems to be paying off. I have just been signed to a contract with Sin City, so you’ll be seeing me in their films and videos exclusively later this year. You have no idea just how thrilled I am about this! Meantime, this summer, watch out for a new film I just did with director Nic Cramer, called Flesh For Fantasy …

  This would be followed by an account of the shoot, and the sexual details would heat up with each progressive paragraph:

  When you guys see the film, you’ll see Rebecca shaving Lacey … You’ll also see the two of them thrusting on the floor with a two-headed dildo while I’m masturbating on the couch, first with my fingers and then with a cute pink vibrator! You should see the look on the guy holding the camera between my legs …

  And then, at the end of the page, there would be a teaser that I would also make up each month. “Want to read more about the sexy things I did in L.A.? Click HERE to join and be a member!” This would be followed by a “Continue” button, which sent the reader straight to the membership sign-up page.

  I got the idea from having visited those tacky peep-show clubs on 42nd Street in New York, the ones with the automatic windows where the poor, pent-up patron has to fork out more money each time if he wanted to see more of the girl. It’s the same principle. The guys have to join the site to read more, in order to get off. Porn, let it be said, isn’t ultimately about sex. The sex is only the conduit. It’s really always about money.

  So, if the hot, bothered and bewildered reader decided to type in his credit card number and join the site, he could then read my next page:

  Hi again! A few days before I did that shoot with Nic, I did an outdoor scene with two guys. It was actually a cold day for L.A. and I almost froze to death. I was naked the whole time. This is one of the work hazards of being a porn star (in case some of you were wondering), I love being seen naked and I love to suck and fuck two men at the same time, but I’m human too, you know. Boy, do I hate cold weather. On another shoot last month, I was really moaning and coming pretty fast when the director suddenly yelled, “Cut!” Ugh, some stupid production assistant walked into the camera or something. It’s very frustrating when that happens. I can get horny down there, between my legs, but it’s often harder to get turned on mentally, because of all the lights and equipment and people around you at the time. The last thing you want to think of is where the camera is, or how I’m pulling my stomach in, or putting my breasts out, or whatever …

  Membership, as they say, has its privileges. It confers the special insider’s view, the “behind-the-scenes” aspects of the business and the private details of a porn star’s life. I really think this was a unique strategy, and it was what gave us the edge that resulted in our AVN Internet Award nomination at the end of that year. Not many porn stars were using their personal sites to do this in such a brazenly calculated yet eloquent manner back in 1999, since most membership “extras” on most porn star sites usually took the form of additional picture galleries, JPEG files meant expressly for their members’ wanking pleasure. The DVD revolution and all those behind-the-scenes interviews, in what we now know as the “Special Features” sections, hadn’t quite happened yet.

  It was really great fun working with Linda. Ironically, her star would be in decline just as mine was ascendent. In February 2000, I wrote the last of her “Letter of the Month” pages. Linda had that month decided she was going to retire. She had been having medical problems, apparently caused by anal sex. And, from what I was told, Sin City had used her refusal to perform anal as reason enough not to renew her contract. Bad press accordingly followed; she either refused to do interviews or had made a petulant show of doing them grudgingly (as the company’s publicist at the time had informed me), and then broke up with her boyfriend and manager, Tomas Edberg, and finally quit the business for good.

  In March 2000, Sin City released the last of Linda’s films, Linda Thoren’s Gang Bang, a messy “gonzo” tape which featured her in a free-for-all with six other performers (four men and two women), entirely set on a single soundstage functioning as a room and with absolutely no dialogue whatsoever. The video came with an equally sophisticated box cover (not!), a full-color close-up of Linda’s face post-orgasm, eyes closed and cheeks splattered with semen, three still-erect penises dangling above her. It was a bit ugly, and almost as if Sin City was determined to get their money’s worth out of whatever they’d paid her for her contract, which she had served out for exactly the requisite one year.

  By that time, though, she was long gone back to Sweden and couldn’t care less what Sin City was doing. Nic Cramer told me later that she was living in Stockholm, studying to be an accountant. One year later, Sin City was still mining the vaults and releasing old footage cobbled together as “new” material (such as Linda Does Hollywood, released in the summer of 2001 with an amusingly ridiculous box cover of her dressed as a Viking), and Nic himself would purchase old scenes shot in Sweden from her directly, to compile into “new” films (such as Passion Tales #6, released at the end of 2002!) “Linda Thoren is a find,” raved AVN reviewer Dan Miller in his “Video of the Day” section, apparently not knowing she was long gone or, perhaps, playing along with the bluff. We insiders knew about girls coming and going all the time, and, sadly, many so-called “retirements” weren’t always taken seriously. (Many girls staged “comebacks” after their drug money ran out or if they needed to sharpen their media image to help publicise their stripping at the clubs.)

  I was only sad for L
inda, though, because she had been responsible for getting me started in the business yet had fallen casualty to it. She was a girl who unabashedly loved sex but she had, as Nic told me, an inbuilt stubbornness typical of Northern Swedes—she wouldn’t play politics or make nice in accordance with studio protocol. She’d made no bones about the fact that she was a nymphomaniac from a small town with a name few non-Nordics could pronounce (Ornskoldsvik, try saying that fast), who used her real given name to do porn (a rarity in the business), but she learned the hard way that while her unflagging honesty was a valuable asset in captivating the fans, her naivete had failed her. She simply didn’t have the gumption for the game.

  Linda was, for me, an object lesson in how sometimes, it’s much better to save your insatiable love of sex for the privacy of your own bedroom. The difference between Linda and myself wasn’t simply that she performed in front of the camera and I didn’t. It was the fact that I have a perverse fascination for artifice. So what if the sex wasn’t “real”?

  I recall an argument I had once with someone who complained that “nobody ever sweats in Andrew Blake’s films.” Of course not, I said, that’s the whole point! I actually asked Andrew Blake about this when I finally got to meet and interview him at the end of 2000. “Sweat will mess up their hair and their make-up will run,” he agreed, chuckling. “This is not about reality. This has nothing to do with reality. It has to do with fantasy. It has to do with angles and positioning and women with their breasts hanging just right. I don’t want to see the bad parts. I only want to see the good parts. If people want to watch amateur porn and gonzo porn, there’s plenty of that out there.”

  So where, I asked him, was the fine line between erotica and pornography? “I don’t think there is one,” he replied. “I think it’s the way it’s packaged and the way it is presented, and in the sensibilities that you bring to it. You can have the most salacious-looking blowjobs and have it look quite beautiful and make it art, as opposed to making it have less than 100 percent visual style. I try to do pictures that have a lot of style to them. And the other stuff I see out there has no style. If they’re both going to be called pornography, I would rather my work be called erotic pornography as opposed to sleazy pornography.”

  “I’ve said this for years,” he concluded. “When people who are hungry want something to eat, they can go to different places. There are people who will go to a beautiful restaurant and have a three-hundred-dollar meal, and there are going to be the other people who are going to go to a McDonald’s and have a couple of Big Macs. I’m the expensive restaurant.”

  I liked that analogy. I also liked the fact that in the hierarchy of sex workers, porn stars were at the very top of the totem pole. Unlike strippers, escorts and call girls (all beavering away, so to speak, a rung or two below on that same labor-intensive ladder), porn stars were the most glamorous and best paid, the metaphorical expensive restaurant dishes in the gastronomic universe of commercial sex.

  However, writing about porn and cultivating the eloquence to do so was one thing, but getting used to the company of these highly sexual women was another. The trick was to gradually imbibe them into one’s cultural DNA. I found through the years that I really did like the company of these crazy girls. I just made sure that the relationships were personal but never actually sexual, and dating them was a total no-no, a Pandora’s Box I veered away from like pestilence and plague.

  My sanity, and theirs, was at stake.

  Plot? What Plot?

  You have to be crazy to be in this business,” Andrew Blake once told me. “It’s the kind of craziness that lets your inhibitions down, that enables you to do these things. I think there is a ‘porn flaw’—the flaw in these girls that makes them work from their private parts rather than from their heads. Girls who should be on Felicity but instead they’re in California Blowjobs #15. You know what I mean.”

  That was in April 2001, and by that time I certainly knew what he meant. I knew so little about the adult film industry going in but became more and more intrigued by it the deeper in I got, if you’ll pardon the innuendo.

  I remember, for instance, being on a set one afternoon and feeling completely flummoxed to learn that male porn stars were usually given flesh-colored condoms to wear so as to minimize visibility on film (Kimono Micro-Thin Plus, made in Japan for Mayer Laboratories in Oakland, California) or if they wore white condoms, they were the thinnest-possible (Crown Skin Less Skin, lightly lubricated, also made in Japan but for Okomoto USA, Inc. in Stratford, Connecticut). Sharon Mitchell, one of the great veterans of the blue screen, once gave me an all-American condom (from Ansell, Inc., in Dothan, Alabama), and she wrote her phone number on the package.

  I never called her but ran into her some years later, at A.I.M. (Adult Industry Medical) Healthcare, the clinic she ran in the San Fernando Valley suburb of Sherman Oaks, where all conscientious porn stars go for their AIDS tests and medical check-ups. I reminded her of the condom she’d given me, and we had a good laugh. “That was back in 1992, and you were the first porn star who ever gave me her phone number,” I told her.

  Next to us in the clinic reception room was Laurie Holmes, ex-wife of the late John Holmes—“Johnny Wadd” to those who remember him for his massive schlong that often got him into trouble, grimly but wonderfully played by Val Kilmer (sans visible schlong) in the film Wonderland. Laurie, a pixie-faced, curly-haired brunette formerly known as the porn star Misty Dawn, was actually there working the reception desk, doing her bit to help her fellow porn stars. She had met me once before, at the home of another porn legend, Screw magazine publisher Al Goldstein (another story entirely, as with everything Al Goldstein). Laurie was also a real working girl, putting in time at America’s most famous legal brothel, the Moonlite Bunnyranch in Carson City, Nevada; I’d seen her in their print ads.

  It was an eerie rendezvous. We bantered cheerfully as several girls strolled in and out getting their HIV tests done, but I was struck by the incipient tension of the moment—the realization that there was a time in my life when I couldn’t even have imagined being in the same room with these two women, let alone any of the other legendary lasses. What was more palpable, and memorable, was the fact that I enjoyed their company greatly, even as I would be the last to surmise that we would stay, so to speak, bosom buddies. No, we had a business relationship, or we formed an alliance of sorts. The porn industry is very small and close-knit, and operates entirely on trust.

  Even when it operates largely on money, it still operates sooner or later on trust.

  I remember Nic Cramer, the director to whom I owed my own infamous entry into this industry, telling me about his protracted legal problems with the company he had signed himself to, after he had sworn on his mother’s Swedish meatballs that he would never work for those scumbags again. “I’m back to work for Pleasure Productions, we settled my lawsuit against them on the eve of trial, July 31, with a go-back-to-work package and a stack of cash upfront. It entails eighteen movies—six films, twelve videos—to be shot over the next eighteen months, a bunch of bonuses and performance incentives, and a five-figure check as a ‘signing bonus’ to me, all under non-exclusive terms this time around. We start work September 2002.”

  A year later, he was complaining to me about how fed up he was with the business and how he was still planning to retire altogether and maybe even return to Stockholm, once he figured out how to pay off the mortgage on his Malibu beach house. I always liked Nic because he was different from the rest of them. He lived by the beach, instead of in the valley like everyone else, and he was often caustically opinionated about the people in the business.

  I never had the balls that Nic had, though, to blast colleagues openly in public or in print. It was through him that I learned how the business functioned. For example, I was amazed to discover that porn directors usually get paid a flat fee for each film, unlike mainstream Hollywood where they usually get a cut of the film’s proceeds and can earn residual income through
percentage points off gross receipts. This is the main reason why the producers are the ones getting rich, and why directors are always constantly working, and why the amount of videos being churned out month after month is nothing short of staggering. Nic, after winning “Best Director” two years in a row at the AVN Awards (in 1998 and 1999), found himself still toiling in the salt mines like everyone else, and perhaps he took umbrage with this enough to speak candidly with me.

  “I’ve talked to Linda a lot lately,” he told me in August 2002 when I inquired about our mutual friend Linda Thoren, now retired and living back in her native Sweden. “Mostly because I bought some scenes from her and I’m still waiting for releases and I.D. shots a year later. She’s as imbalanced and manic-depressive as ever.” Nic had weathered two bad relationships with porn stars—he had previously dated Taylor Wane and Melissa Hill, both of whom he had little good to speak of, and the only girl he said he liked enough to even consider dating was Gwen Summers, a perky part-Japanese sex kitten whom I was also friendly with. Gwen and I had first met on the set of one of Nic’s films, Irresistible, shot not far from where Michael Jackson used to live, in the upscale valley enclave of Encino.

  Gwen was married, and in more ways than one (and perhaps luckily for me) distinctly unavailable. She had told me a great deal about how she got into porn, to get back at her abusive husband, porn actor/director Johnny Toxic, only to discover that revenge is a dish best served cold, not hot. She discovered that she actually enjoyed having sex with other men and was stuck, and continued to make movie after movie, returning home to look after their young son before dashing out again for the next shoot.

  “Another producer just bounced a check on me again,” Gwen would sigh, whenever I ran into her again, on yet another set somewhere deep in the Valley. “It would really suck if you were young and starting out in the business and you were really depending on that check.” Every “time I tried calling her, her cell phone would remain unanswered and every time I asked her about it, she would tell me that her son had been playing with her phone and had “thrown it somewhere again.” I found this egregious lie somewhat amusing, since like most working actors porn stars live and die by their cellphones and the callbacks they hope to get.