by Gerrie Lim
Singapore’s only real, internationally famous porn star had decided to quit, opting for a new life of relative obscurity. And who would miss her now?
We had met when I interviewed her for the April 1999 issue of BigO, the Singapore rock magazine that seemed to be the only media outlet back home that was on her side—a local tabloid, The New Paper, had vilified her quite unneccessarily—and so we stayed friends for a while, though I heard less and less from her as her post-porn years went by. Sometimes, I thought that appropriate. I was always less a fan of Annabel Chong and more a fan of Grace Quek (her real name), ever since I got the know her as a person. Her style of porn was never my taste—I was not a fan of hard, angry, fast fucking, and even less enamoured of that exalted genre she had become synonymous with, the gangbang.
In short, much as I believed that porn deserved its place in the democratic marketplace of ideas, using sex as a way to exact some kind of revenge just wasn’t ever my trip. But I did like what Annabel stood for, even though no one got the joke. In retrospect, her “World’s Largest Gangbang” of January 19, 1995, when she had sex with 251 men (recorded for posterity on home video as The World’s Biggest Gangbang), was a tragic non-event, in the sense that she had set out with an agenda but most people never saw the humor in it.
They never grasped the post-modern notion inherent in her proclamation that “251 is just a number.” It went right over everybody’s heads, and the video made her famous for all the wrong reasons. I know this to be so because the industry immediately treated it as a watershed event, and bigger gangbangs were set up, resulting in Annabel’s record being smashed later by Jasmine St Clair, Houston, and, finally, Sabrina Johnson.
Sabrina, a dark-haired lass from Manchester, England, ushered in the new millennium with 2,000 men, done over two days, and later said in an interview that she wished she’d never done it. At what point, she herself must have wondered, did pointlessness set in? Probably, I surmised, when the pain made her realize that the whole spectacle was built on repetition, which could certainly get boring. Worse still, the DVD version of the event, cleverly “divided” into two separate releases, Gangbang 2000 and Gangbang 2000 - Day 2, received overwhelmingly poor reviews.
“Sabrina Johnson’s big ‘2000-man’ bang falls flat on every level,” wrote Susie Ehrlich in AVN, July 2001. “Johnson is a beautiful girl who deserves better than getting fucked by a (pitifully small) group of guys who think that taking part in this event will make them full-fledged porn performers. She goes through all the ‘passionate’ reactions, moaning and writhing, but reality intrudes when one of the bangers actually believes she means it and starts smacking her ass. Watch her drop the act quickly.”
In the second disc, Sabrina was seen “icing her swollen pussy sometime around 1,600,” and the rules stipulated that “each guy gets a mere thirty seconds before being gonged, which signals the next fucker, but he can return with another number after a minimal passage of time.” The questions one could conjure, surely, were all too obvious: Could a thirty-second penetration really count as sex? Wasn’t this postmodern irony taken a tad too far?
In 2002, Sabrina decided to compensate for the public humiliation by directing her own gonzo series, cheekily entitled Can I F*uck You … Too? in which she participated with total strangers she’d accosted on the streets of Europe. The first episode was shot in Antwerp, Belgium, where she lived (having moved there after her husband Graham had been busted in the UK and served a nine-month jail sentence for “living off immoral earnings”) and it was generally well received by reviewers, though many preferred her in the likes of Butt Banged Naughty Nurses, made back in 1997, in which she took on six guys every which way and then drank all their sperm from a glass cup.
Annabel, however, was far more notorious. She had achieved the one thing that had eluded Jasmine, Houston and Sabrina: mainstream fame.
She’d made a big splash at the Sundance Film Festival with a documentary film about her life, Sex: The Annabel Chong Story, part of which dealt with the emotional fallout over her famous feat. The worst part of it wasn’t the shock or horror of it all, or the reaction of her mother when she found out, but rather the way her fame tooks its toll on her adult film career. What most civilians don’t know, and what adult film veterans know only too well, is that there is a pecking order to employment, and the worst thing a porn star can do is to gain a reputation as a gangbang girl. Annabel had made her name with such self-explanatory titles as All I Want For Christmas is a Gangbang and I Can’t Believe I Did the Whole Team!
It sounded strange indeed but the hierarchy of porn had inbuilt prejudices. A porn star who kept doing gangbangs soon found herself accorded pariah status, an outcast akin to say Chuck Norris in his laughable syndicated shows repeated constantly on daytime television. I had seen some of Annabel’s films and thought they were generally one big yawn. But that wasn’t the reason why I found her intriguing. I was much more interested in the emotional arc of her career, and in the way she saw porn as a sex-positive statement aimed at stoking the fires of philosophical debate.
She had a lot more than met the eye, an intellectual spark that few girls in the business even came close to possessing. And, like me, she had been away from Singapore long enough to see it with deserving amusement. After she was photographed in the Los Angeles Times Magazine of August 5, 2001, dressed in her golfing togs and brandishing her 7 iron, she told me with a laugh: “Golf is my way of keeping close to my Singapore roots. You can take the girl out of Singapore, but you can’t take Singapore out of the girl!”
“I don’t think Singapore is for everybody,” she’d said when I interviewed her. “There are people who take well to the system and they seem to thrive on it. And, well, good for them. I do not intend to condemn anybody. I don’t think it’s my place to do so. But for me, personally, I don’t think that it is a system that sits well with me politically.” It was, she added, “the way the government posits itself as a father, like ‘Father knows best.’ A lot of people swallow that idea. Singaporeans are being subjected to a constant stream of propaganda. It’s very insidious.”
I asked her about her infamous gangbang. “After the first 100 men or so, you realize the number is just a concept,” she said. “So it’s not about sex per se, it’s about exploring the concept of what sex is.”
“Firstly, it’s not sex as intimacy … it’s sex as sports,” she explained. “It’s public sex. Sex is getting more and more public now. Look at, like, the Calvin Klein ads. More and more, in our society, sex is becoming a spectacle. And so how can we draw the line between what we do in private and what is otherwise? That sort of thing, it feeds into each other such that the private and the public no longer is important, and we’re moving towards sex as ‘information.’ How many guys? 251. Or 300. Or 551, whatever, you know.
“And the other thing is the invention of this whole genre, this new genre of sex films that really does not come from the tradition of erotica or pornography but comes from somewhere else, like the Guinness Book of World Records, or sports. It’s more like sports. There’s a historical parallel between gangbangs and orgies and fertility-goddess rituals, but in our society our communal ritual is sports. It’s football, soccer, whatever. It’s really interesting, this playing out of our modern religion, which is sports.”
One thing she wasn’t going to do, she assured me, was attempt the ““mainstream crossover.” After hearing so many girls tell me of their deep yearning for recognition—the need to be a “real actress”—it was so refreshing to hear someone who had come to terms with her talents. “I cannot act,” Annabel told me. “My parents were theatre pioneers in Singapore, back in the 50s and 60s, but I have no acting talent and I’m not about to kid myself. I have no aspirations to ‘cross over’ as a Hollywood actress.
“You have to understand that Annabel Chong is a persona, she’s a character,” she added. “I think the dichotomy is interesting. I think everybody puts on personas, although their personas ma
y not necessarily have a different name.”
How about being a role model for Asians in the adult entertainment industry? “I don’t know about that,” she mulled. “I don’t know if Asians in the industry necessarily need a role model. I think most of the girls, the Asian girls in the industry, are pretty sussed. A lot of actresses are on drugs or whatever but the Asians are really together. Asia Carrera, for example, she’s a really smart girl. She has her shit together and she’s a really good businesswoman. Minka runs her own fan club. From my experience, the Asian actresses really have their shit together and they have a pretty good sense of where they want their careers to go within the adult industry.
“Also, the adult industry is so diverse, just like the rest of society, that the word ‘role model’ does not really apply. You know, people call me up to ask me for advice and I’m always happy to give them advice. If I feel they’re not right for the adult industry, that they have certain things within their personality that will not fit well with the industry itself, I advise them: ‘Don’t do this. It’s not what you really want to do.’”
After that interview, I managed to get her to write a couple of columns for BigO magazine, and to my fascination she kept dwelling on the idea of fame.
“Before I embarked on a career in stripping, an old stripper once offered me some useful advice,” she wrote, in October 1999. “She took me aside before my first show, lit a Marlboro Red, and said to me, ‘Look here, honey, show them only what you want them to see. You might be naked, but it ain’t personal. They just want to see your pussy.’ With that thought in mind, I hit the stage. At no point did I feel vulnerable about my own nudity. After all, I was putting on a show and my nudity was, in many ways, a costume.”
The next column, in December 1999, was entitled: “Signing Autographs is Worse Than Doing a Gang Bang.” She began with a description of her ordeal at the Fantasia Film Festival in Montreal, signing autographs for 300 waiting fans, with barely one minute to appease each individual before having to get to the next one as the festival organizers urged her to move on so the line could move.
“The thing I have learnt about celebrityhood,” she concluded, was that “understanding does not grant immunity. You can deconstruct the entire process of fame until you are blue in the face, but that does not instantly take away its power to seduce. Take me, for example. I have been through the entire process from the standpoint of the ‘celebrity’ and I know what an incredible sham it is.”
Which was why, she giggled, she once satisfied a bizarre request from an obsessed fan in the best possible manner. “The guy wanted me to shit into a bag for US$150,” she told me. “I went out and scooped up some dog shit and mailed it to him. He was completely ecstastic, thinking it was my shit. He wrote to me telling me he ate the shit and it was delicious.”
What a brilliant response, I thought, to an absurd situation! In one fell scoop (sic!), she’d addressed the oft-forgotten truth that in the end, porn is merely a form of commodified sex whereby what people really pay for is the suspension of disbelief. Or, rather, the privilege of experiencing fantasy, often a manifestation of your own mind. There were no barriers to good taste.
A is for Asian
I remember buying Porn to Rock, a 1999 album pairing porn stars with rock music, which included one of porn’s pioneering Asian stars, Suzi Suzuki. Her tantalizing bio inside the inner sleeve (my copy was on vinyl) read: “Suzi Suzuki was born in Tokyo, Japan, in 1972. As a child she lived in Germany and Japan and is fluent in both languages. She got her first job as a jazz vocalist in a Tokyo nightclub in her last year of high school. Now living in San Francisco, she appears in adult video and works as an exotic dancer.”
It prompted in me that eternal question: What was this thing called “exotic,” so commonly associated with Asian women, particularly in a sexual context? “Exotic,” I have concluded, was the promise of something. But what exactly was that something?
I certainly understood the way many Asian girls in the business were quick off the mark to take advantage of their exalted status. For instance, I recall meeting a lovely Korean-German girl who called herself Jade, on the set of a movie she was appearing in. I had a friend visiting from Hong Kong who had a penchant for Korean girls, and I casually told her that. “Cool,” she said. “See me after the shoot and I’ll give you my phone number.”
She hurried off to get her hair and make-up done, and it took me a few seconds to realize that she wasn’t asking for a date. She was setting up one. She was a hooker.
Asia Carrera once told me how incensed she was when she found herself on the cover of L.A. X … Press, a tabloid advertising incall and outcall services (specifically, the issue of February 10, 2000). “This prostitute magazine,” she said, “used my photo without my permission!”
She had refused several offers in the past. A certain famous baseball player once promised her an insane amount of money to “go up to his hotel room.” But could anyone blame that baseball star? He knew who she was, after all. Asia herself had emailed me the link to the “AVN Top 50 Porn Stars of All Time,” compiled at the end of 2001, telling me she was voted in at number 22. (The top five: Ron Jeremy, Jenna Jameson, John Holmes, Traci Lords, and Linda Lovelace.) Annabel Chong, the only other Asian on the list, came in at number 40.
At the time of writing, the latest rising star in porn was also Asian, if somewhat unusually so—a Canadian lass named Sunny Leone, the 2003 Penthouse Pet of the Year, who’d signed exclusively to Vivid in May 2005. She was the company’s “first performer of Indian descent,” but her Punjabi parents weren’t too happy; an AVN interview disclosed that when the Vivid contract was faxed to her parents’ house, her mother asked: ‘What’s double penetration?’”
“She figured it out, and started crying,” Sunny told the reporter, Peter Stokes. “I put them in their place, I told them I’m not stopping what I’m doing and it’s only going to get wilder!”
That episode reminded me of the time I interviewed Kira Kener, another Vivid Girl, who told me her favorite thing in the world was to do a d.p.—“Because it makes your head spin,” she quipped. She had been the Penthouse Pet for December 2002 and, at age twenty-eight, traded quite effectively on her 32DD-25-32 Vietnamese-Norwegian heritage. However, she was evasive when I asked her about being Asian and what it meant to her. Unlike Asia Carrera or Annabel Chong, who had no problems at all with the concept, Kira looked like she’d never thought of it before.
She told me she was born in San Jose, California, and had never been brought up in a typically Asian household. Her real cultural roots lay in rock music, particularly her favorite band, KISS. (Her Penthouse layout made special mention of how she had met the band’s long-tongued bassist Gene Simmons and he had asked her for an autograph. That was the pinnacle of fame to her.) At the time we spoke, in November 1999, she had just re-signed for a second-year contract with Vivid.
“Last year I did six movies and this year I’ll do eight,” she told me. I asked her if she felt like she was carrying a torch for Asian girls, since she was only the third Asian girl ever signed to Vivid, after Asia Carrera and Kobe Tai.
“I suppose so, but I really don’t think I look as Asian as they do. And, to a point, that kind of disappoints some fans. You know, it all depends on how I do my make-up. Most people can’t figure out what my nationality is. I’ve heard it all, let me tell you. If they ask, I tell them the truth, which is that I’m Norwegian and Vietnamese.”
She had spent eighteen years growing up in San Jose, and did not feel particularly Asian. “It’s really strange,” she told me. “Some of the stuff I follow traditions with, but most of the stuff I don’t. My parents always worked. I only saw them when they left for work and when they got home from work, and once a year we went on vacation. That was it. They were both in the computer business. They wanted me to get into it too. And that made me want to keep getting away from it more and more.”
It was easy then to see why she was a porn star: she w
as the typical neglected child who craved attention and so took to being a stripper and then to porn, in an attempt to erase her emptiness. I had seen this kind of defiance in so many girls; they all had different versions of the same story. I tried a different tack: I reminded Kira of some of her scenes I’d seen, where she’d expressed a shyness in her eyes, very demure and very Asian, especially when giving a blowjob. Lots of white guys I knew were turned on by that sort of thing.
“Right,” she agreed, “and that’s what really amazes people once they meet me, because they totally think I’m one way and when they realize how I am, they’re totally shocked. There’s that ‘shyness’ side that I put out, and then there’s this totally opposite side. And that blows everybody away. I am shy, but once you get to know me, the other side of me takes people by surprise. I’m wild and crazy, a lot of times.”
Kira was the unapologetic party girl, who didn’t care much for being stereotypically Asian in order to satisfy some fan’s fascination for the jade-goddess archetype. She had made a valid point—about how one’s ethnicity need not (or, perhaps more acutely, should not) become the focus of other people’s expectations.
The best example of such vaunted panache, to my mind, is still the opening scene in that Christian Slater film Very Bad Things, in which Kobe Tai played a stripper who performed a bachelor party but came to a tragic end. It was an unusually long scene in a mainstream film featuring a porn star, and one which some people felt had helped adult performers gain visibility in Hollywood.