by Jiz Lee
I was traveling for gigs. I had begun performing in Los Angeles, and I’d been featured on box covers. I was invited to speak at schools and was given awards in other countries! I was regularly contacted for interviews by mainstream press. Years later, when my stepmother would open her laptop to find me on the homepage of MSNBC, I’d exhaled the biggest sigh of relief that she already knew, was proud, and had my back. At the time, I’d been keeping all my porn adventures a secret. I’d been hiding all the excitement from some of the closest people in my life. I was keeping it from them almost as if I were ashamed of what I was doing, when in reality I was very proud. What was the real reason I was keeping this part of my life from my family? Why hadn’t I kept them in the loop? When I received that phone call from my dad, I suddenly realized how far off the map I had drifted away from my family. This distance made me feel as if I had been living a double life. But if I didn’t tell them soon, they would find out on their own. I made a sincere vow to tell my dad the next time we were together, in person.
It wasn’t easy.
I love pornography. Porn is an extension of my own sexual expression, a blend of art and documentation. My first sex scene was with a lover. I cherish it, and although we’ve long since broken up, the video remains one of my favorite performances. I learn a lot about myself when I do porn. It provided a space for me to explore BDSM through bondage and electricity. Porn has become part of how I practice being poly; shoots are a clearly defined container offering distinct boundaries where I can have sex with close friends on preestablished terms. Porn is part of my exhibitionism and a place I can literally own my sexuality. Performative sex is thrilling, and with sober sets, regular STI testing, and a crew of professionals, I’ve had the opportunity to explore the vast edges of my sexuality, gender, and fantasy. Some of the safest and most satisfying sex I’ve had has happened on camera.
I’ve had so many positive experiences in porn that I’m convinced it’s one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. How can something that has so profoundly impacted my life be bad? Sure, there were some not-so-awesome times, but even those moments taught me how to better articulate my boundaries. Porn taught me to be emphatic about giving consent. Each shoot comes with new challenges and rewards, and if the many messages I’ve received from viewers are any indication, I’m humbled that my very existence in porn brings visibility to the simple fact that queer and gender-variant people are deserving of a happy and healthy sexuality, and capable of being loved. I’m working with friends and lovers to create images of intimacy, trust, and pleasure. And we’re having fun! This is what porn means to me.
Not everyone understands my view.
Please forgive me as I skip the difficult details of coming out to my brother, father, stepmother, mother, and grandma. I don’t want to speak on their behalf, and I am edging on what I feel comfortable disclosing. The past few years have been challenging, but well worth it. What I will say is that I am still moved by their various forms of acceptance, as expressed in my brother’s curiosity; my father’s efforts to empathize; my stepmother’s supportive role as an ally in standing up for me when dealing with the reactions of less open-minded family members; and to my surprise, my religious mother and grandma’s display of unconditional love. (“A good Christian doesn’t judge.”) It wasn’t—and still isn’t—easy, but I’m grateful for their attempts to better understand who I am. Coming out to them has made me feel closer to my family than ever before and my heart swells with the knowledge that they love and are proud of me.
I don’t consider my process of coming out as over. On the contrary, I still have a very long way to go. It’s still an uncompleted project in the back of my head that I am constantly fine-tuning. As I continued engaging in conversations with my peers, a few familiar threads became clear. For one, there’s what I’ll call the “outing snowball effect”: the potential that disclosing one’s work in porn can result in the further outing of themselves and others. (For example, working in BDSM porn might also reveal a performer’s personal kinks.) There’s also the matter that when we out ourselves as porn performers to our family, they take on the responsibility of this knowledge. If someone asks my father what I’m up to these days, he must decide whether or not to talk about the porn career that is now one of my primary activities, or he can choose to focus on my triathlon training, a topic that has become convenient at large family gatherings. Some performers are outed by accident, others vindictively. Coming out on our own terms is a luxury; if we talk to family members when we’re ready, we can create a better environment for the conversation to take place. We can control the privacy, even plan aftercare to unwind from a stressful talk. I also saw another big observation: Coming out about porn sometimes isn’t too different than coming out as queer and/or trans. Parents can have strong reactions out of fear. They are concerned for our safety; they accuse us of drug use or assume that something must have happened when we were younger to make us this way. The misconception that we are victims incapable of sexual agency mirrors that of coming out as nonnormative gender expression and sexual orientations.
I’ve made mistakes in the process of coming out, many of which I’m glad to see detailed by other stories in this book. When I first came out to my family about working in porn, I tried to play up what I understood as more socially acceptable performances, describing my feature films as comparable to recognized films that include explicit sex, such as Shortbus. However, the logic that sex within a narrative plot would somehow be more respectable backfired when my hardcore BDSM scenes were discovered. Although I never said, “At least I’m not doing XYZ,” I was too insistent on making comparisons to independent film. We’re all affected by whorephobia spectrums of sex worker stigmas; when coming out like a porn star, it doesn’t help to throw other kinds of porn or sex work under the bus.
My checklist of family members whom I want to tell is far from complete. At the time of this writing, I’ve yet to find the courage to talk to my little brother and sister, now in their late teens. We’ve grown closer as they’ve become young adults, and the possibility of losing them shakes me to my core. I tell myself I shouldn’t place such steep fear on their reaction. It’s entirely possible that they already know. They are children of the Internet, after all. But being a sex-positive sibling is easier said than done. When they were going through puberty, I tested the waters by giving them each, separately, their own copy of Heather Corinna’s S.E.X.: The All-You-Need-to-Know Progressive Sexuality Guide to Get You through High School and College. It wasn’t long ago that I’d been in their shoes. I told them I wanted to be a resource for them, especially if they didn’t want to talk to Mom or Dad. That was the last and only time my siblings and I talked about sex, a brief exchange of “Uh-huh” and “Okay.”
Years have passed, and I still want to talk to them about porn at the appropriate time and place. Yes, I know I’ve been stalling. The truth is, I’m scared. I sought out peers who have children or younger siblings. How did they talk about porn in an age-appropriate way? Former porn star (and new grandmother!) Sinnamon Love cautioned hiding information from youth in the event that they find out on their own. She likened it to kids finding out there’s no such thing as Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy. I certainly don’t want to jeopardize my siblings’ trust, but am I delaying the inevitable? Surely, it will be easier to talk about this when they’re older. Maybe when they’re dating? I’ll tell them after they have turned eighteen, I’ve reasoned with myself. The countdown hangs over my head and looms like a prediction for the end of days.
The hardest part of loving someone is the fear of losing them. The thought that I might even disgust them absolutely silences me. Maybe this whole situation is better left unspoken, I tell myself. My other younger brother found out casually, years before anyone else. Being only a few years older than him, I felt comforted by our closeness. We used to keep secrets from our parents so I knew I could trust him. Perhaps his nonchalance about my doing porn means my younger siblings
will feel the same? I run circles in my brain to avoid the hard part. How deeply have I internalized this sexual shame? I want to get to a point where the idea of it turning out well is more readily available than the worst-case scenario replaying in my head.
Maybe it will be easier when I get over it.
I realized early on in the process of creating this book that these stories not only served my own needs but could also help others navigate the process as well. Having found my voice while writing for The Feminist Porn Book, I was inspired to put these stories to paper. Books have been written about coming out as queer, as transgender, as poly, and even as kinky. However, Coming Out Like a Porn Star is the first of its kind to address coming out about sex work in pornography.
Where this book fails in scope (writers are primarily American, English speaking, and their eras tilt toward the most recent decade), it succeeds in being one of the more inclusive anthologies to represent a range of marginalized voices from commercial porn. Contributors span people of color, trans and nonbinary performers, people with disabilities, niche genres, and varying professional experience—from Nina Hartley, a legendary performer with more than thirty years under her belt, to the porn hopeful Verta, who had the door slam in her face before she had a chance. As an advocate for diverse expressions of human sexuality, it was vital to me that the less-heard voices of my peers ring loud and clear. I’m equally grateful to popular “mainstream” performers whose experiences show that we’re more alike than one would think. Combined, the collection features honest and often emotional accounts from over fifty adult professionals, placing it among the ranks of other big porn anthologies. It may hardly scratch the surface, but it will spark a conversation.
Working on this book has not been easy. Dozens of performers who initially wanted to submit a story later retracted. This might be typical of publishing collections from various authors and limited budgets; however, in the case of Coming Out Like a Porn Star, contributors have much more at stake. Writing this piece proved to be an intensely personal process. Even I wanted to recant my own submission. For many peers, the danger of being exposed is simply not worth the risk. I understand that. Coming out is hard enough, but to do so publicly has dangerous implications.
Regardless of the outcome, all the experiences shared in this book reflect the social stigmas of a culture whose sexual maturity is still in an awkward phase of adolescence. Where media outlets and public opinion continue to portray a negative, one-sided view of porn and its participants, our stories reveal a more honest depiction. We write at a time when sexual knowledge is typically buried in shame, fear, and ignorance. Where hate crimes against people whose gender and sexual expression differ from a strictly defined template are alarming statistics; the suicide and murder of trans women of color in particular are screaming indicators that something in our understanding of sex and gender is clearly amiss. If our experiences of sexual stigma and its intersections are any indicator of the social inequity of our time, may our words be stepping-stones for increased sexual awareness and nuances to come. And may we come out on top.
WINNING AT PORN: MY PARENTS’ OPINIONS STILL MATTER
AliceInBondageLand
After a near-life experience in a plane crash, Alice set out to live her dreams and bring her mad visions to life in moving pictures on both sides of the lens. Now, Mistress AliceInBondageLand is on a mission to put the fun back into femdom, one movie at a time. Her videos feature female-dominant-lifestyle couples in all combinations. Winner of the Best Bondage Paysite award in 2014, her movies shine with innovative bondage, genuine orgasms, and real kinksters really enjoying themselves, with a surprising sense of humor mixed in.
All my parents really wanted was for me to win the Olympics. Instead, I produce pornography with every method of artistic creation ever made available to me.
That makes more sense with a little context. Both of my parents were Olympic competitors and, like most parents, they hoped their children would succeed where they had failed. They got a porn star instead of a normal athlete, one born with the same intense drive that pushed them to Batman-like lengths of willpower and sacrifice in pursuit of a possibly impossible goal: to be the “best in the world” at something most people have never heard of. They sacrificed their lives and didn’t win. My sister and I were raised in the fallout of their dreams.
My early artwork was soundly denounced as pornography by my hysterical mother one day after I quit yet another Olympic sport at an athletic camp. I was copying the classics from photo books and had started sketching from Victoria’s Secret catalogs. My mother was unnerved at the level of explicitness her eleven-year-old was extrapolating from the world of advertising, even though I was just redrawing what I saw all around me.
At thirteen, I remember looking at my own vagina with a mirror. I was trying to figure out how to draw a fully nude woman without ever having seen one. It was also a little obvious from an early age that I liked girls. My mother destroyed all of my vagina art when she found it. She didn’t have words for why girls shouldn’t draw that kind of stuff, just rage, fear, and fire. The rule was that we would never speak of it again, but her control tightened when she discovered that the money paid to send her talented daughter to art classes instead of sports camps was churning out smut.
I got a Polaroid camera for my sixteenth birthday. I immediately used up all my film photographing stuffed animal bondage and nude mirror selfies of my changing body. No more camera for me when they were discovered in my art stash beneath my bed. I got caught masturbating with a carrot. I was kicked out of the house a few days later. I moved out with whatever I could fit in the trunk of a Nissan.
A few weeks after my eighteenth birthday, we shot roll after roll of film at an older friend’s house using my new 35mm camera. We tied each other to his pinball machine and posed provocatively with bananas. I was devastated when the photo developer exposed the film, destroying it all. He told us to never come back, even though there were no actual sex acts portrayed in any of the photos. We were all of legal age and could prove it, but that didn’t matter. It was his religious imperative to destroy our young, queer photographic obscenities.
Yet every time I looked at the world, I saw it in porn-o-vision. Every piece of architecture was a potential attachment point for bondage. I cast every passerby in my lurid fantasies. I kept a notebook of video ideas with me where I constantly sketched, scribbled, and took notes.
I traded nude modeling to my landlord for an early digital camera while I attended college, insistent that I never wanted to risk my creations to a moralistic interloper again. I use my cultural anthropology degree in every movie, but probably not in the way my school intended it. I sold my motorcycle for a video camera. I traded yard work for dungeon rentals and bribed my friends with favors to join me, with or without masks. We showed it to our lovers but not anyone else.
I lied for years about other gigs while I secretly spent every penny I earned at “normal” jobs producing lewd fetish material for my personal wank bank. Part compulsion and part creativity, it consumed me. I watched other people’s pornography, but nothing spoke to me. Where was the laughter in the bondage? Where were the smiles? Where was the female pleasure? Where was sex that looked like what I did in my bedroom? I kept making movies because I couldn’t find my kind of movies anywhere else.
Many years later, while collaborating with friends that owned a website, I let slip that my secret stash now numbered in the hundreds of scenes and thousands of photos. They wanted to see what I had been up to.
The website happened fast, faster then I was expecting. I had not counted on finding an audience; my focus had only been on pleasing myself. In a rush I’d gone from “weird girl with a video camera” to “Internet famous” (whatever that means).
I hesitated to tell strangers. “I make moooooovies,” I would say, drawing out the o as long as possible. They always ask if I have made any theatrical releases they might have seen. Everyone is eager to think th
ey might be meeting someone famous. “Probably not,” I would answer and let them assume I made obscure documentaries and very boring corporate training videos.
I kept a once-a-week day job for years, just so I could point to it and have something to talk about when someone asked me what I did. It wasn’t until I won awards for my porn that I tried to tell my parents again what it was that I had spent my whole life doing.
I think they knew all along. My mom knew from the very beginning. She called it porn the moment she saw it. She grew up weird in a small town and was tormented by peers for being perceived as a lesbian. She married my dad in part to get away from the gay bashing. They found common cause in the Olympic Games and their shared sport.
My mother told me years later that she was so hard on me because she didn’t want me to grow up too weird. In her twisted small-town logic, if you are too different, then no one will like you, and if no one likes you, you will never be happy.
I pointed at my crowded Thanksgiving, my Burning Man camp, my band of merry mischief-makers, all full of happy pornographers and performers. San Francisco is not small-town Wyoming and “weird” is an ethos embraced by the West Coast. I am not a lonely weirdo.
Mom is in a healthier relationship after her divorce and all she will tell me is “I am a lot more open-minded now,” with the phrase pronounced in a lilting voice with extra-long vowels. I can only wonder. She is now dating a guy that did win the Olympic gold a few years after she retired. I hope she dances around naked except for it nestled between her breasts. I’ve never asked, but I hope.
