by Jiz Lee
My father still struggles with his kinky side, according to my stepmother. She wishes he would watch some kinky porn with her and get over his guilt about sex in general so they can move on to the fun stuff. We both agree that my films are the right attitude but the wrong cast.
Being the visibly odd one that couldn’t stop drawing naked chicks made me the lightning rod of the family. They’ve all had time to grow and change; getting sober helped. Telling the truth to them helped more than I realized. It cleared the air. Gave us a chance to start anew with real honesty instead of pretty fabrications. Their acceptance has been a landslide for my acceptance, too.
Now when strangers ask me what I do, I still tell them, “I make movies,” but I don’t dread their follow-up question about if it is something they might have seen. I smile my most mischievous smile and tell them, “Only if you watch naughty movies!” I still don’t use the word “porn” with strangers. It is easier for them to laugh off the word “naughty” as being cute and fun instead of scary. People spit out the word “porn” like it is a cussword or slur, followed by awkward sexual advances, as if being naked on the Internet obligates me to sleep with strangers. “Naughty” is cute, mostly harmless, and gets fewer propositions in response.
The after-school rule used to be “any sport as long as it is in the Olympics,” but instead I host the CBT Olympics and the Strap-On Olympics. I couldn’t shake my parent’s competitive nature, so I carved out a place for my own sexy challenges.
Ultimately, it was the trophy that cinched their acceptance. I finally won first place at something. Even though they don’t understand how their daughter turned out this way, they do understand winning.
OUT OR BUST
Andre Shakti
Andre Shakti is a queer polyamorous educator, producer, activist, and professional slut living in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is committed to normalizing alternative desires, destigmatizing sex workers and their clients, and not taking herself too seriously. Follow her on Twitter @andreshakti and visit AndreShaktiXXX.com.
I live the vast majority of my life balanced on the outskirts of “traditional” society, and as such I’m often asked how the people in my life feel about the work I do. When the question is posed respectfully (as opposed to invasively), I give my rote, honest answer: “I’m completely out.” As a stripper, as a professional dominatrix, as a live webcam model, and as a porn performer. Each time, I’m met with a mixture of wonder and disappointment: turns out, folks want to hear a story. Not just any story, either—they want to hear about secrecy, about living a double life, about navigating awkward situations. They want to know how my parents reconciled themselves with it, how I was ever able to find conventional employment, and how many partners I’ve lost as a result. They make their own assumptions about how condemned my life must be. In doing so, no matter how sincere their intentions, they set the sex-worker rights movement back exponentially.
The thing is, I don’t really have any coming-out narratives of my own. I never felt as though anyone was entitled to a red-carpet presentation of who I am and how I identify. When I initially found myself attracted to women in college, for example, I simply showed up at the next family function with my first girlfriend in tow and introduced her as such. I didn’t call each family member ahead of time and instruct them to brace themselves, nor did I write lengthy letters detailing the intricacies of my new desires. Likewise, when I’m meeting people for the first time at parties or other social engagements and they pose the inevitable, “So what do you do?” I respond as routinely as possible: “Oh, I work in the sex industry. You?”
I’m not trying to be provocative; rather, I’ve always believed that being “out” is the most powerful tool of activism available to disadvantaged minority communities, sex workers included. I find that when you approach a supposedly radical issue (queerness, nonmonogamy, atheism, gender nonconformity) with the same nonchalance as you would a less controversial topic (accounting, marriage, cooking, the weather), you give the other party permission to treat it with the same accepting ambivalence. We’re pack animals, and we’re constantly comparing ourselves to one another. We look for approval from our peers, and in many cases we use their reactions and opinions to help guide our own. I often observe people, who I’ve just disclosed to, pause to shift their eyes and gauge the receptiveness of those around them before responding. It’d be a fascinating study if it weren’t so disheartening.
Additionally, putting a familiar, nonthreatening face to something perceived as alien can make it seem much less so. Let’s continue with the party scenario. Say I’m introduced to an individual whose only context for sex work is an HBO special on sex trafficking, an industry that deals in the underage, nonconsensual selling of sex but is often disastrously conflated with legally-aged, consensual sex work. We immediately hit it off, talking and laughing and connecting for a few hours before I disclose what I do for a living. Assuming this person thinks highly of me, they now have to reconcile what they think they know about the kind of people who do sex work (coerced, substance addicted, disempowered) with who I am. All of a sudden, an unexpected hairline fracture appears in their presumptions. That’s all I ever aim to do: present people with sound reason to doubt their prejudice. Give them complexity and nuance to sharpen their naïveté. Nonjudgmentally help to normalize the foreign.
An unforeseeable benefit of being radically out is that it acts as a near-perfect filter for potential friends and lovers. Because I work in the entertainment industry (I produce nightclub events and go-go dance in addition to doing sex work), and as a result of the overlapping nature of San Francisco Bay Area communities, I’m constantly meeting new people with similar interests through work and play. Many of these people have either seen at least one of my social media profiles, watched an erotic film I’ve been in, attended a sexuality-related class I’ve taught, or shared a friend or partner with me before we even meet. Whatever the case, it’s very rare that I have to “explain myself “ to people who are interested in my companionship, and that’s a luxury that I am incredibly grateful for.
Of course, this approach isn’t perfect. First of all, being out is not accessible to everyone. Young people still dependent on their family’s resources for survival may opt to stay quiet about their proclivities for fear that they’d be disowned. Citizens of some foreign countries may also elect to remain closeted lest they face violence or death at the hands of their own government. Even in certain states in North America, there’s a real risk of same-sex couples losing custody of the children they co-parent if their sexual orientations become public knowledge. I recognize my own privilege in never having to worry about any of the above. The whiteness of my skin, the conformity of my gender presentation to traditional expectations of femininity, and my upper-middle-class upbringing provide me opportunity and dramatically decrease the chances I’ll be discriminated against on a daily basis.
There’s also a hierarchy within the sex work industry. Although dividing and insulting our community makes it that much easier for people to denigrate us for working, there’s a tremendous amount of classism rampant in the industry. Workers judge other workers on the services they provide and what they charge for those services, as though one person’s preferences and boundaries should naturally extend to everyone. The fact that I am a sex worker who operates in niches of the industry where I can charge more for my services (which are always performed indoors in safe, controlled environments) and receive a certain level of notoriety for those services gives me privilege even within my marginalized community. I do believe that it is the responsibility of those in a privileged position, such as myself, to be out when others cannot. To speak out when others cannot. To use their privilege to steer the public opinion and legislation in favor of all sex workers. We need to hear from a diverse array of voices—workers of size, workers of color, street workers, transgender workers—but those who are more readily given a mouthpiece (like porn performers who have inflated social me
dia presences) have no excuse not to use their power for good.
Second of all, not everyone responds to my flavor of enthusiastic, unabashed transparency. I still have one or two elder relatives who blame and resent me for never rolling out that red carpet and “formally” coming out to them. In my early twenties, I applied to and was courted by two graduate programs that I was exceptionally qualified for, only to be abruptly denied admission without explanation after I told them what I did for a living. And I’ll never forget the time I chatted up a svelte Russian femme at a Los Angeles lesbian bar. She’d bought me a drink and sidled up next to me, batting her long lashes, when she asked me why I was in town. When I casually responded that I’d been shooting a pornographic film, she immediately recoiled, shaking her head and saying, “You’re beautiful and everything, but I’m pretty conservative. I can’t get down with that.”
All that being said, I love my life. Being as open as I am has afforded me far more intimacy, support, community, and fortuity than I would have had otherwise. Because most everyone—from my childhood neighbors to my high school teachers—know what I do, I’m constantly fielding questions about my work, and I never let a question go unanswered, even when I’m feeling tired, overwhelmed, or disenchanted. I’m honored to act as an advocate for the sex industry, and I don’t begrudge any of my fellow workers who choose other, more private levels of “outness.” I just don’t know any other way to be.
COPING WITH SHOWING YOUR JUNK FOR A LIVING
Anna Cherry
The three best things in life are laughing, thinking, and orgasms. I want to make you do all three A LOT. Professional Naked Girl.
First thing they always tell you: Once it’s on the Internet, it’s there forever. I remember being not exactly sure what that meant while also feeling the palpable fear that sentence always carried. Now I can tell you with confidence that I have discovered what it meant and gone beyond; and I have returned bearing gifts of how to emotionally handle adult industry public opinion job hazard.
I have been doing webcam live sex and filming adult videos for at least four to five years. Keeping it a secret from my family and public at large, 90 percent of that time was spent under that elusive but omnipresent, heavy weight. In fact, even after everyone in the city I lived in at the time (as well as people in at least three to four other states and millions more online) knew that I was an adult entertainer, my parents did not. Even after moving to a new city entirely to pursue further flourishing of my adult entertainment career, my mother still had no idea of how exactly I earned my living.
Truth is, we all have the equivalents of AI implants of the people closest to us in our brains—for instance, you can quote to me exactly what your mom would say in a particular situation. That means you hear the echoes of negative and hurtful attitudes in the back of your head if you have any unresolved cognitive dissonance. And trust me, you do. We all do. No matter how open I was with both strangers and immediate friends, and although I was eager for my parents to find out what I do so we can be over the whole issue, I still could not actually take that step myself.
Until a few months ago.
You may successfully assure yourself in the strength of your slutty convictions, but as long as there continues to be a feeling of need for privacy there is also that unbearable weight in the background that will endure to erode away your soul and mental peace until you come out and confront it yourself. Wage war on it. I dub us the Lipstick Warriors.
Truth is, you have to set them free. Everyone you have ever loved, you have to give them the opportunity to reject you and show the true colors of what kind of human being they are.
Then, you have to get mad.
Privacy is a tool we use to protect ourselves from the weapon of social judgment. Think of the Belle Knox backlash as a microcosm of the slut shaming we all feel every day in countless imperceptible ways. The same slut shaming we hear in the back of our heads, quoting our sensible mothers and prim grandmothers and all of their nice, clean, wholesome friends.
Truth is, clean is a lie. Nothing is clean.
Any true expression of freedom is by definition an expression of rebellion. No matter what you do in life or what path you take, if you continue to follow your one true path, there will be those who will try to enslave you, to bring you back into the fold of doing what they think you should. Stripping away all need for privacy, armored in righteous indignation, and armed with proven fact—you must make them pay for putting that pain of social exclusion inside you. Social opinion is mimetic warfare, and judgment is the first act of aggression.
You have to bring up that righteous indignation to defend your right to your own life and strike down anyone daring to impose their limits on your life. You need to refuse to be swept down and swallowed by their bitter fountain of feelings of inadequacy. You have to refuse to be limited by the fears of others.
Telling my mom what I do for a living was one of the best things I have ever done in my life. That invisible suffocating leash of fear of revealing the truth (see: fear of social rejection; see: ostracism; see: death) has been snapped, and I have never felt freer, happier, and more unstoppable in my career—because now there truly is nothing holding me back. No limits. Although I was not perfectly fortunate to have a 100-percent supportive mother, I am rewarded with discovering that I am still loved and no less valuable to my parents as a result of my career choice. Fully keeping in mind that they have no right to make a value judgment on that in the first place, it is still a nice feeling, and one not many adult industry performers are fortunate to feel. Still, even those who have been severely hurt by social exclusion from their families as a result of their adult work will tell you that total exposure is a must and you will be better for it. As cliché as my favorite analogy is, this really is like ripping off the Band-Aid, except it’s a little more like breaking through a cocoon. You are limited and in pain in the darkness, but you have to welcome that pain and rush toward it, expand toward that bright light you see and crave so badly, push through no matter how much it hurts because you have made the decision to follow this path, and bam! You’re a butterfly.
Deal with it by knowing that they have no right to dictate the terms of your existence. Deal with it by knowing that you are perfectly allowed to erect a billboard showing you naked outside and inside, and anyone raising even an eyebrow to that needs to go through some heavy self-acceptance. Deal with it by knowing that it is already too late to do anything about it anyway. You can hope nobody close to you will find out—and they might not. After all, there are plenty of ways to cover your ass if parents suddenly announce, “Uncle Joe from Muskogee said he saw you naked on the Internet!” But beware that you are sacrificing a lifetime of true freedom, knowledge of who truly loves you, and true realization of your dreams in exchange for the immediate gratification of not rocking the boat. In the end, it is all about whether you chose what price to pay or if you let the price choose you.
I hope this helps.
THE LUXURY OF COMING OUT
Annie Sprinkle
Annie Sprinkle has worked in sex for forty-two years. In the ’70s, she was a porn star, pinup model, and prostitute. In the ’80s she was a sex-worker-rights activist, writer and photographer for sex magazines, and directed her own post-porn films. She was a pivotal player in the sex positive feminist movement and put herself through college doing burlesque. In the ’90s, Sprinkle branched out into the art world, toured theater pieces about her life in sex, and became a sex educator. In 2002, Sprinkle got a PhD and fell in love with artist Beth Stephens. Currently, they’re pioneering the ecosex movement.
Hell, I didn’t come out just once. I came out again and again, and again—multiple times. After I came out as a porn star, I came out as being into BDSM and fetish sex. Then I came out as being spiritual and into sacred sex. Then I came out as having transsexual lovers. Then I came out as a lesbian separatist, albeit briefly. Then when I came out as being heterosexual—again—some queer friends were
horrified. When I came out as being celibate, that was probably the most shocking news of all. Then I came out as bisexual. Then I came out as monogamous! That was very radical in my world. Then most recently I came out as an ecosexual! Every time I came out as something new and different, I faced people’s shock, judgments, and rejections.
When I was seventeen, my neighbor, who was like a mother to me, was on her deathbed, and she gave me the most important words of wisdom. She said, “Above all, to thine own self be true.” I took it to heart, although I could never have imagined how many different selves I would end up having to be true to. When we follow our muses, our dreams, our desires, and we stay in the truth of the moment, we can end up in some pretty unexpected situations. However, for the sake of this book, I’ll focus on my coming out as a porn star.
In 1973, forty-two years ago, when I went from being Ellen Steinberg, a shy, insecure eighteen-year-old ugly duckling to Annie Sprinkle, a sexually adventurous, glamorous porn starlet, no one was more surprised than I was! First I had to come out to myself. I had to admit to myself that I had a porn star inside me that wanted to bust out into the world. I shocked myself! However, as I was interested in filmmaking, and interested in sex, porn was something I was simply destined to do.
As a child, whenever I lied, I got caught. Plus, I noticed that lying didn’t feel good. So after just two months in the sex biz, I knew that telling the truth was my only way forward. My two brothers took it the hardest. They were protective, concerned, upset. Dad tried to be supportive but was visibly shaken. Mom got pretty emotional and was “disappointed” in me. At first, my parents were worried maybe I was addicted to drugs or that someone might be coercing me. But that was never the case. In time, they grew to trust that I had made my own choices, and for good reasons. In some cases, it can take a lot of time for family members and friends to come around to accepting who we are, or choose to be. It took a good two decades for my family to come to accept the fact that my career in sex wasn’t just a passing phase. Time can do wonders. Time is on our side.
