by Jiz Lee
I guess you could say that the Internet landed me on Miss Deborah’s sofa. But the Internet has also made me who I am today, so I don’t blame Vint Cerf.
It was the Internet that led me to Spanking Teen Jessica.
That night, I masturbated, just like I did every night. But I didn’t picture the pretty blond cocks from the computer screen. I went back to my favorite fantasy, a variation on a theme, a story of spanking. Just like I did every night.
Then I got an idea.
The next time my parents left me home alone, I went online. Typed eight simple letters into the search bar: spanking.
I chose the first link. I made it through all of three seconds of silent video before the explosion of arousal and shame. And orgasm.
So it became a game. Every time I was alone, I would log on. Each time, I lasted a little longer, watching more and more. But, mixed in with the arousal, there was always this underlying panic someone would catch me, an underlying shame. I knew what I was doing was Wrong.
I found SpankingTeenJessica.com pretty quickly. I started coming back because of all the previews, and as I got bolder, I started clicking around. I found a bio.
The bio was long, but I devoured every word. I was hungry, starving for someone like me. And I had finally found her.
I wasn’t alone.
Jessica said she started making porn because she wanted to fulfill her fantasies.
I had another idea.
It was finals week, seventh grade. At my magnet school in the ghetto, during finals week, we weren’t allowed to bring backpacks to school. They were worried about cheating, or guns, or something in between that I also didn’t concern myself with.
I didn’t care. I wasn’t allowed backpacks in elementary school either, and carrying around my fifth-grade transparent purple folder was a way to cling to a part of my youth that I desperately missed.
In science, I sat next to my best friend, Erika. And Jessica had inspired me. In her story, she told her best friend about her deep dark secret, and her best friend spanked her. So I printed out the bio, and brought it to school with me in my purple transparent folder.
Erika laughed at me. And then told way too many people about my Deep Dark Secret.
The school year was over, and I brought the bio home in my purple transparent folder. I set it down on the kitchen counter, where I always put my school stuff.
And then I went away to summer camp.
“Mom wants to talk to you,” Dad said, as I was sitting in my room. “She’ll be up in a second.”
As soon as she walked through the door, I saw the purple folder in her hand. And I knew.
My mom sat down on the bed next to me. I didn’t stay long. The clouds of Absolutely Excruciating Embarrassment stormed in and became a Category 5 hurricane.
I spent the entire rest of the day hiding under my bed.
I learned a hard lesson about the necessity of clearing one’s browser history that day.
So, off to therapy I went. My mother, my feminist, abused-as-a-child mother, couldn’t fathom why her twelve-year-old daughter wanted to be hurt. In an act of I-don’t-know-what-the-fuck-else-to-do, she drove me to Miss Deborah.
Miss Deborah wasn’t wrong, you know. Different people are into different things. The thunder was just too loud for me to hear it.
Andrew and I were hunting for shark’s teeth. That’s what we called it: hunting. Like the fossils had to be chased down and killed before we could put them in our Tupperware.
I taught him how to do it. The shark’s teeth creek was a sacred childhood place to me. Andrew was the only one I’ve ever taken there. He was a much better best friend than Erika ever was.
I was twenty. I hadn’t had a boyfriend. I had my first awful kiss, but second base is as far as I’d gotten with a guy. I hadn’t watched another single second of porn. My Deep Dark Secret had become my Deepest Darkest Secret.
Andrew thought that I lost my virginity at sixteen. And was vanilla.
We were horny college students. All we did at the creek is talk about sex.
“What’s the one thing that turns you on the most?”
I froze as the clouds rolled in. Andrew noticed.
“What?” he playfully teased. “You’ve never blushed before. Now you have to tell me.”
He was right. The lies usually came so easily.
“I . . . I like to be hit.” It was barely audible.
“You mean, like spanking?”
“Yes. Like . . . spanking.” It was almost impossible to say the word.
“Oh, that’s not that crazy,” he smiled. “Mine is that I want to have a threesome.”
My Deepest Darkest Secret came out of its cave, and instead of the villagers seeing a fire-breathing dragon and running away in terror, they saw a harmless little lizard, like the kind that we used to catch in elementary school. Everything was about to change.
Professor Calvert brought DVDs to class with him today. He teaches First Amendment Law. I’m not even supposed to be in this class. I was supposed to be in Telecom Law, which was supposed to be absolutely awful, but it was full, and the college gave me credit for that, from this.
Thank you, College of Journalism and Communications. Thank you.
Professor Calvert passes the DVDs around. They are porn; but of course they are.
All we’ve learned about in this class was porn. That’s what Professor Calvert studies. Free speech. Free expression. Porn.
This is the first porn I’ve seen since I was twelve.
It doesn’t feel like shame anymore.
See, we’ve already learned that porn is a perfectly legal expression of one’s First Amendment rights. Porn is not Wrong, as long as you’re over eighteen.
I learned how much girls get paid for double penetration at Kink.com that day. I learned that I’m not exactly sure what double penetration is.
And I learned from Professor Calvert that there is absolutely nothing wrong with making porn.
The sunbeams started to break through the thunderheads.
I had this ritual. The same every night: Kink.com previews until I was really close, Niko’s videos until I came.
Every night, Niko’s video ended with a “for a good time, call” and an email address.
My twenty-first birthday was fast approaching. I wasn’t having any of the oh-fuck-I’m-almost-twenty-one-and-I-haven’t-had-a-boyfriend-yet, but at the same time, it was my twenty-first. It’s the night that most kids get legally trashed for the first time. I wasn’t interested in getting legally trashed, but I still wanted it to be special.
I had been thinking about it for a week or so. What can I give myself for my birthday? What’s the one thing I want more than anything else in the entire world? Then one night, it came to me, post-self-coitus, 2:00 a.m., as Niko’s lower third ran across the screen.
Oh. I know.
I composed a message that sat in my drafts folder for almost a week.
I hit send.
The next time we went hunting, I told Andrew about Niko and about my plan. In my excitement of just needing to tell someone, anyone, I accidently established a safe call with the only person I could tell.
I wasn’t worried about safety. My deduction: Jessica made porn to explore her fantasies in a safe way; Niko makes porn; thus, Niko must be safe.
Andrew was genuinely supportive. For the first time, instead of the storm, the sky was blue.
I had to stop to pee three times during the half hour drive to the truck stop.
He was shorter than me, and his truck smelled like Axe.
I was there three hours longer than we had planned.
It was the first time I ever hugged someone without feeling awkward.
I thought I was gonna get it out of my system.
I was wrong.
I skipped school the next day, the day of my birthday. Actually, I drove in, dropped of my zoology homework, and drove back home.
My body didn’t know how to process the traum
a it had received, however sexual, however much I loved it. I dry-heaved in the parking lot of the blood bank, and a gardener asked me if I was alright.
Boy, was I alright.
I wrote in my journal that afternoon. I wrote down every little detail, so afraid to forget. At the end of my entry, I apologized to my mom. I apologized for staying out late. I apologized for enjoying it way more than I thought I would. The lightning flashed. Terrified. Of disgust, of hate.
The video was up a few days later. I wanted him to film it. I wanted the tape for me, as a way to remember the session. The time I got my spanking. It was so romantic.
I thought I was gonna get it out of my system, remember?
All you can see is my twenty-year-old, pale, not nearly as nice as it is now, ass. I made sure he didn’t record my face or my tattoo. I figured it would be the only video of me ever, but just in case, I wanted to ensure no one would ever recognize me.
Still though, you could say, in a very loose sense of the phrase—it’s my first porno.
“You should really be a model,” Lew said.
Using my same “porn is safe” deduction, I’m at Lew Ruben’s house, getting tied up for the first time. I’m lucky. A bondage porn god lives only two hours away, and he actually wants to tie me, of all people, up.
“But I can’t. I’m not tall enough,” I said.
Or pretty enough, I thought.
Lew disagreed with both opinions.
He set up a glamour shoot for me to start building a portfolio. I decided it would be okay to show my face if I wasn’t naked.
Remember that other idea I had, that one that had been hiding in the back corner of the dungeon in my mind, behind the St. Andrew’s cross, that one I got from Jessica. Well, it was still there.
Make porn, it whispered, every time a grown-up asked me what I wanted to do when I grew up.
Make porn, it screamed now. Make porn.
My mom was an absolute wreck. Holding my journal, the same way she held the purple folder eleven years ago, she wanted to talk.
I had been acting differently, going out more; moms always know when you’re lying. She had read the last thing I had written, about my first time with Niko, the one I wrote on my birthday many months ago but didn’t date.
She wanted to know why.
The sun was shining too bright now to let the clouds roll back in. I didn’t hide under the bed.
I sat there and told my parents about my deep dark secret, no longer so darkest and deepest. I told her I knew I was unsafe when I met Niko. I told her about Lew, about how he was mentoring me. I told her about the shoots I had been doing. I told her about how I had just started to feel pretty for the first time in my life.
She sat there and listened. She didn’t sweep me away to therapy. She tried her best to understand.
The art—that’s easy.
The masochism—that one’s a bit harder.
I’m graduating from college, magna cum laude; across the stage, smiling parents somewhere in the massive auditorium.
And in the past year, I’ve travelled all over the country, Canada, Costa Rica, as a fetish model. I have a spotless reputation, amazing new friends, and strangers on the Internet think I’m beautiful.
I’m happy.
I have no idea what to do with my degree.
My little idea, no longer whispering from the corner, but standing in the doorway . . . it started speaking again.
Porn. Make. Some. Goddamn. Porn.
And that’s how I ended up on the phone with adult super-agent Mark Spiegler.
Sitting in the hot tub in our backyard, steam rising in the humid summer air, I’d just gotten back from a trip to Los Angeles.
This time, it was my turn to say I wanted to talk. There would be no finding out after the fact. My mom fidgeted in the hot water, nervous as I was when she said those words to me.
“I haven’t done anything yet, I promise.”
I had already met Mark Spiegler, already been wined and dined and wooed by Mark Spiegler, and I’d already almost made up my mind.
“But I’m thinking about it.”
One flash of lightning, of fear. Not of hatred, not this time, but of being a terrible disappointment.
“I just want you to be safe,” she said.
My parents paid my first three months’ rent when I moved out to Los Angeles.
When my dad’s side of the family found out what I do, my mom stood up for me.
My kink used to be my Deepest Darkest secret, and now it is an integrated part of my everyday life.
It’s really nice not to have secrets.
MY SECOND COMING OUT
Chelsea Poe
Chelsea Poe is a writer, director, porn performer, and trans activist from Grand Rapids, Michigan, currently residing in Oakland, California. She has been an outspoken advocate for better representation of trans women within pornography. In October of 2014, her first full-length feature, Fucking Mystic, premiered at the Berlin Porn Film Festival and garnered her multiple AVN and Transgender Erotica Awards nominations. She launched a petition in November of 2014, calling for mainstream trans porn sites run by non-trans owners to stop the use of the term “shemale” within their marketing. The petition received over 1,600 signatures. Her website is ChelseaPoe.com.
My story of coming out as a sex worker is a bit strange and a bit last minute. It was the night before I was flying out to California for the first time, and I was counting on my mom for a ride.
I came up with some really thinly veiled story of why I was going to San Francisco. My mom confronted me on it and asked, “What are you really doing in California?” So I decided to come clean and told her I was planning on doing feminist porn. Her response was, “Everyone who does porn is into drugs, and I don’t want to see you go down that road. Why would you put yourself in such a dangerous position?”
I saw Jiz Lee speak at a college near where I grew up, and while watching their “Dirty 30 Orgy” scene, I knew queer porn was for me, and I knew this wouldn’t be an easy thing to explain to my Midwestern family. I wanted to be able to show my sexuality and my story of being a queer trans woman. The next day, after I came out about doing porn, my mom drove me the long forty-five-minute drive to the airport with nearly no talking until she broke down in tears and made me promise her I would be safe. I made her that promise, but getting onto the airplane everything went through my mind: What if I get to the set and freeze up and can’t do anything? What if all the stereotypes about porn are real and there are drugs everywhere? Are they going to force me to do something that I don’t want to do?
My first shoot was a huge moment of my life. I never felt anything that so fulfilled everything I wanted out of it—showing my gender in a positive way, being able to perform, being able to live out my fantasies—and more importantly, it made me proud about being queer. I came home and my mom kind of backed off about it for a while. Then I told her I was planning on moving to the Bay Area within six months. After I moved, she commented on how I seemed happy and surrounded by a large group of close friends for the first time. She said, “I don’t like the idea of you doing porn, but I can see it makes you extremely happy, so I support you.”
The longer I was in porn, the more activism became a part of my life, and I was traveling all over the country. The activism had turned into writing and speaking gigs that were featured on mainstream media sites that my mom actually stumbled upon and saw that there was something more to this for me than just money or having sex.
In October 2014, I became the first-ever trans woman to be in God’s Girls Purgatory, a popular alt-porn site where the community’s network votes on which young woman will be the newest addition to the site’s gallery. The morning of the first day, I got a phone call from my mom. She said something I never really had anyone express to me since I was over the age of ten: “I’m extremely proud of what you’re doing, not only for you, but for what it can mean to your community. I miss you so much with you bein
g across the country, but I am so happy to see you succeed to truly make a difference.” I broke down in tears upon hearing this, because I never really thought she would understand what I do and why I do it.
My relationship with my mom isn’t perfect and we still struggle at times, but the fact that she respects what I do is so important. Doing porn is one of the most important things in my life, and I know it will be for a very long time. I know I am very blessed to be in a place right now where I can talk openly about my job with my mom and to not have some secret part of my life. After feeling that way for so long before coming out as trans, queer, and a sex worker, I hope it goes to show that people can evolve after they have sex workers in their lives. Sex workers are some of the most highly stigmatized people, and I really think when people can relate real people to being sex workers, that stigma will slowly go away and create a more positive space for sex workers.
ONLY SILENCE
Chris Lowrance
As a freelance designer and web developer, Chris Lowrance has worked behind the scenes on numerous queer and feminist porn sites, including the original HeavenlySpire.com, PinkLabel.tv, and CrashPadSeries.com. Now web manager at veteran queer porn studio Pink & White Productions, Chris searches for practical solutions at the intersection of ethics, sex work, and technology.
The name I was given by my parents at birth, recognized by the government, and appearing next to a photo of my face on social media is also the name that appears in the opening credits of a long-running queer porn series. It’s the name at the bottom of my company email there, as well as the name that appeared in the 2014 Feminist Porn Conference’s schedule of speakers. I’ve made a career out of building and managing websites for pornographers and sex workers, and I’ve done it under my legal name.
It’s an incredible privilege, being able to use a single name like this. It’s one most of my friends in the industry do not have, especially not if they’ve performed in front of the camera.
A performer doesn’t adopt a stage name out of shame for what they do. Rather, a stage name is a necessary defense against society’s shaming of them, a shield not only against harassment, stalking, or loss of privacy but also the possibility of losing a job outside of porn, custody of their children, or even their life.
