by Jiz Lee
Is it real?
Which one should I use?
It seems like your name depends on context. But context turns out to be complicated.
It was cut-and-dry on set, where directors and crew called me by my porn name. And it was simple enough for anyone who knew me before I started porn. But sometimes, someone would recognized me at a bar and say, vaguely, and coyly, “I know you from somewhere.” He might have seen my dick in his spam email and it blew past him, hanging around in his unconscious. Or maybe it was in person; maybe he met me at a party. Maybe he just didn’t want to admit he watched my scenes, or maybe he really didn’t recognize me at all. Maybe it was just a bullshit line.
Sometimes I would go to a coffee shop and know for a fact that fans were sitting in the café when the barista called my name. Sometimes a fan would ask me out on a date, or know one of my close friends.
If this all sounds like a little too much, let me explain: Porn performers pick their stage names for different reasons, but the most common idea is that if you create a name, you create an identity. That identity is a thin veil that’s supposed to help you avoid job discrimination in the future, prevent your family from finding out, protect you from certain overzealous viewers who may think they have a relationship with you that oversteps the boundaries you’re comfortable with, and more. You live out your porn life under a performance name and the rest of your life typically under the name you’re born with.
Implicit in this is the old, now hopeless fantasy that when you’re done with porn, you discard the name and identity and you’re born again. Putting aside the fact that many of us don’t want to be born again, choosing something “after” porn has become more difficult. The Internet has made birth names more searchable and created a permanence of visibility, not just for porn performers who have started recently, but also for ones who had, for a time, faded into obscurity on dissolving reels of VHS tape. Now their porn pasts have been resurrected.
There is no “after” porn.
Now what?
When I began to publish essays and appear more often in mainstream media, I had to decide what name to use. Initially, it seemed obvious: If I were writing about sex or pornography, I’d publish as Conner. But other essays seemed to call for Conner Habib as well. For example, I’d written an essay on the philosophy of time that I thought more people would read if it were published under Conner. I assumed—and was proven correct—that more people would be willing to engage with philosophical topics if they came from an unexpected source.
Then in late 2011, my friend and mentor, the renowned biologist Lynn Margulis, died. I had studied with her for three years at the University of Massachusetts and felt compelled to write an essay about her work. I knew many of Lynn’s friends and colleagues, as well as some of her family. Lynn herself knew about my porn career (“Habibi!” she’d often call me happily), but not everyone else did. If I published under Conner, they might miss it. So the essay appeared in an anthology under my birth name, with a contributor’s bio in the book that included both my names. It was a way to dispel any illusion that I could ever go back. There was no way to go but forward, carrying everything I’d done with me.
Increasingly, it seems as if there’s no “after” anything for anyone. Our lives are recorded. Our days are categorized by statuses, filtered photos, and updates. The world has become a big Linnaean list of identities.
Compartmentalizing different aspects of our lives has become more and more of a problem for everyone, not just porn performers. Potential employers investigate drunken Facebook photos, and there’s a pervading anxiety of making a public and YouTube-able misstep or off-colored comment.
Who are you? Let’s check the record to see.
At best, it can be confusing and annoying to juggle both identities and to keep them separate. At worst, it’s traumatic. As many porn performers know—particularly outed ones who went on to become, and be fired as, school teachers or cops or athletes—the costs of trying to cordon off certain parts of our lives can be high when someone forces our identities together for us.
There are other, subtler demands on porn performers’ identities too.
“What’s your real name?” is a demand for intimacy. Who are you really?
I’d go on dates with guys who would say things like, “I want Andre, not Conner,” as if this were a request for closeness rather than a command to dismember my personality.
I wish I had understood all this more deeply when I started appearing in porn; I might not have chosen a porn name at all. Maybe I would have seen, instead, that porn performers, who have sex publicly, are in a unique position to consider and talk about integrating private and public aspects of life.
Perhaps it would help end discrimination against and misunderstanding of porn stars if more performers expressed both their names publicly—neither name is “real” and neither is hidden; or maybe new performers don’t have to take second names at all. If there’s no getting away from being in porn, why should one name be more important than the other?
So I introduce myself to everyone as Conner now. Who cares if it’s my “legal” name; it’s real. Instead of being reborn in my birth name “after” porn, I will be born into my porn name after my birth. My porn name, anyone’s porn name, may now just be the name of a braver self, one that’s not afraid to be open.
A few years into my career, I was asked to give an autograph as Conner, but I had no idea what that signature would look like.
I scrawled out “Conner Habib” quickly across the photo and saw that the frantic symbols tilted into the same gestures as Andre Khalil. They shared the same loops and the same dot on the “i” just before the end.
It was as if the name were there all along.
DADDY ISSUES
Courtney Trouble
Having spent their entire adult life in the adult industry, Courtney Trouble is currently in graduate studies at California College of the Arts and owns the film production company, TROUBLEfilms. Their company funds the films of trans, POC, and plus-sized queer sex workers, as well as their own art and short films, which range from experimental shorts, music videos, and of course: queer porn.
Mateo Griffin is Courtney Trouble’s dad. He is a fifty-six-year-old stay-at-home dad in Seattle with his wife, Heather, and two four-year-old identical twins, Sky and Sparrow.
The funny thing about coming out is that it relies on the belief that the information you’re keeping about yourself is shameful. If you were raised to be somewhat shameless, it’s less of a one-time shock and more like a lifelong rumble. I feel like I have come out to my dad either 100 times or never at all.
Mateo: I’ve never been ashamed of your work. You’re an amazing individual and a profoundly deep artist.
Courtney: I’ve also never been ashamed about what I do. For me, coming out to you has been more of a process of wanting you to be proud of me, your child, the porn star.
M: I always get a little twinge when you say you’re a porn star because I don’t personally think of what you do as porn the way most people think of it. It seems to me that “porn” is like the word “queer,” that you are trying to change the perception of it a little. But I still have a little twinge, I guess. There’s some kind of gravity to that word.
C: There’s a world of stigma around the word “porn,” for sure. But there’s no way to deny that I’m doing porn, even if it does have artistic merit. Honestly, it makes things more complicated for a conversation about sex work and shame because when I talk about it to you, I can say, I’m making queer porn, I’m making ethical porn. I can show you articles in academic journals and Bitch magazine; I can show you the “ethical legitimacy” of my work, and that kinda gets me off the hook.
M: Off the hook?
C: I can say I’m a porn star, or a sex worker, and people can then say, “Oh, but you’re this kind of—” as long as I say I’m an ethical, feminist, sex-positive female porn director with an education and social capital. A l
ot of the people I hire as performers do not have an attached “legitimacy” to their work. There’s an imbalance of privilege there to say what I do is “good sex work” and what someone else might do is “bad sex work.”
M: When I was single and living in Tacoma, I liked porn, and I didn’t know any better. I enjoyed it and I never felt that it was wrong for me. Some sites I went to, I wouldn’t go back to again because they seemed to be awful and degrading to women.
So, if you didn’t include all those extra details . . . like if you said, “Dad, I’m a porn star and I’m making porn for Reality Kings,” I’d be like, whoa, really? That’s not uplifting of women, or even men. I would really have some concerns. I really think the context is important. I don’t think of it as you making it easier for me, lightening up or sugarcoating it, I just think it’s all in the details.
C: You’re right, some of them do feel really degrading to women and men, also just because it’s dumb, generic, and impersonal. I think that the real problem with that kind of porn is that it’s created for the lowest common denominator, right? It’s not the Sundance Channel, it’s McDonalds.
M: Well, I don’t like McDonalds, and I feel really sad and upset that people have to work at McDonalds in the conditions that they do.
C: I don’t think there’s going to be anything out there that I would ever do that would make you McDonalds-level sad. That’s the reality of my privilege as a sex worker that I’m speaking to. I have made enough opportunities for myself now to manage my own sex work in the form of porn performance, so that I don’t often have to work for other people to make ends meet. I get to make my own burger for my own burger company, and that’s an important privilege that I have that also lets me be able to be out to my family.
Like, when I “came out” to you about working at the Lusty Lady, you were like, “Oh god, you’re a stripper,” and I was like, “But wait, it’s a co-op!” I said, “Dad, I’m the madam, there’s a union!” And you were like, “As long as you’re the boss.”
M: You were able to minimize your student loans and survive going to school doing sex work, and I just have always admired how self-sufficient you are and how businesslike you are about things.
C: If I were more of a survival sex worker, like I somehow hadn’t been successful in starting my own productions and relied on taking random adult-industry jobs to make ends meet, I don’t know if you would know about that.
M: All I’ve ever wanted for you is to be happy and do what you wanna do, and I guess make money or be successful. You dove deeply into those things that you’re interested in, and found a way to make a living and make your life about it. From a parenting standpoint, that’s a huge victory for me!
C: I learned it from you, honestly. When we were growing up in Tacoma, you went to school to try to make money to raise me. You raised me alone. You did all of these things to make money but at some point, you felt bored or desperate enough to quit your safe job, start your own business, and try to support your family and yourself on something you’re more connected to creatively and spiritually. I was fifteen when you started your landscaping business, and that taught me more than anything I learned in high school. The corporate world wasn’t going to do anything for me after watching you succeed in starting your own small business. I just kind of knew my life would be one big hustle. No bosses.
M: You know, when I did that, and I came home and told you I left, you looked at me like, oh my god how are we gonna eat, how are we gonna live? You were kind of mortified for a day or two and then, you know, it was kind of a process to find what I was gonna do next.
C: Sounds kind of like a coming-out story.
M: I think it was really nice for me to all of a sudden have all this time to hang out and pay attention to you because it was kind of a crucial age for you and you were getting harassed at high school, so it was kind of nice to just do projects and hang around you.
C: Were you worried about me being queer in high school?
M: I was worried about you being bullied. I was worried that teachers would misunderstand you. There was also another thing going on with you too, you had a resistance to authority; and in this case, I don’t think you liked male authority. Not mine and definitely not male teachers.
C: No offense, but men just kind of always seem to pose a threat to my happiness and queerness, and my general feelings of freedom and safety.
I have a pretty low tolerance for jerks. As a teen, I worked in fast food, coffee shops, video rentals. In all of those situations, my bosses treated me like total crap. Expendable, disposable trash. I was always at school, always working, always doing something—so the thought of doing any kind of sex work seemed really appealing because I’d be able to make it to all of my classes and work on my own schedule, and finally get away from these pigheaded managers I suffered.
Honestly, doing phone sex seemed hilarious because I was totally talking to just about the same guys, paying me in cash and intimacy. I was totally gay, I just thought it would be funny and interesting and nobody would harass me. It was an incredibly viable option as a young person to make a living and be in school and make art. And it wasn’t degrading, it was fun.
M: I guess I’ve always trusted that you would look out for yourself. It didn’t take me long to figure out that what you were doing was fine. I’ve never called a sex line, but being a man and imaging that transaction kind of seemed to be, in terms of a power dynamic, fairly equal, and I just don’t judge stuff like that. There are a lot of lonely people out there. It seems like a good service.
C: When you’re talking about coming out, a lot of the pain around being “out” comes from parental disapproval. I honestly don’t hold a lot of pain around being a sex worker. I’ve never been hurt at my job, I’ve never been taken advantage of. The pain I do have though, honestly, is the constant hum of my mother’s disapproval. That’s affected me for life, far more than any bad boss ever has.
Not having support when you reveal something secret or personal, like sex work or gender or sexual orientation, can be far more damaging than anything else that’s gonna happen to you. Thank you for not making me fight for your approval. A lot of people I know have these life-long struggles with their parents.
M: I wouldn’t want to lose you. We’ve been so close, you know. I felt like it was just you and me as a family, and I didn’t even consider that that would be some kind of deal breaker or something that I would shun you for. It just kind of made me love you more.
C: Aw! Have you sought out any education about sex work or whatever in the past ten years? I remember the first time I saw you again after telling you I was working for the Lusty Lady, and you name-dropped Annie Sprinkle and Carol Queen.
M: I did. I mean, I’m very much kind of a research person and you had mentioned names and books in this growing field of feminist porn or queer porn. I already knew Annie Sprinkle from . . .
C: Your own research?
M: From our church!
C: She’s a good gateway for all of us porn stars coming out to our parents!
M: Yeah. And I think I saw an early, late-’90s viral video of her performance art stuff.
C: The only way an adult performer can actually BE a sex educator is through porn or art performance. We can’t actually go into a classroom and teach kids.
M: No.
C: Oh, don’t say no like, no, of course not. Of course we should! I can’t think of anyone more qualified to tell teenagers in high school about gay sex than myself. I can’t! They would never let me do it because of my stigma as a sex worker.
M: Okay, I was imagining you going into a public school classroom and teaching kids about gay sex.
C: It would be brilliant!
M: Yeah. I think that there has to be an opt-in process from the parents.
C: Well, like with any sex education. But what would this opt-in be like? “Hey, do you want your child around this porn person?” Is that what you’re saying?
M: I don�
��t think that’s the way you would approach it. When I did “Our Whole Lives” in the Unitarian Church, we sat down with the parents before we met with the teens, went through all the materials. When you do it that way, you get more participatory attitudes from the parents. But I think there’s some work that could be done. You have to educate the parents first, then it will be easier for the children.
I agree with you that sexuality should be open, and I think that children are curious about it and then forced by society to stifle it. Many people rediscover sexuality as a teen, and it can be traumatic. If it’s more of a continual flow throughout childhood, then I think it can be a lot less traumatic or explosive. When you get back to the important drama around coming out, wondering, “Will I still be loved if I reveal my true self to my parents and my friends,” that’s an incredible question to ask, and my hope is that most parents would give their kids enough space to never have to ask that question, to add to that trauma and explosiveness.
C: Are there trainings for the parents about things that they might have to hear, like things that kids come out about?
M: Our Whole Lives is a five-part series that spans kindergarten to young adult, exploring sexuality and society and spirituality and growth. It’s facilitated by open-minded parents who have gone through training. I was a trainer for all of the age groups.
C: What inspired you to get into OWL?
M: Someone in the church approached me, I think because they liked the way I raised you. OWL instructors have to be able to speak of sexuality without shame or judgment, and be able to create a safe space for teens, especially to express themselves and be curious.
C: There are few things more beloved in the UU church than the parent of a gay child.
M: So there have been some times in your life when you’ve had to tell me things, and I’m just curious about your personal process. Did you have to muster courage? Did you feel a lot of fear? Did you mistrust what my reaction would ever be?
