by Jiz Lee
It didn’t take long at all before I was searching for hardcore porn sites and poring over their model applications, counting the days until my eighteenth birthday. Although I lived in a small Alaskan city, I dreamed of going to these dungeons and porn sets and having a sexy dominatrix or dom do to me what they were doing to so many other lucky models. It was sinful, I knew, but I had never met someone who could or would do these kinds of things with me, so watching was the next best thing. But I was confident that one day, I would be one of these characters, and I would get to live out my fantasies on film. I was barely sexually active, and I already knew I wanted to be a porn star.
In 2009, I was working at a popular local coffee shop and getting ready to move into the dorms for college. The shop’s owner was a longtime friend of my mom’s, such old friends that his daughters used to babysit me, and now one of them was my manager. I’d been working for them for a couple of years when news hit our conservative town: one of my boss’s daughters was in porn, nominated for best new starlet, and was shooting for big-name hardcore companies. Her name was now Chanel Preston, and she was my new hero.
Of course, I was ecstatic. I (vaguely, through family) knew a porn star! Someone who used to give me her old Archie comics had hit it big in the adult industry! And most importantly, someone had escaped this cold, dark place and had awesome porn sex, and if she could do it, so could I!
My favorite reaction to Chanel’s career choice was definitely her sister’s. She was so excited that her sister was a porn star, and she bragged about it constantly. “She’s in an Avatar porn parody!” she proudly told me one day. “It’s even in 3D! I got a copy, I want to have her sign it!” She even entertained the idea of going back to school to be an accountant so she could help Chanel manage her newfound income.
My mom, ever the critic of other peoples’ personal matters, mentioned the matter to me a few times. I dreaded talking to her about it because I knew her politics, and I knew that as a devout Christian, she completely disapproved. Sure enough, one day as I was standing in our living room, it happened: “I feel so sorry for [Chanel’s father],” she told me bluntly, laptop across her legs. “He’s having such a hard time coming to terms with this. It’s so hard for him.” She paused and looked me in the eyes. “I don’t know what I would do if you ever did something like that.”
Oh. Whoops.
I decided not to tell my family the real reason that I moved to San Francisco at the age of twenty. I had visited the Bay Area for a New Year’s concert with a friend and gotten up to the kind of mischief you can only find in a big city. By the time I came back from my nine-day, parent-free vacation, I had gotten my first tattoo, had group sex, been to my first goth club, and had a Dom/sub couple waiting for me to move down and live with them as their partner. San Francisco had people making kinky and alternative porn all over it, and I was now really ready to join in.
My parents, knowing none of this for sure but assuming the worst, were completely against me moving away. They swore they’d only ever lend me money or send help if it was to help me move back to Alaska. I told them that I needed a change of scenery, that I’d get settled in and then maybe look at colleges. But mostly, I just wanted to run away and be kinky in an area that allowed people to do things like have a master or do porn or shave half their head without people making a huge fuss. Only my younger brother, four years my junior but the strongest and most supportive friend I’ve ever had, knew my true motives for leaving. I’d already chosen a stage name and put in modeling applications with every porn company in the Bay Area by the time I bought my one-way plane ticket.
During my initial visit to San Francisco, I had heard about FetLife, a social networking site for kinky folks. I used this to scope out the community I was soon to be a part of, and eventually also to find a place to crash when the couple I had met over New Year’s and I inevitably broke up. I connected with a few people who offered to buy me coffee and show me the local dungeons if I managed to leave Alaska. One such person was Mistress Alice of AliceInBondageLand.com, a lifestyle dominatrix who made outrageously kinky porn with her friends with a “home video” feel to them. Of all of the studios and performers I’d contacted, she had been the most encouraging: “If you can make it to a shoot,” she said, “and you’re willing to sign a model release form, we can make movies together!”
And so we did. It was only a month or two after I had landed in Oakland when I did my first porn shoot. It was like nothing I’d ever done before. I didn’t have sex with anyone, but I got to be tied up and spanked in front of a camera, among many other things. Fuck, it was fun! This was what I had been missing. I knew I’d made the right choice. I started connecting with fetish photographers and other newbie models and put my work out there as much as possible. I modeled, I cammed, I volunteered at play parties and took BDSM classes. I finally got to have the kind of experiences I had been fantasizing about since my LimeWire and fan fiction days, and I got to be a total exhibitionist while I was doing it. I was still a nobody, but that didn’t matter. I felt amazing. I felt like I was finally who I was meant to be. My new Facebook profile, which I had made upon moving and only added a select group of people to, was covered in news of my wild exploits and bemused but encouraging comments from my friends back home.
But apparently I was too out there for some people, or rather, too out to some people. Depression hit me hard toward the end of my first year in the Bay, and after a series of disappointments in my personal life and my modeling career, I was feeling low. I had no reliable income, having just parted ways with a former client who had been paying me to do kinky Skype shows. Due to another job falling through, I had become dependent on the money I made from him. Having always been the type to wear my heart on my sleeve, and having gotten used to being able to say whatever I wanted, I caved and shared a bit too much about how unstable my living situation and mental health had become. I didn’t realize when I asked my Facebook feed for advice and moral support that some people back home were interpreting everything in a different way. A girl I had worked with at the coffee shop was uncomfortable with my porn career and incorrectly surmised that it was the direct and only source of my depression. Out of what I can only assume were good intentions, she showed my profile and statuses to her mother, who worked with my mother.
Long, painful, how-could-you-do-this-to-yourself (and how-could-you-do-this-to-me) emails and phone conversations from my mom came first. She told me she would not support me in any way as long as I continued these degrading activities, and was absolutely outraged. I called my younger brother, crying, desperate for emotional support. He told me what I had been afraid of hearing: Mom already told Dad.
Before I could attempt any kind of damage control, my mom had confronted my father and told him everything. Well, sort of everything. She’d added a few dramatic twists in her retelling. “She’s doing torture porn,” she told him, in front of my seventeen-year-old brother. “She has a phone sex ad and she’s a hooker or something, and there are naked pictures of her all over the Internet, and she’s been lying about everything she does.” My brother told me that our dad had looked upset, and uncomfortable, like he didn’t really want to hear any of it. But my mom gave him an earful before he and my brother left.
The phone conversation with my dad was terse, short, and extremely uncomfortable for both of us. I called him, knowing sooner was better than later and wanting to set the record straight if at all possible. He told me that my mom had found “things” about me online and I admitted to doing “some nude modeling.” He told me my mom had found a Craigslist ad where I was advertising some kind of sex for money deal, which was completely false. If I was going to put up any kind of ad, I told him indignantly, Craigslist stopped being the place for that years ago and was very unsafe. He told me he didn’t approve of whatever I was doing, that I needed to realize that all future employers were going to find out about any adult industry work I did (to which I replied that I am neither an aspiring tea
cher nor government employee), and that my mom had every right to be angry with me. She would come around after a while, he reminded me, but I really should stop doing “that stuff.” The offer still stood, however, for a free plane ticket home to Alaska, any time I needed it, no questions asked.
And then, sex workers came to my rescue. After posting a feeble, “Help, I’m depressed and starving, maybe I should just move away” online, I got an overwhelming amount of responses. We want you here, they said. San Francisco is tough, but you must keep going because you came here for a reason and you belong here. Friends checked in on me and helped me look for jobs. Alice, who had become like a big sister to me, got us a paid shoot and gave me her share, telling me that I was her “Kickstarter of the month.” An eighteen-year-old escort I had only known through Tumblr sent me $100 for rent and invited me to come watch cartoons with her at her sugar daddy’s apartment. Kitty Stryker drove to my house with a huge bowl of soup and a jug of orange juice. A friend I’d met in the scene and done photo shoots with asked her boyfriend to get me a job at my favorite night club. I also, with some prodding, went with one of my web-camming friends to audition as a dancer at a peep show called the Lusty Lady. By my one-year Bay-versary, I had two fun, quirky part-time jobs where I got to be with my kind of people and keep modeling. The people of the adult industry had saved me. I had never felt such love and support from a community like that before. I was so touched.
Eventually, my mom called me again, and our make-up talk was both frustrating and relieving.
“I hate to ask this, but are you still doing that stuff for money?”
“Do you really want to know?”
“No.”
“Then no, I guess I’m not.”
And then we were friends again.
Since that summer, there have been good times and bad in regards to my relationships with my family. We’re still figuring each other out, I’ve realized, and while we share blood we have very little else in common. I’m polyamorous, I’m genderfluid, I’m a sex worker, and I’m kinky. They’ve never had to deal with any of that. It started as a “don’t ask, don’t tell” situation, but we’re learning how to talk about my life without really talking about it. My mom even shocked me once recently, when she cracked a good-natured joke alluding to one of my fetish videos.
I’m not an AVN-award-nominated starlet, but I have had some incredible experiences thanks to the porn industry. One summer, Alice made me a human pride flag by duct-taping my entire body to the iconic Castro flagpole during Pride Week. That was the video my mom apparently found amusing. I’ve led naked men around Folsom Street Fair on cock leashes. I’ve had a clown nose pulled out of my vagina (we actually shoved it up there and then pulled it out on stage) for a live sex show performance. Once, I was paid $200 to shave a friend’s eyebrows off. I was a booth babe for a cosplay pinup site with a couple of friends last summer; and at a charity poker tournament where all of the players were men in “sissy” outfits and chastity devices, I coined the term “punch-fucking” during the winner’s on-camera dominatrix gangbang.
Last summer, I even launched my own porn site called Petplay Palace, which is based around my first and favorite fetish, pet play. (Side note: The name of my website is a play off the pet store my dad and stepmom ran when I was growing up. I couldn’t resist the personal joke, and the name was too catchy to not use. I still haven’t heard how they feel about it.) I crowdfunded the launch, and thanks to the collaborative efforts of basically every friend I’ve made since I moved, it was a success. I now have found my dream job, although I haven’t reached a point where I’m getting paid for it. I’m told that most triple-X companies go under in less than a year, so if you’re reading this after July 2015 and I still have a website, we’ve made it over the hump! The content is genuine and the experiences are real, and I’m making exactly the porn I always wanted to see. We won Best New Bondage Website in the Bondage Awards last year, which was based on a fan vote. Fan vote. I have fans. Three years into modeling and it still blows me away that people are watching and enjoying what I do. Getting feedback from people who believe in what I do and are happy to see ethical fetish porn being created reminds me of why I keep going on this weird, often uphill journey. I’m truly living my dream.
I tend to use my experience of being outed as a cautionary tale for people who are considering getting into the industry. I wasn’t trying very hard to keep my persona a secret, it’s true; but porn does get leaked, people do gossip, and as I always tell new models, if you don’t out yourself, someone will do it for you. I don’t recommend that people with a lot to lose get into the adult industry. If your family could be torn apart, if your spouse could lose their job, if you’re doing it to pay for a childhood education degree, consider the long-term impact of your choices carefully. If you do out yourself, do it as safely as possible. I moved to California to find out who I was and to be able to wear it proudly. I have immense privilege in being able to do so now. Here, people respect my gender pronouns (they/them, folks, it isn’t rocket science), I hang out in cafés where I can edit porn at my table without bothering anyone, and even my teachers at beauty school make jokes about my “double life” as a dominatrix porn director. I have a huge network of friends and supporters who have become my big, queer, scantily-clad family. And my blood family, although far away, confused, and mostly unable to relate, are trying really, really hard to understand me. I live in a bubble where I am reasonably well-protected from mainstream society’s stigma against sex work.
Even in the hardest of times, I’ve never regretted being a professional naked person, and I love and respect myself more than I ever had before. I have confidence now that I never knew was possible. I’ve learned a lot of valuable skills and made wonderful friends. There are so many beautiful, funny, sexy moments in this world that you would never experience anywhere else. My life is positively absurd, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
I ended up running into Chanel Preston again in the model’s shower room at Kink.com’s Armory Studios a while back. I had just finished a cam show and she’d just finished a shoot. We recognized each other, laughed, and chatted while we casually washed off lube and body fluids. Her dad heard from my mom that I was also doing porn now, she said. How crazy, we both ended up here! We dried off and said goodbye, then tweeted each other.
“I used to babysit @DenaliWinter and now we both have sex for a living. Weird? More like awesome.”
Couldn’t have said it better myself.
COMING OUT AGAIN (AND AGAIN)
Drew DeVeaux
Drew DeVeaux is a queer-identified trans woman who works as a part-time porn star/nurse/epidemiologist/educator and activist in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. She is recognized as a boundary breaker and game changer for trans women in the porn industry. Her films have been nominated for various awards, and she was a past winner of the Heartthrob of the Year at the Feminist Porn Awards. As a trans activist, Drew coined the terms “cisnormativity” and the “cotton ceiling” (the systemic exclusion of trans folks from everyone’s spheres of desire, i.e., whom we find attractive). Drew is a sci-fi geek and has a dream to film the first-ever porn scene in space.
I could be in so many closets. A closet within a walk-in closet in a closet-sized apartment. Except I learned a long time ago that closets, instead of protecting us, are more likely to suffocate us and leave us vulnerable. As a trans woman (who is post-op), as a queer woman, as a porn star, as a disabled woman, there are a lot of parts of my identity that I’ve had to come out about, that I’ve had to make decisions about when to disclose, to whom, and how. When you have to come out as many times as I have, coming out as a porn star isn’t as big a deal as you might think.
I’m a nurse. And I’m also an actress, including my work in erotic films—that is, porn. My life is full of seeming contradictions in this way. I also was a high school dropout and I also went to graduate school. I have not only one but three university degrees. I’ve been a modern
dancer and I’ve been an exotic dancer. Being a nurse and a porn star have both been important work that I’ve enjoyed immensely. And while they seem completely opposed to one another, both are important and respond to important issues that I’ve identified in the social world we all live in. In both forms of work, I’ve had to make important decisions related to disclosure, not only of my previous work history but disclosure of my health, of being a queer woman, of being a trans woman. I know that I’m a skilled health professional and a talented performer. I’m damn good at both my jobs. I think that I’m good at what I do, not in spite of all that I’ve been through, but rather because of the strength and clarity of purpose I’ve fostered when deciding to transition, or deciding to make porn, or deciding to fulfill my dream of becoming a health professional.
So when I talk about “coming out,” it’s not a simple story of recounting a time when I told just one thing to someone. Coming out is an ongoing process. I come out about different things, at different times, to different people, and for different reasons. In writing these words I am, in essence, coming out to you, the reader, in a way that doesn’t really happen in my everyday life. No one really knows everything about me. And even though I’m very open about things on social media, it is another thing to simply “truth dump” as I’ve done in the start of this chapter. It’s rather a lot to handle, and generally, strategically speaking, it’s not the best idea to just throw all that information out there at first encounter. The ideas that others have about women who work in porn, or about trans women (especially a trans woman who has worked in porn) make it potentially dangerous to come out without others first knowing me in my entirety, as an individual and not as a caricature or stereotype, and without knowing my reasons for making porn, in particular. That takes time, and that takes an open mind on the part of those to whom I’m coming out—open so they can question and tear down their ideas about what my being “queer,” or “trans,” or “disabled,” or a “porn star” really means for those whom I perform my work as a nurse, how I will be a sibling, or friend, or lover.
