Coming Out Like a Porn Star

by Jiz Lee

  I never set out to be a “porn star,” but I wholeheartedly admit to being one now. With the help of allies in the director chair, I’ve broken down some significant barriers and helped redefine what “trans women porn,” or more accurately, what “trans women in porn” means as we move forward. I’m so proud of my work and recognize it to be so important that I feel no shame or carry no fear about it ever coming back to haunt me, whatever well-intentioned friends or colleagues may say.

  Porn is the medium through which sexual culture is both reflected and reshaped. It can be educative, transgressive, and just really fucking impressive. I’ve shot with cis men and women, genderqueer folks, trans men and women; with my porn work, I’ve helped to reshape the place of trans women in the broader queer community and helped to show that there is space for full inclusion of trans women—not just in porn, but in all aspects of queer and straight sexualities. I’ve done as much work, if not more, than Rebecca has accomplished giving talks, leading workshops, or writing journal articles.

  In a lot of ways, my whole porn career has been about coming out—coming out and showing that post-op trans women exist; that queer trans women exist, that switchy genderfucking trans women exist; that trans women can cross over into queer porn and mainstream cis porn; that we’re sexy and smart and pervy and vanilla. I’m excited to see other trans women come out and show us all who they are and how they love to fuck.

  LIKE GETTING KICKED IN THE GUT

  D. R.

  D. R. has requested to submit this essay in anonymity.

  It was like getting kicked in the gut and then being dipped in a cold bath of fear.

  On the other end of the phone, a good friend and fellow performer was telling me in a frantic tone that there was a website that had just gone up that listed over 15,000 performer’s real names, as well as their personal details: addresses, names of family members, children . . .

  I was sitting on the couch as the sound of her voice went in and out in my hearing, terrified thoughts short-circuiting my brain: What? That can’t possibly be real. Holy shit, I wonder if my name is on there too. She went on to say something about how the people that created the website got the information, shrieking something about “leak” and “medical records.”

  I was about a year into dating an amazing new person. He and I had been friends for years and had transitioned our relationship into something wonderful and nurturing. He darted out from the blur of my peripheral vision to half catch me as I tried to stand up and couldn’t quite manage it before losing my legs at the weak knees. I managed to garble out, “Where is your computer?” and tell my friend thank you and that I would try and call her back and that I was sorry, but I couldn’t get the words out of my scared mouth to tell my boyfriend why I was so suddenly messed up. I grabbed the computer, typed one key at a time, wishing with each tap: Not me, not me, not me, not me, please, not me, not me. A few moments later, there it was. My porn name and my given name. On a website that called me a whore and a hooker. A website that exposed over 15,000 men and women. A website that wanted to hurt. A website that wanted me to feel exactly what I was feeling in that moment.

  Many people think that porn stars and adult performers pick names because it’s a fun thing to do. They think that we pick names to reinvent ourselves. That we pick new names to hide and because we are ashamed. Are all those thoughts true? Sure. For every choice there are a thousand reasons, and stereotypes come from a first choice made by one person at some point. But while those reasons might be true, what is also true is that new names protect us. From stalkers, from people that think they get to find us and hurt us and ruin our lives because we choose to share our sexuality publicly and onscreen. New names protect those we care about from suffering the consequences inflicted on them by a world that thinks our friends, family, and children should be punished because we have sex on camera. New names allow us a tiny modicum of freedom from the oppression of judgment, shaming, hatred, and retribution brought on by a world that thinks that what we do is wrong and that we don’t deserve the same kind of privacy and respect as everyone else. New names give us a way to feel okay for even just a few hours, to love what we do and not have to live in abject terror that that enjoyment, those choices, those scenes, these movies will get us killed, get our parents fired from their jobs and our children kicked out of school.

  And for some people, new names give them a chance to try something new, try it only once, decide it’s not for them, and move seamlessly on to other jobs. It was these people the website punished the most.

  Still sitting on the couch, still completely chilled with a fear that was getting steadily worse as I read more and more pages of the website, I began to discover an even sadder truth to which my friend had referred on the phone: The content for the site, all the names and addresses and personal details had been leaked by someone at our very own performer-testing resource. At that time, testing was maintained by a single organization that standardized the process and worked to keep the industry well-informed and healthy. It had been someone from inside that had passed along all our information. This was how one-time performers were on the list. People whose scenes may have disappeared into the ether of obscurity were now part of something much bigger than their singular choice.

  Now, at this point you either know the site of which I speak, or you really, really want to know. Either way, you won’t catch me writing its name here. You won’t catch me giving the wretched, homophobic, racist, abusive man who created it any more publicity than he has already, unfortunately, received. You won’t catch me telling you what it’s called so you can run to your laptop and Google it, moving it up the page stats and closer to something that people care about and want to feed again. And in your curiosity, you might be saying, “I still don’t understand why it’s so bad, isn’t it better to be out and not ashamed?” It’s a question many people have asked me. And to you and to them I say, imagine something you do that you know people wouldn’t understand. Imagine having to tell them about it. Now imagine someone else telling everyone about it on the World Wide Web with a picture of you next to it. Imagine the feeling of coming out about it, in your own time, in your own ways, crafting a hopeful privacy for yourself that you can figure out when the time is right. Now imagine having none of that. What are we entitled to as far as privacy? Because we perform on camera, do we get none? Because we bare our bodies, are we owed nothing of respect and space and boundaries? Regardless of your politics, your religion, consider the shreds of control you hold onto when you make choices every day. With the tap of a computer key, that can all vanish. This is being outed in the modern world.

  It’s been years since that day on that long, green couch. I can write about this now with only the smallest pit of bile in my stomach. Many legal battles have been fought over the website and its resulting exposures. That healthcare foundation is gone and others, hopefully safer ones, have risen in its place. Jobs have been lost, families have been torn up and shifted around, and people have dealt with the fallout and found ways to move on. There is no happy ending here.

  I eventually put down the computer, allowed the fear to turn into wracking sobs and then decided that I would give it no more of my energy. This is the first time I have written about it. You are the first people who have gotten to hear my story of that day, my thoughts about what was done to us. But even after all this time, healing and growing and getting over it, one thing has not changed.

  You still do not get to know my real name.

  WHAT’S IN A NAME?

  Edward Lapple

  Edward Lapple has worked as a producer/director/editor and every other production job over a forty-five-year career. He worked on over 200 adult films for a host of companies. In the straight world, he won six Emmys and numerous other awards while working for ABC, NBC, KCAL, KCOP, ET, PBS, Prime Ticket, Disney, ESPN, and a slew of advertising agencies. Infomercials he has worked on have grossed over $50m and he conducted eBay’s most viewed auction, se
lling the town of Bridgeville for $1.75m, with 1.3 million page hits. He is semiretired, living in Humboldt County, California, and writing for BareFootMusicNews.com.

  I spent about seven years in the adult video business. I’m speaking about seven years as a professional, getting paid to do it. I have no tally of the time I spent during my high school years, sneaking into dark theaters on self-authorized field trips, attempting to gain an education into the taboo subject of sex. Sometimes you just have to take the initiative because you’re growing up in the early ’60s and your mommy won’t tell, your daddy won’t tell, your religious school sure as hell wouldn’t tell, not to mention that MTV and the Internet were a quarter of a century away in some place called the future. I needed to get educated so I wouldn’t look like an idiot the first time I tried to do it. I was able to check out my dad’s Playboys, but they were just still pictures; there were no how-to sections. So I admit that I got my Sex Education 101 from underage visits to X-rated theaters. When I was up late at night, I’d watch all-night movies on television, and there was this one cowboy car dealer that ruled the all-night airwaves. Wait, what does he have to do with this? Well, fifteen years later, I found myself directing his commercials and directing those kinds of movies. Who knew?

  I spent those seven years behind the camera rather than in front of it. Sure, I had the standard male fantasies that when the urgent cry of “Stunt cock!” came from the set, I could rip away my Clark Kent disguise and swagger out onto the set like Godzilla in a rapacious mood, dragging my schlong along; however, unfortunately, that particular mental fable just had to remain in Fantasyland, the reason being that while my folks did endow me with the funds to obtain a college degree, my physical endowment was more wanting than wanton. I am certain that even Howard Stern would not be in awe of this member. I understand that the male segment of the human race has succeeded in deluding the female portion that three inches is actually a foot, but cameras do not lie (although they may fib a bit). When the standard comparative size device of a United States quarter is placed in the shot and Washington’s head exceeds the altitude of your own phallic monument, let’s just say that you are not going to be chopping down many cherry trees.

  So now you know why I remained with my trusty camera, but there was still the problem of my name. Each of these one-day wonders that we shot had credits on it when it was released to the public, and people who were associated with adult films could very well be shunned by the industry where I made the other half of my living. Not to mention by their unions, euphemistically called “craft guilds,” those blood-sucking vampires would rain on you like a ton of bricks if they thought you were working a nonunion gig and I never worked an adult flick that was a union signatory. So crew names on credits were invariably pseudonyms. Heck, my weekdays had moved up from car commercials to where I was a director/editor for the Walt Disney company, and an association with productions bearing titles like Days of Our Wives, Backside to the Future, Crocodile Blondie, Funky Brewster, and The Beverly Thrillbillies, to name but a few, would have given that adorable rodent mascot of my overlords a coronary which could only achieve resuscitation by the termination of my employment. Oh, he may appear to be soliciting laughs in those lovable cartoons, but trust me, that little rat ain’t got no sense of humor.

  Early in my career, I had worked at a PBS station with a Mormon program director—half of the people in broadcasting are either Mormons or hippies—and he made the mistake of telling me that if he ever worked as a DJ, he would use the name Eddie Lawrence; since the initials were the same as my real name, when I had to come up with a nom de plume, in a hurry I quickly appropriated Larry’s invention for his alter ego and embraced it as my own. He never worked as a DJ, so he never missed it. That’s the story behind how the name “Eddie Lawrence” turned up on a couple hundred porns. As an aside, I must tell you that when you take a hot date to an adult motel, the kind that you rent by the hour, and you switch on the TV in the room, which normally has a couple of porn channels, and the show that comes on is one that you made, there is nothing erotic about it at all.

  Many of the crew dogs on these shoots had straight gigs during the week, so their credited names were changed to protect the guilty. One of the great DPs of this business (get your mind out of the gutter, DP is director of photography, not double penetration) was named Dink R., but I always used the credit “Sucof Kind” for him, which spelled backwards is “Focus Dink [sic].” The man who lays claim to having directed the first triple-X-rated video and probably a thousand more, Roy K., used his real name about half of the time for his directing credit, but when he was also the writer, he was credited as “Hugh Guesedit.” I had a young camera operator whose father was a billionaire, and this kid was already worth millions but he wanted to run a camera because he thought it would be “hot.” Actually, shooting one of these shows is similar to covering wrestling matches for ESPN, except they are shot in living rooms and bedrooms and there is no stripe-shirted referee nor time limits or a bell. Also, you have to dodge two C-light operators, and the WWF has yet to add those to their crews. This fellow’s camera credit was “I. Cansee.” I had one pain-in-the-back-end performer whose real name will not be mentioned. He gave me a really hard time on the set and took five hours to finish his scene. When the flick came out, his credit read “A. Hole-e.” I know, sometimes I can be a bitch.

  So many performers used different names, but that wasn’t really to attempt to conceal their participation in the biz. I mean when your face, among other parts, is up on the screen, plausible deniability is difficult to maintain. In fact, porn stars probably changed their names in no greater percentages than actors in straight Hollywood films. Would John Wayne have been as popular under his real name, Marion Mitchell Morrison? Or Natalie Wood as Natalia Nikolaevna Zakharenko, or Woody Allen as Allen Konigsberg? How about Ben Kingsley as Krishna Pandit Bhanji? I think you get my point. If Olivia Wilde had done porn, she probably wouldn’t have had to change her name from Olivia Jane Cockburn. They can have many weird reasons to make a change. I did an infomercial for a psychic hotline with Kreskin; he had his name legally changed to T. A. Kreskin, so now he’s The Amazing Kreskin.

  There is a delightful study of porn performers done by Jon Millward called Deep Inside. You can see it at http://jonmillward.com/blog/studies/deep-inside-a-study-of-10000-porn-stars/. He has created a database of 10,000 porn stars. When I was working, I thought that I knew half of everybody in the biz. Well, with that number I didn’t know 2 percent of the people. Plus, it turns out that Mr. Millward only took a small sampling because the Internet Adult Film Database contains a list of 115,000 adult actors/stars. Mr. Millward’s analysis of the averages among adult performers makes fascinating reading, but for the purposes of our discussion of adult pseudonyms, I’ll skip right to the bottom line. The vast majority of adult performers employ false names; the most popular last name for female performers is “Lee,” and the most popular for male performers is, perhaps you guessed it, also “Lee.” I think that is pretty amazing, and I feel a kindred spirit because my great-great-great uncle was Robert E. Lee.

  The most popular male first name is David, and the five most popular female names are, in order: Nikki, Jessica, Lisa, Kelly, and Angel. I’m not sure if a pseudonym is adequate protection from having your profession outed to your folks. I can imagine a scenario where Poppa sneaks off to the above-mentioned hot-sheet motel to enjoy a libidinous liaison with his mistress, only to observe his little darling performing some impossibly kinky act on the in-room TV. What’s he really going to say that evening around the family dinner table? Just how is he going to explain his source for that information? I personally never had a problem over my involvement in the industry with my parents. My father died while I was still in high school studying to be a preacher, and my mother, always being the frugal entrepreneur and quick to embrace every source of dollars, appreciated the business as just another way for me to pay my video equipment lease payments, but she never
did get the pronunciation correct. She always asked me, “Are you making another one of those promo films?”

  MOM, ARE THE PEOPLE IN YOUR FILMS ALWAYS NAKED?

  Erika Lust

  Erika Lust (b. Stockholm, 1977) is an independent erotic filmmaker and author based in Barcelona. She graduated from Lund University in 1999 with a degree in political sciences and founded Erika Lust Films in 2005. A staunch feminist dissatisfied with the portrayal of women in mainstream adult industry, Erika is committed to infusing intimacy, modernity, and beauty into her explicit films. Her latest multiplatform project, XConfessions, grabs inspiration from the audience’s own sex stories, resulting in a totally new genre of adult film.

  My name is Erika Lust and I am a film director. I make explicit films.

  I was born in Sweden and before making the choice to specialize in erotica, I studied political science, feminism, and sexuality at the University of Lund. There, I came across the 1989 book Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the Frenzy of the Visible by Linda Williams. This book was hugely influential on the modern discourse of pornography, and on my personal impression of the genre as well. Sweden has a strong culture of sexual liberalism, and just like everywhere else, feminists were dividing themselves on the issue.