Coming Out Like a Porn Star

by Jiz Lee

  “Coming out” indicates a process tainted by discrimination and societal disapproval. Those who do come out, come out of necessity, to crush stereotypes, refocus the dialogue, create change, and combat systematic forms of oppression. Coming out can be empowering and it can be exhausting. Even when someone has been out, sex work, porn, and/or public discourse on sexuality and desire can be used against you. Employment and institutions may accept porn thrice removed, but not when it’s standing at the helm of their work. Anti-porn proponents, fueled by religion, conservatism, and “in the name of feminism” beliefs have maintained an ongoing battle against pornography. Exposing ourselves for the greater good shines a light on a controversial subject that some of us will withstand. The greater good in this context is the act of exposure for the purposes of de-stigmatizing, education, debunking shame, and reconstructing desire, or reframing the concept of legitimate work. Porn has come a long way, but it’s still one of those touchy subjects that will always fuel debate.

  I came to porn from a privileged vantage point. I had an out. Even if the out was undesirable, it was there nonetheless. I came at it from a position of empowerment, not desperation, although desperation introduced me to other forms of sex work long ago. Before porn, sex work as an undesirable but necessary option came to me off and on for years. I grappled with the idea of sex work but only chose to do so when I had “security.” Others haven’t had that luxury. I had always seen sex work as a legitimate and quick way to make money, but fear of losing my child held me back: “Sex worker” equals “unfit parent.” I was a young, queer parent on welfare, and living in and out of shelters. Sex work provided an option to navigate within these rigid systems, have time with my daughter, and supplement my income. However, if I were ever caught engaging in sex work, I’d lose my daughter, partial income, housing, and insurance. I decided that I had the “security” of welfare for the time being, so I maintained the scrutiny of that system and put sex work on the back burner for several years.

  When the question of sex work came up yet again for me, I opted in. I went in drag, put on wigs and heels and went by names like Nena (Spanish for “girl”), and Mistress Isis. Although this portion of my sex work history was anonymous, my friends knew and so did my daughter. I’ve always been open with my daughter. My daughter was aware of my anonymous sex-work encounters. I kind of just told her, this was where the extra money came in. She understood, asked some questions, and helped me put my makeup on. My daughter was practically raised at rallies, pickets, and community organizing circles. She is well-versed in oppression, its manifestations, and how some have grappled with surviving in them. Sex work was not a hands-off topic, and she had informed knowledge about almost everything in my life. My chosen family and friendship circles consisted of poor queers, poor trans people, people of color, poor people of color, activists, artists, and writers. The ideas and reality of sex work were not foreign. It was a sad reality, a wonderful option, a quick fix, fast money, emotional work, dehumanizing, liberating, and legitimate.

  While engaging in sex work, I picked up a few things. I talked with other sex workers; we shared stories and skills. All of my hard studying worked and I was really good at it. I wanted to learn more and, within my work, I found sex education. I became more knowledgeable on safer sex and how to negotiate. These skills not only helped me in my sex work but in my personal life. As a survivor, this transformed me. I was negotiating the sex I wanted and exploring new relationship structures.

  While working at a New York sex shop, one of my coworkers, Morty Diamond, asked if he could film my partner and I. This was where my private sex work transitioned to public. Morty had already released Tranny Fags and was looking to film his next. We agreed, and what ensued was an upstream of positive reactions. The docuporn, Trans Entities: The Nasty Love of Papí and Wil exploded. I was wonderfully overwhelmed by the want and need for desire-positive, sex-positive, POC, trans/genderqueer, negotiated kinky porn. Just like that, I was Papí Coxxx. Not soon after, because of the sexuality education and sex liberation work I was doing, my name quickly became Ignacio Rivera, a.k.a. Papí Coxxx. The two were very publicly one and the same. It was terrifying and necessary. I came out like a porn star as a form of empowerment, education, and visibility.

  It was time to break those rigid frameworks and ideas about how queers, POC, and parents fit into this industry. For-us-by-us, indie, and feminist porn provided the vehicle to do the kind of porn I wanted to be in. It was the porn I wanted to see. This porn is art. It is political. In many ways, I had a level of protection with indie/feminist/queer porn. Engaging in public sex work has its own challenges, but none like private sex work. The worker risks are higher and so are the state and societal ramifications. Porn is legal. Stigmatized, but legal. Indie/feminist/queer porn took it many steps further than the legal privilege and dove deeper. It challenges how we use our bodies, how our bodies look, and who we are. It has allowed for the porn performer to be multidimensional. We are performance artists and social justice agents. It helped change the landscape of queer eroticism and made it easier for me to be open and out about it.

  Even within that “protection,” the outness of porn is naked. It is vulnerability. You display your imperfect body, your impure thoughts, and your unnatural actions on screen.

  It is there for all to see, to enjoy, to feel empowered by, and for all to judge. This is not a secret. Private sex work was easy to tell my daughter about, but the public sex work was not. There was no more secret. Only after we received a Feminist Porn award for Trans Entities did I approach the subject. I took the passive way out and put the glass butt-plug Feminist Porn award on my dresser and waited to see what would happen. When I finally did begin to talk about it, she laughed, cut me off and said, “I already know, Papí.” I was taken aback and relieved. She’d noticed the butt-plug and waited for me to tell her. We talked about what me being in porn meant and what she needed. This was a hard coming out, but the reception was good. Our previous discussions had paved the way to this understanding.

  The coming-out process is a never-ending story, like that of queerness. Sometimes we choose whom we tell. Some porn stars choose anonymity; others, like me, go all out.

  I didn’t choose my queerness or transness. One could say that I didn’t “choose” sex work. According to the Oxford Dictionary, to choose indicates that you “pick out or select (someone or something) as being the best or most appropriate of two or more alternatives.” I “chose” within systematic forms of oppression. Whether we view it as empowering or legitimate rests within the confines of a sexist patriarchal system that, at times, applauds our sexual entertainment value and, at others, demonizes the very acts that get them off. If we are privileged enough, coming out like a porn star challenges those discrepancies, creates dialogue, makes visible and offers new opinions on sexuality.

  ORANGE IS THE NEW JACK

  Jack HammerXL

  Jack HammerXL directs HardTied.com for the company once known as Insex.com (Intersec.com). He served in the Marines for eight years and is also an avid practitioner of Brazilian jiu-jitsu and was at one time a cage fighter. After finding out about BDSM in the late 1990s, he played in private for some time before starting to work in BDSM porn for Kink.com in early 2008. During that time, he acted in many shoots as a submissive and later as a dominant male figure. You can see all of his work at JackHammer.xxx or on Kink.com.

  When I applied to work in porn, I didn’t think I’d even get cast. I was just chilling at home, drinking a bottle of wine, owing the IRS, and someone was like, “You should apply.” I sent my application to Kink.com and chose the name Jack Hammer. I didn’t realize there was another guy, a white guy, by the same name who had just been released from prison for armed robbery. Even though he’s back in prison, Los Angeles porn agents still wouldn’t want girls to shoot with me because of this confusion. But I never really considered it a setback because mainstream porn wasn’t what I was into. This let me focus on BDSM, which
I actually prefer. I’ve been in porn for eight years now, but BDSM is basically all the porn I’ve ever done. It’s how I got my start.

  For eighteen years and six months, I also worked as a sheriff’s correctional officer. Just eighteen months away from retirement, I was terminated for being a porn star.

  And then I was diagnosed with stage 4 urothelial carcinoma (bladder cancer). They told me I’d be dead in two years, but here I am, five years later, in remission. After I made it through the hardest part of my cancer battle, I had just gone back to work. I’d only been back to my job for a few months when, through an anonymous tip, my job was informed of my connection to pornography. They put me on paid suspension. It took a year and a half for them to figure out what they were going to do. While combatting this personal attack on my professional life, I was also fighting a battle against my very own body in the form of cancer.

  What happened next, I imagine, was the difficult process of them tracking down my porn work. Of course, they didn’t take the time to look back at all the lives I saved and all the good I had done. They just dug into random sites on Google and Kink.com to find my performances and warped it to fit their agenda. They accused me of engaging in workers’ compensation fraud because they didn’t understand that when you film a shoot, it comes out at a later date. I tried to explain that to them and they wouldn’t listen. I repeatedly said, “When you work, it doesn’t come out the next day!” And even though the shoots are in the daytime, and my shift was 5:45 p.m. to 6:00 a.m., they’d try to say that I called out sick so that I could shoot porn. They ignored the production dates and times on all the scenes they collected. I was being stonewalled.

  The worst is that they tried to say that I was abusive because I performed in BDSM scenes. The picture they painted made me out to be some type of liar or woman beater because of performing in BDSM scenes. They’re idiots because they didn’t try to educate themselves, occasionally pulling out their Christian cards. As they brought up each new scene, I would counter with things like, “That was my partner at the time,” and, “That’s my girlfriend.” They just assumed BDSM is the same as abuse. But despite the scenes with my partners, the main thing they seemed to take issue against was the gay and transsexual porn. I never even saw the complete list of scenes they had collected against me.

  I wasn’t aware of the policy at my job that stated I couldn’t do porn. It’s one of the last things on a very long list of stuff you’re not supposed to do. You can’t be a bouncer, things like that. A couple of times they sent out a paper that you’re supposed to fill out, asking if you have secondary employment. The one time I signed one was back in 1999, long before I was working in porn. I don’t even remember signing that. My lawyer was like, “Look at the date!” She made them look so stupid. She used to be a prosecutor for sex crimes. She called them out for how they lied, and called them out for all kinds of shit they were trying to pull on me. They went to Kink.com and told the site owners that they were doing a criminal investigation against me, and they were given all the information they needed—without a search warrant. They said I lied, that I got money—when what happened was Kink.com’s owner, Peter Acworth, held a fundraiser for me because I was homeless with stage 4 cancer. My lawyer told the prosecution someone did the fundraiser for me and gave me the money. But they tried to say I did tax evasion. They violated my rights by having my supervisor call me directly for my tax records, rather than going through my lawyer. I could easily just walk away from all of this, but where’s the justice in that? What they did was wrong and they need to know that. Fighting for my life is something I’ve gotten very good at.

  They eventually decided to terminate me. I never lied once. I still remember one of the guys who interviewed me, because I trained him. He ended up having a desk job, while I was deep in the trenches. I worked in the worst places there are to work in prison. If you watch Orange Is the New Black, it is spot-on. Especially in the federal system, there’s a lot of horrible shit going on. If you look at Baltimore, a bunch of officers got fired because inmates were getting pregnant. Fraternization will get you fired. I knew some people who had done that too. Yet here I was, being dragged through the mud because of porn scenes.

  I had to tell the mother of my fifteen-year-old. She couldn’t believe that I was let go. She knows what it’s like there. You can kill someone and not get fired. I’ve seen it happen.

  Being fired meant I had to come out to her about the nature of my termination. Since then, I’ve wanted to attend my daughter’s cheerleading events, but she told me she didn’t want anyone to know that I was my daughter’s father, out of fear that someone there might recognize me from the porn that I do. I’ve only been to four of her birthdays because I was working. I was always working, and not by choice. Christmas, Thanksgiving, school plays, all of it, 5:45 p.m. to 6:00 a.m., working mandatory overtime. They make you work. I still have some of my pensions, but I have lost most of it. If you get fired, they can take their portion of it back. I’ve lost my health benefits; I would have had Kaiser for the rest of my life. My daughter was also on my plan. Now I have to pay for that. I’m a stage 4 cancer survivor of urothelial carcinoma. I need that level of health care. Now, I am without the safety net of my job’s insurance. I’m lucky enough to be in remission, but I’ve already seen how fast things can go bad in your life.

  I have suspicions about who outed me. If it’s who I think it is, it was a friend of mine who wanted to direct scenes for Kink.com and was never offered a position. He tried to use me to get the job but it didn’t work. He was one of the few people who knew me working at the prison and he had the most motivation to use it against me. He wanted to get back at me. Jealousy. Nothing but jealousy and hating on someone’s good fortune and notoriety. Green-eyed monster, as Othello would say.

  Now I’m a director at Insex (the company that put porn on the Internet) with its creator, PD. If you’ve ever seen the documentary Graphic Sexual Horror, you know of them. This is a company that existed long before Kink.com. Live shows and everything. So I work there now. I still do scenes for Kink.com if they call me, but at Insex, I’m a director. I make less money now without the pension, health insurance, and I can’t get my pension until I’m fifty. (We’ll see about that.)

  Before I got fired, I was making $150,000. I’m still paying child support for three more years. I’m not a materialistic person, like the people I suspect outed me. I lost seven figures worth of money. And that doesn’t include my benefits, which I’ll now have to pay for, right before my retirement.

  For the first few days, I was upset because I had just been through a lot and I did my job really well, and the people I worked with, folks who knew my reputation, knew that if they called me, things would get handled, the job would get done. I used to tell people all the time, I have more respect for murderers than I do rapists and child molesters. Creepy pieces of shit that are the biggest, whiniest people in the world. I had to deal with Cary Steiner, Curtis Dean Anderson, Scott Peterson; I’ve dealt with all those fucking guys. Couldn’t stand them. But if you had a problem at work, I was there to help you. You can’t fill these shoes. Compared to the average guy, I guess you could say, I’m a man’s man in the vanilla homophobic sense of what that’s supposed to mean. I served in the Marines, fought as a cage fighter, and was in law enforcement; I was a total ass-kicker at work. I was that guy. You had a problem, you called me and that problem was taken care of. I grew up in West Baltimore in the worst neighborhood. I was in combat in Kuwait. I survived stage 4 cancer. I sat across the table from people attempting to tear my life apart, and I couldn’t help but think: “What have you done with your life?” I risked my life for what I believed in, and I was being punished because of outdated stereotypes.

  There are some people at work who are like, “You’re okay with me.” The ones who are still cool with me don’t care. The ones that are still cool sent me messages while I was on administrative leave. They called and said, “Dude, I don’t care what yo
u do.” But a lot of people, guys who I knew for eighteen-and-a-half years, stopped being friends with me. Law enforcement is like this box. It was like lighting a match to gasoline.

  Not too long after I got fired, I was watching Orange Is the New Black with my girlfriend and I started crying. She asked, “What’s wrong?” I was like, “That’s how it is.” She said, “What do you mean?” I told her that’s what I dealt with for the past eighteen-and-a-half years, I’ve met all those types of people. I’m glad I don’t have to deal with that shit anymore. I get up, go to work, have sex, and get my paycheck.

  You can’t ask for a better job than that.

  PORN WITNESS PROTECTION PROGRAM

  Jackie Strano

  Jackie Strano is the executive vice president of Good Vibrations, the legendary sex-positive retailer (GoodVibes.com) and executive producer of the video-on-demand site (GoodVibrationsVOD.com). Strano is a trans butch singer-songwriter and feminist pornographer. She cocreated with her wife, Shar Rednour, the cult phenom Bend Over Boyfriend and queer butch/femme favorite Hard Love & How to Fuck in High Heels (AVN Best All-Girl Feature 2001)—the first time an all-queer, all-woman indie production company had won the industry lesbian feature title, paving the way for queer porn to become a viable genre. She loves her kids more than anything. Follow her on Twitter @JackieStrano.

  “Listen to me carefully: If they come for our kids, I will disappear with them quickly. I will head north with them, and I will contact you safely to tell you where we are and how you can find us. Do not let them follow you or get information from you.”