Coming Out Like a Porn Star

by Jiz Lee

  If you want to slip in and out, real quiet, calm, unnoticed, don’t come with me. My body has never been the camouflaging type, so I chose to roll with it.

  I grew up rotated and brown and with a taste for glitz and roses. Looking at a photo of me from when I was seventeen, plunging neckline Jessica Simpson hot chartreuse dress, purple circles painted on my cheeks, behind the ears wet with some Night Queen oil, my mom tries to find humor in her own anxiety at my outlandishness: “They’re going to remember you for fifty years in this town!” It’s a small postcard town in New Jersey, a mill town, but also not really surviving off the mill anymore, other than its red face in paintings sold in novelty shops. A bit Gilmore Girlsy, and though my mom hates the fast, quippy way the Loreleis speak, we are a single mother and an only daughter. We do drink a lot of coffee, and crawl headfirst into the nest or cavern or corn maze of one another. We were always teetering on this sweet hysterical edge of laughing and crying, heads thrown back or held tight on our necks, trying to decide how we really felt about something before it was too late.

  The purse is hot pink and it makes her nervous or agitated or afraid. Maybe we are a family of animals, that we could both be so sensitive. She makes a joke about my fur cape, to show we still share a mythology, saying I look like a beaver from Narnia. This is in front of my partner whom she is meeting for the first time, at the airport, who is also queer, who knows me too, and I say, “That’s not all that beaver means.”

  There is a tale of a woman who could take off her head and make soup from one grain of rice. Sometimes she is an old woman in rags and sometimes she is a haughty princess. You must serve her aims no matter what.

  She tested girls’ generosity, humility, modesty, obedience, and faith.

  How the good girl chose the plain eggs and not the ones covered in jewels. Or she brought the pitcher of water to the woman’s lips. Or she did not laugh or make a sound at all. Good girls are tactful, subtle, obedient, quiet, agreeable, and pretty.

  Girls who advocate for themselves, say no, shine it on, make noise, or react are bad. The bad girls get frogs falling from their mouths.

  I guess I wonder if it is possible to do what you want—disobeying orders respectfully, lovingly even. Breaking rules is always seen as a sort of violence, but never their existence in the first place. Circumstance doesn’t matter. If you break code, slippery amphibians follow you all your life like a cursed reminder of your boundary-crossing ways.

  If I do something you believe to be offensive, inappropriate, self-obscuring, or self-destructive such as get tattooed, identify as an anarchist, identify as queer as in fuck you, not gay as in happy—although queerness in its possibilities that I’ve already seen have made me happiest of all—genderfluid/multigender/genderqueer/genderfuck and not woman, at times even act as a separatist of something I need to protect from something I need to protect it from—and worst of all, perform in porn made for the Internet, that sieve: If I do these things that you don’t respect, does it mean I don’t respect you? If you don’t love it, can’t I still love you? Even if you can’t believe these actions are the stuff of love, can’t you still believe me?

  As Maureen so beautifully put it in her plea-bargain love duet with Joanne, “Everybody stares at me.” Who knows if this was always a favorable experience. People have paid attention to me since I was a child. Sometimes doting and sweet attention, sometimes pity, sometimes resentment that somehow the nature of my existence and the entire shape and function of my body required their attention, positive or negative. The combination of my will, charisma, disability, race, gender, and pervasive and confusing visibility commanded the attention of others, even when my and their needs were left uncommunicated or ignored. I learned I was a princess early on. Race and class aside, I was a princess because I was a little girl; I liked pretty, bright, floral things and fairies (and bugs, really), and often my style of playing was to sit in one place while I made up stories and people brought me things and I added to the story. I was a princess because people did things for me, whether I wanted them to or not. People adore princesses; they loathe them; they tolerate them; they mutiny.

  No, that’s on ships, but I was always also at sea.

  For my whole life, my mother has held in her freckled, golden head the most important mind of this or any age. She fed me the mythologies that run through my veins: She built for me ethics, how to care for cats and birds and fish, boil rice, stew meat, wash the dirt patterns (she called them kitten markings) from my neck and chest, and stretch my curved joints. She supported all of my academic, artistic, and even some less-informed social endeavors. I have never known how to convey to her, as I exploded outward and upward in growth, that my attractions, desires, expressions, and aesthetic were not inspired by my anger or pain but by just that, my desire, my inner fire, my joy, which sometimes, as Clarice Lispector says, is a difficult joy, but is still called joy.

  There is an anger in there too. But it’s not an evil, it doesn’t poison me, and it’s not the point.

  One day, I decided I wanted control of what people saw. Maybe that’s how I justify it now, like the eating disorder it was about control over my out-of-control body and visage. Not just out of control, but if people were going to interact with my body anyway, try to control what they believed I was, then I would be something else. Maybe there are ways that is true; and can it also be true that I am a creatureling with weird taste, and I can’t help it any more than you can help craving a normal human life? But I dyed my hair blue like beaches on the East Coast in winter and I tried piercing everything at least once, even though each time I remembered hating try to stick my face in saltwater. I tattooed down every creative and less than creative thought in my head and I tattooed my face, I did, I’m sorry but I’m not sorry that I like them. They are like antenna, horns, fern fronds, new legs, river bends. I follow them and reach with them. They are a sensitivity.

  I have come out to my mother many times, as many sorts of creatures with different powers and disempowers. Coming out is much more like a partner dance than a PowerPoint presentation. I am frequently testing waters, even though I am always already swimming. I don’t think I ever really came out as a porn performer. I knew just the word, “porn,” would pierce her eardrums and sit heavy in her mouth. She noticed that it was something I was close to. The way she notices a new tattoo, a fur cape, a Facebook status where I say the word “fuck” or talk shit about something, when my hair is dirty, when my lips are red, when my gender or sexuality are morphing yet again, unfurling, settling, unsettling.

  The Internet is a new tentacle to contend with, I know. A new extension of my different body and different life. While I try to shut out some people, I don’t shut out my mom from my Internet life. She doesn’t comment online, but on the phone, she wonders if I limit my opportunities with the advertisements for events that show a costar’s naked thigh, my hand, my smiling face. I tell her my possibilities are more expansive than she knows. I tell her I hope she’ll move to me. I tell her, but also, I don’t know who writes me off. Do I need them? Might they need me?

  My mother is a private person, and shy, self-protective, protective of me, subtle, modest. But whimsical! Imaginative. She is also proud; she is also a genius. And she is not a prude. As an artist I always hoped to appeal to her finer sensibilities. But even artists have art they think isn’t worth it. Art that just makes them say, “Why?” Why is the word for my decorated body, for my public sexual performance, for my volume, for my visibility.

  The answer is, why not? The answer is yes. The answer is, I have always been a container and a vessel. I am bubbling with fire water and I am carrying it out into the world. To you. Take it. Take it from me. I have more.

  Things that are antisocial or societally interruptive are considered either violent or self-destructive, and eventually, tragic. I can sense the furrowed eyebrows like they have their own pulse, their own smell. Potent. The your-shame-should-be-so-deep-it-makes-me-feel-sad eyebrows. We m
ust already hate ourselves if we could do such things to our bodies. We must already know what punishment is coming. We must actually crave the stones thrown, the hot shoes, the toads and snakes, ostracism, imprisonment, exile, scrutiny, disgust. To be born with a queer (also meaning “odd, strange,” and in my case, “disabled”), weird body is one offense. To perform queer, weird desires is to add insult to public injury.

  When I move and the shock of my form hurts you, I can’t kiss it better. Consider the erotics an attack and a gift.

  All I can tell my mom is that there is joy and love in what I do, in how I perform and live who I am, in how I fuck on camera, even though she can’t hear that word, and how I dance onstage. How I settle and unsettle. I tell her about the love because there is anger too; there is a rage so wild it might have colored, stained, tattooed me on its own. There is anger there, and she knows about it. She has always known. I think the anger is what I have the most pride and defense around because she could always see it, all aflame. Sometimes, more so lately, she tells me how she sees the light and sweetness too.

  Maybe I can’t relate to the story of the good girl and the bad girl and the plain eggs filled with virtue and the bejeweled eggs filled with filth because I am closer to the dangerous egg, to the unlikely and ugly magic itself, than a human girl, good or bad.

  I can come out, I can show you, show you, but I can’t make my body subtler. I can’t deescalate my me-ness. I can’t make it less.

  Mama, I love you. I know you love me too. We don’t have to share everything, but know that the sweet things you teach me are in everything I do. The tattoos, the choreography, the writings, the relating, how I put my body where I do. You have taught me that it is possible to make my own life, to save myself with magic and resilience, to love through it all. And I have, and I do.

  I am the sorceress, and I am not in disguise. I am a mainshow freak. I am the gingerbread house, the Venus flytrap with nothing but love and teachings and madness inside. I am the head that keeps talking after it is removed. I am the grain of rice in the pot. I am the toads that spill from somewhere wet. I am the sun after it has been raining for too long. I am the muck and the sugar too. I am the egg that cries out, “Take me!” and if you do, I’ll take you too.

  Take me.

  REVEAL ALL, FEAR NOTHING: RAISING A FEMINIST

  Madison Young

  MadisonYoung is an author, artist, feminist pornographer, certified sex educator, and mother. Young has presented on the topics of pornography, feminism, and sexuality internationally, including at Yale University, Northwestern University, and the University of Toronto. Young’s writings have been published in books such as Best Sex Writing of 2013,Subversive Motherhood, Daddy: A Memoir, and her forthcoming DIY Porn Handbook: Documenting Our Own Sexual Revolution. Young has been featured for her expertise in sex-positive culture on such media outlets as BravoTV, the New York Times, and HBO. Young is currently working on her third book, The Ultimate Guide to Sex During Pregnancy and Motherhood. Madison Young lives and works in Berkeley, California.

  Growing up in the conservative Midwestern landscape of Southern Ohio, I was born deep inside my own personal closet. In those closets we kept our fears, our differences, our desires, and bodies hidden from the public.

  Closets are dark and scary places. Growing up a young girl who found herself experiencing queer and kinky sexual desires when I had yet to ever hear an open conversation about sex—I found myself amongst tremendous feelings of isolation, anxiety, and depression. I thought there must be something terribly wrong with me to have these thoughts, yet my thoughts and fantasies of an alternative life in which my body was paired next to that of another woman was one of the only slivers of light in the darkness of my pubescence.

  I daydreamed frequently and found escape in worlds that I had built in my head that were different from the one that surrounded me. I knew that I had to leave Ohio in order to find any kind of connection and freedom from my closet. I dedicated myself to my schoolwork and had a talent for memorizing and regurgitating the lessons that my teachers outlined in school. By doing so, I graduated at the top of my class and made my way to college in Chicago, where I followed my love of theater and began to step out from the shadows of a closeted life.

  In Chicago, during my freshman year of college, I phoned my mom and told her that I had started dating women. I listened to her cry over the phone, “ Why would you make your life more difficult? Why would you choose this life? What did I do wrong?”

  I listened to my mother’s pain that my freedom had cost me, but felt the heavy veil of shame that I had been carrying around for so many years start to lift as I slowly uncovered my own identity and room to explore who I was and who I was meant to be.

  In 2000, at the age of twenty, I decided wholeheartedly to dedicate my life to creating space for individuals to express and explore their authentic selves. I decided to open my own queer feminist art gallery and performance space, Femina Potens Art Gallery, in San Francisco, California.

  While serving as the artistic director of Femina Potens, I simultaneously launched a career as a porn performer and feminist porn director with an emphasis on BDSM performance. I quickly found that this powerful pornographic medium was a way to empower others to explore and embrace their own sexual desires while dismantling shame around sex. I discovered that in committing to loving myself, and openly and publicly exploring my own sexual desire, I would be empowering others to do the same. Within my career, in the realms of art and sex, I developed a primary mantra—a code of ethos—that I refer back to in all that I do: Reveal all, fear nothing.

  To reveal all and fear nothing is not to say that fear wouldn’t exist or I wouldn’t encounter it, but that we persevere through the fear, that we live through the fear and find our way to the other side of it. I’ve now been performing and directing in erotic film for well over a decade as well as presenting and leading sexuality workshops at conferences and universities since 2005. My parents have come to accept who I am as both a queer woman and feminist pornographer in my very out and public life.

  In 2011, my life changed in a way that was both terrifying and beautiful: I became a mother. I was raw, exposed, and more vulnerable in my essence than I had ever experienced, and I felt fear.

  The moment I went public about my pregnancy, interview questions poured in asking, “What will you tell your child? What will you tell the mothers at the PTA meetings?”

  Considering both my child’s father and I had appeared on national television multiple times talking about pornography and sexuality, and their grandmothers were the iconic Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens, we weren’t going to stay discreetly unnoticed in a quiet corner somewhere as we pretend to be someone we are not.

  I didn’t have all the answers four years ago, and I don’t have all the answers now. But I always knew that no matter what, we would not live in a closet. My entire adult life, I had worked to dismantle my closet as well as hold peoples’ hands as they bravely stepped out of their own closets. I wasn’t going back in because I was becoming a mother.

  I was more motivated than ever to raise this brilliant little person and give them the space to express their authentic self and their authentic gender—to express and explore who they are in their own time, at their own pace.

  My child, Em, is well practiced in coming out daily as their gender fluctuates through different spans of the spectrum, sometimes in a single day. Em has also honed in on the skill of facilitating gentle practice for others to come out, asking warmly to me, their father, babysitters, and friends: “What is your preferred gender today?”

  So how does someone who works in the realm of sexuality and creates art and film on the topic of sexuality come out to their children? How do I reveal all and fear nothing in the face of parenthood around such loaded topics as sex and pornography?

  Sex and pornography are two highly emotionally-loaded topics. We pack them full of more shame and power than any other topic. So first, let�
�s unpack these two terms. “Sex” is a natural human expression of affection and gifting of pleasure either to oneself or to others. “Pornography” is the creation of film or photography that captures the natural human expression of affection and gifting of pleasure either to oneself or to others.

  Coming out to Em has been easier than coming out to any other person that I have ever met. Em was born into an experience of living outside of a closet. When our bodies and sex are not shamed or stigmatized, it becomes so much easier to have an honest conversation about the context of documenting pleasure and sex.

  For me, I realized that as a feminist and a mother, it was key to advocate for my child to develop a healthy relationship with their body. I also realized that for my child to develop a healthy relationship with their body, I would need to first develop my own healthy relationship with my postpartum body, which was challenging. I looked in the mirror at a body that looked foreign to me. Through meditation and affirmations, I grew to love the body that was proof of where I had been, that told the story of the journey to birth my child. I looked in the mirror, I looked down at my belly, at my stretch marks in wonder, tracing them with my fingers and thanking them for reminding me of where I had been, physical memories clawed into my postpartum belly.

  As I came to terms with my relationship with my own body, I knew I was advocating for my child’s healthy relationship with their own body. Em is growing up knowing the anatomical names of their body parts, snuggling up with their plush vulva toy, Val, which is adorned with silk, velvet, and sequins, and not fearing their body but embracing their body with love and curiosity.