Commerce, community and creativity

[I spent a lot of time in Vegas with these dudes, Benny and Zak. Photo by Gram Ponante]

I think I’m recovered enough from traveling to write about Vegas a bit more in depth. On Sunday night I managed to miss my flight home through my own stupidity – I thought I saw a delay on the board but it turns out I was reading the wrong line, so when I ambled up to my gate a little past departure time it turned out I’d missed my flight. Self-hatred and an extra five hours of waiting and travel insanity ensued. So much for my easy direct flight home. I think I need my eyes examined.

I am glad I was able to spend a lot of my time in Vegas with people who I like and whose intellects I respect (pictured above, for example). It got me to wondering what would have happened if I had gone to the Adult Entertainment Expo much earlier in my career – would I have followed the same path? Honestly, without the comfort of the like-minded contacts I now have and am able to make with relative ease these days, I think I certainly would have been horrified and quite possibly would have run screaming from the whole industry.

Despite my knowledge of the world and what not, I remain somewhat sheltered from things I do not like or understand. I live in New York, I spend most of my time with smart people in the sex industry who don’t judge me, and I have had a hand in creating and sustaining a life for myself in which thoughtful consideration of and activism around sexuality reigns supreme. The porn industry is nothing like that. Though I am infinitely more prepared with my armor of cynicism, etc, than I was years ago, the experience in some ways reminded me of my initial experience with college. For my first year of school, I went to Bard College, a small upstate liberal arts college known as something of a freak school. I had high hopes: I expected to fit in, not just culturally as a gothy punky kid with purple hair, but as a bonafide nerd with a hunger for learning. It turns out that most kids go to college to party and find themselves, not to be big nerds like me – and though I transferred and moved into the city, I never really found a massive nerd cohort. But that ended up being fine once I got over the initial disillusionment – I made my own nerd cohort of about three people, and didn’t give a damn about anyone else. I think I’ve done the same thing with the sex industry in the last few years – I’ve ignored and dismissed the insane cacophony of the industry and merrily gone along my way, making my own sense of the whole thing.

And I’m not sure how I feel about it all now – ambivalent to say the least. I’ve met truly extraordinary people and am showing no signs of quitting (hell, I’ve already survived the really unsavory stuff), but I wonder if I would’ve gotten this far if I were a less oblivious person. Often I think that I’m not so much hardy as I am spacey and in my own world – but maybe those things serve similar purposes.

One of the things I thought about a lot over the past week – actually something I’m generally obsessing over – is the space between creativity and commerce. The big money porno is all commerce, shiny and blond and gleaming with a mix of bling and slime, not even approximating authentic sexual experiences, and not pretending to either. On the opposite extreme are people who take sex and the art of porn personally, people who have a vision of sex on film and a compulsion to make it so. I’m thinking mostly of Joe Gallant and Benny Profane here – though there are certainly others who have an intense need to make and craft visions of sexuality, I spent enough time with these two over the week to see their intensity about making an enlightened form of smut. And I worry about them, about “us” more broadly, about the earnest contributions of intense and earnest smut makers – artists, really, and I say that without the snark I usually apply to the art/porn swirl – to an industry that gobbles it all up so indiscriminately. As alt makers start to move into the fold (sucked into the vortex is more like it), I worry that we’re being taken for a ride. Sure, there’s the whole dues paying thing, the thing where its important to prove that you’re worth your salt as a pornographer, but there’s also the fact that the power of these visions is in some ways derailed

I guess that’s the ultimate question without an answer: shift things from within and accept a certain level of bullshit in exchange for money, or chip away at things from the outside, with miniscule budgets and (key element) no distribution. But the thing that I’m really concerned about, is that though there’s all this talk about the billions of dollars floating around in the porn industry, it might not float towards us, even if we sign up to join with the big forces of porn. I’m afraid that ultimately, people like Joe and Benny (and maybe me too) are selling ourselves short – or letting ourselves be sold that way, because of this compulsion to make movies our way. I don’t think it has to be that way (see: Comstock Films), but I see it happening now and it annoys me that everyone is working like crazy for their vision – and not much else – for big companies. When I hear about alt porn folks signing contracts with big companies and whatnot – I don’t care about the dumb indie “sell out” crap, because there is nothing wrong with making a living doing what you do, but I always think “I hope she’s rolling in big piles of money and investing it like crazy.” I want to see people succeed both culturally and financially, and I know they aren’t one and the same, but goddamn I want to smush them together.

This is the tune that I’m going to be singing a lot in this next year as I get really serious about the business end of things. I am obsessed with not getting fucked over financially – I have worked and will work too hard for that to happen. I have paid my dues – or been convinced they needed paying – and that is done. This isn’t to say that you’re going to suddenly find this a paysite, or that I’m going to totally transform how I do things, I just want to get smarter about it all, and do my damnedest to bring the people I respect and admire along with me for the ride. I am deep in the belly of the behemoth that is the sex industry, all good and bad messiness, and I’m going to come out stabbing.