March 4, 2008

At Hot Movies for Her: The Bisexual Question

My March column at Hot Movies for Her is about biphobia in porn.

I was not a porn consumer or seeker when I was a teenager. Though I was sexually precocious and promiscuous in many ways, porn wasn’t really on my radar. In fact, when a high school friend found me on MySpace recently and discovered that I’d become a porn director, he was pretty surprised. But since I’m a bit of an extremist, when I began to explore porn, I really did it up. And I wanted to find porn that was like me – bisexual.

At my first job in sex, I lucked into a treasure trove of porn with obsessively categorized videos, magazines, and mementos: the Ralph Wittington Collection at the Museum of Sex. I started as a researcher at the Museum and then became an assistant curator the year it opened – and in addition to jump-starting my career as a sex nerd, being exposed (ahem) to the wealth of smut in the Wittington collection plus meeting a delightful array of sex industry legends got me started on my own personal journey.

Among the carefully labeled boxes that contained videos in plastic archival boxes, polaroids of enthusiastic collector Ralph Wittington with a variety of stars, and a smattering of creepy flesh-colored sex toys was a box labeled “bisexual.” The contents were a bunch of Paul Norman films – the “Bi and Beyond” series that kicked off in 1988. The late 1980s through the mid-1990s were apparently the heyday for bisexual porn – if a heyday can be considered somewhat prolific production from one director.

Click here to read the whole article.

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