PRAISE FOR COMING OUT LIKE A PORN STAR
We all have secrets, alter egos, and live double lives. Coming Out Like a Porn Star is an incredibly rich and moving narrative of an experience we can all relate to. We can learn something from all of the authors.Belle Knox, Duke Porn Star
This revealing, moving, and often surprising collection lets you go deep inside the lives of generations of porn stars and explicit performers. Its an absolute must-read for anyone interested in sex industry politics, sex-positive culture, and porn studies and for anyone whose friend, lover, or family member has taken their pants off in front of a camera. One after the other, these memoirs add up to a powerful, if ironic, conclusion: Porn stigma is the biggest problem many adult performers face, and it is at least as likely to come from our feminist moms as from prudish conservatives. Once youve heard the clear, articulate voices of these porn stars, youll never look at a sex movie, or the people who make it happen, the same way again.Carol Queen, PhD Real Live Nude Girl: Chronicles of Sex-Positive Culture
A one-of-a-kind collection with perspectives from a terrific mix of adult entertainment professionals, Coming Out Like a Porn Star is a timely, insightful read that will change perceptions about an industry so often misunderstood.Dan Miller, XBIZ
Jiz Lee has spearheaded a compelling and heartfelt collectionone that engages wider societys fascination with porn performers in order to humanize, edify, and enlighten.Dr. Chauntelle Tibbals, Author of Exposure: A Sociologist Explores Sex, Society, and Adult Entertainment
Intimates the fascinating story of adult performers whove come out.Jayme Waxman, Playgirl Magazine June 2015
Frank and decidedly humorous, this collection takes the stereotypical narrative of what it means to be a porn star and puts it out of its misery. Without a doubt, this is the most honest, diverse, and innately human take on the art form we call porn Ive ever read. Stories like these have the power to change minds, shatter conventions, and completely reframe the entire genre of porn.Jerome Stuart Nichols, sex & wellness coach, creator of LTASEX.com
Coming out is never a straightforward process. Lees collection of essays offers a nuanced, heartfelt, and incredibly honest look at what it means to come to terms with a highly public, incredibly sexual identity within the bounds of ones private life.Lux Alptraum, former editor/publisher, Fleshbot.com
Finallya collection of essays bold enough to embraceand expressthe complexities and contradictions of performing sex. With uncompromising thought and lucid prose, Lee and fellow contributors rewrite the public record.Nichi Hodgson, author of Bound To You
A manifesto, a reclamation by Lee of the role of porn as a positive artistic form.Rachel Kramer Bussel, Salon.com
Coming Out Like a Porn Star fundamentally changes the cultural conversation about porn performers. Never before have adult performers been given the space to talk about coming to terms with what theyre doing with their bodies, their careers, and their lives. It is in this space that we find out theyre neither victim nor villain; instead we encounter people whose inner strength and thoughtful, well-articulated sense of self can teach us a thing or two about how we can better relate to our loved ones, ourselves, and society at large.Violet Blue, journalist and author of The Smart Girls Guide to Privacy
COMING OUT
LIKE A PORN STAR
ESSAYS ON PORNOGRAPHY,
PROTECTION, AND PRIVACY
Edited by Jiz Lee
Foreword by Dr. Mireille Miller-Young
ThreeL Media | Berkeley
Published by
ThreeL Media | Stone Bridge Press
P. O. Box 8208, Berkeley, CA 94707
www.threelmedia.com
2015 Jiz Lee
Cover design by Jamee Baier. Illustration based on photography credited to:
Courtney Trouble, Jiz Lee, Karma Pervs.
Book design and layout by Linda Ronan.
Copy Edited by Lauren Manoy.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher.
Republishing permissions: Some stories in this collection were previously published and are reprinted with permission. Liabilities and My Mother by Ashley Blue appeared in GIRLVERT (Rare Birds Press). Jesse Jackmans Hi Mom, Im a Porn Star originally appeared in Huffington Post. Jackmans essay Job Security originally appeared on his blog at JessieJackmanXX.com. How They React by Zak Sabbath appeared in We Did Porn (Tin House Books).
Dr. Mireille Miller-Young
Dr. Mireille Miller-Young is associate professor of feminist studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the coeditor of The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure, and the author of A Taste for Brown Sugar: Black Women in Pornography.
What does it mean to come out? Where do we come from, and at what place do we arrive? Coming out has been one of the central issues for the gay rights movement. The idea of coming out of the shadows became a rallying point for gays, lesbians, transvestites, and transgender folks in the 1960s who were fed up with the oppression of silence, denial, police raids, violence, and discriminatory laws that shaped their everyday lives. The famous Stonewall Riots of 1969, and other lesser known uprisings like the one at Compton Cafeteria 1966 in San Franciscos Tenderloin, marked the mounting awareness and activism of a new generation of queer people who did not wish or were not able to keep their sexual and gender identities and expressions in the closet. They bravely defied abuse by eschewing the tactics previous generations of queer people employed to survive harassment. They became radical, outspoken advocates for the right to be out and proud, and used their visibilitywhether chosen or forcedto build a movement that would change the face of the nation.
Nowadays, in the age of colorblindness that refuses to acknowledge the abuse of our racial caste system, we also face the unwillingness to see sexual hierarchies and sexualized violence, which are endemic to our society. Here, I do not intend to draw an equivalency between racism, sexism, and homophobic repression, or the movements to end them, but to say that these oppressive forces overlap and intersect in important ways. We do not see the absolutely vital ways that sexual difference matters, the abiding injustice of sexual criminalization, or the everyday struggles of sexual minorities, and how all of these function alongside and through race, gender, ability, age, and citizenship status. But some of us are pulling back the blinders and claiming visibility as a tactic for gaining freedom. That is the story of Coming Out Like a Porn Star. The authors in this volume are, like their brave foreparents, coming out about their participation in one of the most vilified industries on the planet: porn.
In some ways the porn industry is viewed as more evil than Big Oil, Big Tobacco, or Big Pharma. The porn industry is not simply seen as an agent of rapacious greed that destroys our health and our environment. Porn is perceived as the cause of our modern cultural decline, the trafficker of thousands of innocent women and girls, and the purveyor of a rampant and misogynist prurience that is infecting the minds our youth. The sex panic around porn is, of course, convenient. It distracts from the more complex questions of what kind of sexual morality should be embraced in todays democratic nations, why so many people choose to work in the sex industry instead of more acceptable arenas for labor, and how exactly youth come to gain an education about sex and sexuality in the age of abstinence-only instruction and the repeal of legal and monetary support for comprehensive sexual health resources and information.