A few days ago, I finished reading The Other Hollywood, an oral history of the porn industry, by Legs McNeil & Jennifer Osborne. If you’re into the subject, it’s a pretty impressive book, even though the 1990-present era receives short shrift.
The quotes selected by the book go a long way to avoid the heavy moralizing that most people bring into their views on the industry. The worst example of that tendency was in Martin Amis’ porn article for Talk Magazine a few years ago. That piece went with the “those poor, manipulated girls” angle, in what I assume was an effort to shame porn-consumers. This isn’t to say that McNeil & Osborne portray the women in the industry as happy-go-lucky. The book has all sorts of horror stories, with self-delusion and self-destruction duking it out.
One of the aspects of the industry that’s always intrigued me is the issue of how performers deal with the day-to-day. I mean, a lot of life in one’s 20’s and 30’s is at least partly devoted to finding a person to have sex with. So, when your “job” is getting laid, exactly how does you balance the rest of your time? What do you do, exactly, when your mental approach to sex is that of an occupation? Where do you find intimacy? (I don’t mean this in a “those poor girls” way; I’m more curious as to what substitutes for sex in that currency)
All of which gets me to the strangely profound closing quote of the book. It’s by John Stagliano, known for his Buttman gonzo video series. Following the death of his girlfriend Kristi Lynn in a car wreck, Stagliano went into a deep depression, and ended up going down to Brazil and almost deliberately getting himself infected with HIV (the details are in the book).
Subsequently, he and an HIV-positive performer fell for each other, got together, and went on to have an HIV-negative child. It’s an oddly touching story, an island-of-misfit-toys romance in an environment where romance is in short supply. Stagliano, as I said, gets the last word, and it’s a doozy:
I was getting f***ed-up the other night watching porno movies. And I thought, this is how you write a movie: You set up this whole scenario where some guy’s doing drugs, he’s about to go too far and OD, and just before he does, he looks at the camera and says, “F*** you, people! You live by a whole different standard than I do! I have this life in front of me that inspires me. Every one of you has done something at some point to f*** up your life — get a little too drunk, do too much cocaine. That’s life, right? And you’re judging me?”
I used to judge these people, and I never knew what was going on inside them.
You know, they’re experiencing life in a certain way that I don’t know about, but I need to know about. We want to push ourselves to experience life and to enjoy it: to be a race car driver, or do drugs, or get f***ed in the ass and risk getting HIV — it’s all the same fucking thing. Pushing yourself to experience life to its fullest necessarily involves risk. And if you sit in your room and never do anything — like my mother wanted me to do because she was worried that if I left the house I’d get hit by a car — you’ll never know what it’s like.
Maybe it’s genetically programmed, like women holding back sex. We’re genetically programmed to say, “Wait a second — oh, it feels good to go around that curve really fast, but I’m gonna crash.”
You know, like Kristi Lynn did.