Sex Work Is Real Work, After All
Los Angeles mocks you. It always has. When it’s the end of summer in civilized places, Los Angeles just gets hotter. And then, when you, weeping and bereft, deflate your floaties for the season in Ogunquit, or South Padre Island, or some lonely shipping lane in Puget Sound, you open your device to see a bunch of naked porn sylphs cavorting, talking shop, AirDropping selfies, creating content, gasping at the balls of, and/or simply existing next to a shockingly low ratio of men who, let’s face it, were probably in band.
Not a band, but band.
If it makes you feel any better, Los Angeles has criminally high rent and gas prices, and none of us will ever be able to afford homes as nice as the one you have back in Bogue Chitto or Mumbai.
And that doesn’t mean porn stars don’t work for a living.
On Labor Day, 2022—the third Labor Day in a row falling in an oppressive heat wave—we took a break from shooting on a hot set, captioning photographs, renewing our domains, breaking our sprawling 5,000-word essays into blocks in a content management system, escorting, or working our straight jobs to jump in a pool like normal people.
I mean, hot normal people. Or agreeably creepy (I’m letting it sink in) normal people.
And yeah, there’s just no way to get around the fact that, even on a carefree evening in the pool, we’re compelled to monetize our fun.
Here’s Washington, D.C. native Katrina Colt, a newcomer who works for Mark Spiegler’s agency. i really enjoyed talking with her and had one of those occasional flashes of porny inspiration where I thought, “Has anyone filmed a sex scene on the M Street Steps outside of the ‘Exorcist’ house in Georgetown before? If not, the blood of Christ compels me to make that happen with Katrina Colt.”
In the era pf postmodern adult journalism I helped define (wherein AVN pays one $40k a year but then fires one for pissing off Digital Playground), I used to take photos of dudes taking pictures of porn stars with their flip phones and clunky DSLRs. Now, just as my sideburned forebears had to learn to shoot Hi-8 and edit on Final Cut Pro, I can take pictures of porn stars snapping photos of themselves for their OnlyFans.
Once, upon returning from one of my many departures, I asked my pal, the eminent Ukrainian pornographer Ivan, what he thought OnlyFans had done to the business.
“It makes people not show up for work, is what OnlyFans did,” he said. “If you can stay home and shoot for OnlyFans, what incentive is there to come in and shoot a movie for 12 hours?”
But OnlyFans and the ancient world of the porn set seem to have given ground to each other and reconciled.
That sat with me as I watched Chanel Camryn taking pictures of her mosquito-bitten ass.
“I make more money on OnlyFans since I can say that I also shoot movies,” she says. “(Both platforms) definitely help each other.”
I’m not going to read too much into it, but Camryn grew up in both Alaska and Florida and just maybe straddling those extreme coasts helps her to negotiate the merging of the millennial and Gen X models of Entrepreneurial Porn Star As Personal Brand with Show Up To an Encino Mansion Rented from the Dad of a Persian Family And Shoot Porn for A Company That Was Founded by the Mafia.
Either that or things have just settled down a little. The fact that porn workers control the means of production more than they ever have is a very Labor Day concept and, like unions should, keeps people from sliding into taking the other side for granted.
I got a lot of business done in the hot tub. Rather than shooting from above, emphasizing our age difference by making everyone look like baby birds expecting a meal, I got deep in there. Balls Deep, as it turned out (more on that later). This allowed for some excellent angles and interesting poses. Here’s a hybrid:
I didn’t, for example, tell either Aliya or Coco to show me their vulvas. I’m not complaining. I mean, I’m happy for you that they did. What I did say was, “Coco, please act as if you are taking an upskirt shot of Aliya,” and this is the picture that resulted.
As graphic as it is (and again, I’m not complaining), it still leaves a lot of questions. Is Coco planning toi lick her phone, or did her phone get in the way of Aliya’s vulv? Why is Aliya looking at me? Is the idea of Coco sneaking a photo of something that is only meant for me an affront to Aliya, and is she saying, “Grams, do something“?
Poses like this always remind me of the work of Austrian artist Egon Schiele, who died in 1918 of the Spanish Flu. He painted this frank piece a few years before.
But for all the clinical shots like this one, my partial submergence also yielded wholesome Greek Bathers-style shots, such as when Katrina Colt was talking with Spencer Bradley. I just asked them not to move, because that’s all that mattered.
There were other photos I took in which I was powerless to prevent posing, so practiced at posing were the subjects, or photos where some people followed directions and others were like, “I might be 22, but I really know what I’m doing.”
For years I’ve worked, on and off, for adult publications. When I started, I was wary of fellow writers, directors, photographers, performers, and magnates who are my age now. I’d wonder what kind of arrangement or understanding they had with friends and family in the civilian world. Even when I was a newcomer, still in wonderment at my good luck to find steady employment in such a fascinating world of lawlessness and alternate structure, I’d be careful not to talk too much in certain real world circles. I knew that some people would think I was bragging, some people would be resentful, and some people would question my morality. I never have gotten to a point where I would simply live the porn lifestyle 24/7, as there are a bunch of lifestyles I have that compete.
So instead, I tend to vibe with whatever environment I’m in. A poem I’ve loved since I found it is this one by Langston Hughes:
I stay cool and dig all jive
(That’s the way I stay alive)
My motto, as I live and learn:
“Dig and be dug in return.”
Which is why, near the end of the day, as I was sitting by the jacuzzi, I consented to show my junk.
“Holy shit,” said Aliya Brynn, a few feet away. There had been a scare a few moments earlier with a low-flying bug, and I thought it had returned. But then I realized she was pointing at me.
“Is it … my gut?” I said. I’ve got a skinny guy pot belly, like I’ve swallowed a small opossum. The rule is that it’s only too big if you can’t see your own penis beyond it, so I don’t worry too much.
“No, in your bathing suit.”
Reader, nothing was hanging out of my bathing suit, because I am neither coy nor (for the most part) oblivious. But I realized what she was talking about.
“Oh,” I said. “I happen to have large balls.”
This is both literally and figuratively true. “The balls on you” is something I often hear from people who have never seen my balls. But I do actually have large, healthy testicles, that have astounding generative powers, even if I don’t whip them out all the time.
“Can I see them?” Brynn said, politely.
A while ago I determined that, if the situation was appropriate, and if it wasn’t interfering with any commitment I had with anyone else, and if there was consent all around, then it would be OK for me to cross the line between observer and participant in the porn world, wherever that might lead as long as no onbe got hurt. Since I had been taking pictures of naked women all day, I figured that they could ask to look at my parts, too.
“Do you ever stuff them in someone’s mouth?” she asked.
“Yup,” I said.
***
I’ve written a lot of things about a number of different industries and trades, but I’ve never wanted to drive an 18-wheeler or be a Goodyear Blimp pilot, nor would I ever want to be a prison guard, even though articles about all those things are in my portfolio. And I’m no George Plimpton acting out a fantasy; I’m simply a less-accomplished writer who happens to have the balls to hang at events like this.
And sometimes it doesn’t even feel like working.
Previously on Porn Valley Observed: Labor Day in Porn Valley (2011); Prufrocking with Dakota Skye
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