My friend Jack Boulware wrote a fascinating, well-researched and somewhat personal article for Salon about the fake writer JT LeRoy — who, as many of you know, is really a rich older lady who sold a bunch of lies as a memoir, even going so far as to say the “author” she concocted had HIV/AIDS to sell more books. It’s all disgusting and fucked up, and I’m having a hard time not throwing a brick through the window of the Castro Theater (cinema in SF’s gay Castro neighborhood) for showing the fake film about the fake life, to make more money for HIV-liar lady. In fact, lots of people in the neighborhood are mad; everyone I talk to at parties, bars and cafes is seething about it showing in the Castro, but no one knows what to do.
Anyway, when Jack was researching the article he contacted me, and 29 emails (and setting him up with old streetpunk contacts) later I’d done my part to help him piece together the life of Laura Victoria Albert, the woman who lied. He didn’t just contact me because I lived on the streets as a young girl, or that HIV/AIDS is still killing my friends (part of why I’ve been depressed lately); he contacted me because Albert had been a porn writer and phone sex worker “back in the day”. She had done some of the same kind of porn writing I did/do and had trafficked in early SF streetpunk circles. Jack wanted to quote me on my perspective on the similarities and differences in my generation of ex-punk porn writers, but the story ran too long and my quotes were cut.
Jack’s piece is really good. I disagree with some comments about sex writing, but check it out. If you’re interested in what I wrote Jack about what it was like for me becoming a porn writer in the midst of people like Albert and her junkie name-dropping klingons, read more after the jump.
[email excerpt]
Hi Jack, of course I remember you, it’s nice to hear from you. I lived on the streets as a gutterpunk in SF from 1984-1988, was in the ‘zine scene until the bitter end of Filth Magazine (mid-90s), knew/know tons of artists, writers, musicians, junkies, drug dealers, punks, whores, drag queens and boy whores, I work in SRL, you name it, but I never crossed paths with that person.
(…)
> Specifically, what it was like to break into the sex-writing biz, after the
> first wave of white-girls-as-sexperts, such as susie, laura miller, lisa
> palac, lily burana, carol queen. All of them were getting a lot of national
> press in the early-to-mid 90s, as sex and erotica writers/editors/experts.
> They were like rock stars, quoted all over the place (of course, I was
> friends with susie, and sharing an office with lisa, and then lily, so I
> witnessed a lot of it.) I’m curious what it might have felt like, to be an
> up and comer in this world, a younger person interested in erotica and
> writing, watching all these people in san francisco get so much intense
> international media focus. Was it inspiring? Was it intimidating?
It was never intimidating, and rather than inspiring, the pantheon of all these older women coasting on their reputations just seemed like something that needed to be shaken up. It sounds cold, but understand that I was shocked to meet women like [redacted] and find out firsthand how cruel, competetive and insecure they were — that they had ripped off and stepped on other women to get where they were. I had read these women’s sex books and felt liberated; turns out they ripped off other female porn writers and did everything they could to get me fired and keep me out of porn writing so they wouldn’t have any competition. Susie and Carol can probably attest to the atmosphere of sex writing up to that time (’98, when I arrived), which I call “boot camp for the female ego”. (Carol is a friend; I don’t know Susie but I know who stole her writing and took credit for it — that’s who *redacted* is.)
here we all were writing about sex and reviewing porn and no one was really friends; being the youngest and newest to the game made me *very* threatening — I was contantly fighting to hang onto my porn writing job, which was bizarre — but having lived through life on the streets, I smelled them a mile away. I instantly spotted the women who were trying to contrive tough backgrounds or make it seem like they were “edgy” or living life on the fringes, and that writing about porn and sex was one of their bullshit “street cred” tools they were using to shape their image to … get a book deal, or become famous, or get back at daddy — whatever. it was easy for me to see that these women were just trying to be “bad”. I saw a lot of that on the streets. I didn’t care that they were obvious posers, but I was irritated that they didn’t care about what they were writing about (porn and sex) and was really angry about how backstabby they were — the biggest signifier to me that they came from priveledge. when you live on the streets you never ever forget for a minute that you can never go back home; I earned my street cred and didn’t need to write about porn to be bad, tough or edgy; I’d lived it.
Look, living on the streets made me see sex writing vastly differently than the overly competetive women trying to be “edgy” writing about porn; not just my exposure to sex on the streets but also the real early lessons about sex and power dynamics, for good and bad — and finding a place in between as well. Also, lots of my friends were very young sex workers, all of us were queer, gay, bi, trans, straight, flexible as needed; lots of us dealt with rape and helped each other through it because the system was an utter fucking failure for all of us; quite a few of us (myself included) did work for needle exchange because we knew who/when/where to go so HIV/AIDS was already “on the table” in our lives, even if the rest of the world hardly knew about it (remember, I was 13-17). Sex was also healing for us.
We all knew and talked about sex more than any other 13-17-year-olds having a “normal” life. And in the case of me and my punk “family”, we were helped out a lot by one gay couple in particular, so sex and different sexual expression was normal for us and we had language for it — we knew how to talk about it. The night shift guys at Kinkos let us sleep in the roof; and so we made ‘zines. So then, we wrote about sex. After a few years on the streets I took my first AIDS test and was scared shitless before I got the results, we were all afraid to take it, and I wrote about taking the test and being scared and we put it in a ‘zine and I felt a little less scared (and also raised awareness about taking the test among my peers). And there’s also a lot of power in being able to give language to something, especially if it once held power over you in a negative way; maybe writing about it was a way for many of us to name our demons. And ultimately, when you live in the gutter, all you want to see is the world become a better place. At least that’s been true for me.
So Carol and Susie were clearly survivors of this boot camp that I had no idea exsisted, but the posing and competetiveness of the other women didn’t surprise me because on the streets there were plenty of girls hanging around because they thought it was cool and glamorous — they also tried their hand at being writers, some even stealing our stories and making them their own. The difference now of course is that I no longer punch them in the face, I simply write better and sell more books, and blast my authentic, sex-positive, pro-porn message as loud as I can, I help as many new writers as I can (I publish dozens of new writers every year), and I care way less about my image, making a buck or looking “edgy”. also, I could give a shit about celebrity — meeting one *or* becoming one. watch a famous edgy sex writer nod out (heroin) during a sex ed training session, knowing she came from a really nice east coast home with a family that loves her and sends her money, and it suddenly being an edgy sex writer who “knows Jerry Stahl” isn’t very fucking impressive. it’s just lame.
> Also — I’ve known several people who have made money writing reviews of
> porn movies and websites. Maybe you could address what this headspace is
> like. Watching so much porn. Wondering if there’s another level of writing
> and editing above and beyond. Is it fun? Is it a glass ceiling? Etc etc.
like, is there a porn burnout? how you react to porn depends on what your reasons are for watching porn and how you feel about sex. most of the women I knew who wrote porn reviews didn’t like porn and I had serious doubts about whether they even liked sex — their anger and hate showed in their writing (and around the office). when you review porn you have to constantly remind yourself that not everyone sees sex the same way you do; unfortunately many porn reviewers were/are too busy trying to get attention for being a rebel that they internalize and learn to exploit how fucked up they think sex is (their own notions of sex as bad, reinforced by watching porn and not making distinctions between good and bad porn, or porn and themselves). Most porn writers also see it as temporary or something they do as a stepping stone to thier oncoming juggernaut of fame. Which never happens, of course, and these people think of porn writing (and porn, and sex culture) as such disposable culture that they fuck over lots of people on their way.
I don’t know if this helps, but it’s interesting for me to write it all down.
[end email excerpt]
