Note— Thank you for your patience.
Inspo—
“‘I guess the gaps are sort of a reminder that, in love things get disconnected,’ I said. ‘People just disappear.’
‘Maybe they leave room for something more infinite,’ he said.” —Melissa Broder, The Pisces
“Sometimes I wonder, ‘Do I love you too much?’ Then I tell myself, ‘Caroline Shut Up.’” —Caroline Polachek, Caroline Shut Up
“Bojack: Oh God, is this what music sounds like when you’re sober? Do I hate music?” —Bojack Horseman, S6E7: The Face of Depression
If you’re of a certain age— my age, give or take— then you may have stayed up late on weekends at your dad’s house to watch adult programming on his premium satellite channels. Amid your flowering itch for the explicit, you may have happened upon the overtitled HBO docuseries all about the porn industry as described by its insiders, Real Sex Xtra: Pornucopia: Going Down In The Valley. You may have discovered an entire pantheon of sex icons, including superstar Jenna Jameson and then-ingenue Stormy Daniels, because for the first time in your life, people were sharing their notes with you about pornography. And you may have eventually caught the gay episode.
The gay episode covers a lot of ground, although given how many questions and Klenex I had at the time, it felt woefully inadequate. Formative as this clearly was, the only part I remember with much detail is drag queen director Chi Chi LaRue shouting like the Queen of Hearts at performers to cheat out and make noise. She feeds them impromptu lines, like “your cock tastes so good” and “I need that dick in my ass,” words that feel cheesy when you’re not masturbating and intensely satisfying— anchoring, even— when you are. Others on set chuckle tiredly and clarify that they’ll have to dub most of the audio, but it’s worth it.
I never expected to fall in with the big corporate studio with the absurd, kitschy porn plots, but I’m not mad that I did. Generically speaking, the goofy narratives I’ve wound up acting out have plenty in common with the multicam sitcom, especially the neatly episodic entertainment made for early adolescents. The key difference is obvious, that it always leads into gay sex instead of a series of situational jokes or a moral about friendship, but for the first five to fifteen minutes, the comedic style of these plot-driven pornos resembles the hijinx of a Suite Life episode. Maybe that’s way off-base, but I think there’s something important about drawing these comparisons anyway, about acknowledging that pornography is like other kinds of film, without relying on the artful or high-brow instances of either.
When I was starting out I fancied myself a more sensuous kind of sexual performer, assumed I’d suit a more cerebral or artsy style of pornography. I wanted to be involved in countercultural statements and avant garde visions of gay sex, before I learned that such visionaries tend to lack a remotely fair budget for talent. But it turns out I give good face. Good for banner ads, good for gifs, good for viewers to really root for when it’s responding to big dicks in zany positions. And maybe because I’ve gotten older or further inside it all, the artsy endeavors now just feel unforgivably pretentious (but if you’re out there, Black Spark, let’s talk rates.)
On these semi-scripted shoots— like the ones I saw Chi Chi direct in Pornucopia— we’re asked to improvise commands and provocations while also holding acrobatic poses under sweltering lights, erect. These keep scenes dynamic, urge you to watch more and skip less in hopes of catching a juicy, verbal quip, a sort of erotic punchline. And sometimes, if we’re really lucky, they make great memes.
Most studios these days don’t even write out a script, just a synopsis, and sometimes it’s just an impromptu interview. As for the positions, performers and directors decide on these as a group, once we’re all on set and can assess flexibility, dick curvature, height differences, fuckable surfaces, etc. Any script I’ve been given covers the action leading up to sex and maybe a zinger after the money shot. All the coital dialogue almost always comes from us, the performers. Sometimes we get a few suggestions from the director, but they never feel natural. We try to ad lib the best we can to put it in our own voices, keep ourselves from looking totally stupid. We generally do anyway.
On camera as well as off, I’m terrible at dirty talk. You might think, it’s just role-playing, but when you role-play for fun you can use language to collaboratively write and advance a narrative. At work, I get to exert agency, but not authorship. My job is to intensify a position within a tableau, which seems easy enough. The trouble is how to use language to do so. I think I’ve even gotten worse at it, at wracking my brain for banter that sounds natural but not repetitive but engaging but not too wordy to spit out in the iambic rhythm between thrusts. You can only say so much about a dick in your ass.
If you’ve ever had sex with me, you know that I am a quiet fuck. Aren’t I? I groan and whisper, cast soft spells to stretch a feeling a little longer, but maybe it just sounds like egging on. I don’t like to make commands or ask questions, not in any real voice of mine, but sometimes they just spill out, half-hearted and Doppler. I’ve come to fear the dead space, although maybe I always have. I put on music, take great joy in welding sensations to a given album, but really these are contingency sounds.
I can’t tell if work sex has hushed my leisure sex, and if it has, whether it’s me that’s changed or the expectations of my partners. A lot of men look to me for some kind of direction or feedback, but then they lose their nerve when I give it. It’s like opening a gift in front of the giver, and thinking too hard about appearing sincerely grateful to immediately gauge if you truly are. I try not to overthink, so I simply ask for more, and hope that the wordier desire for obliteration can be implied.
If I have to ask myself how to articulate my pleasure, perhaps it’s not strong enough in the first place. Or perhaps this is another myth we tell people to sabotage their sex lives and make them turn to the market to resolve. Or perhaps it’s just a struggle to distinguish sex in the movies, and all the hidden variables of production and constraints of form that compress sex into an image we can see, from sex in real life. But I’m in the movies— shouldn’t I know better?
XO,
TY