OFFICIAL event photo featuring Reid Mihalko, Jiz Lee, Allison Moon, and Me!
There was Halloween in the air when the Castro Theater in San Francisco opened itself up as the host for the GoodVibes “Quickies,” this past October 26, 2012. It’s been the home of the festival since 2006. What first started out as rag tag, homemade erotic films has now become an international festival with a focus on sexuality that may or may not include nudity or graphic sexual content at all. There are a lot of upsides to the festival including shorts of the non-erotic variety but as the amount of porno decreases and the number of really slutty (so far as festival entries are concerned) flicks that could be distributed or screen in safe for work venues, I start to wonder if the festival should be renamed “You Tube Videos Gone Wild.”
I say this because erotic films really don’t get to be screen and enjoyed in many places. For one, the audience has to be carded lest the dangerous ideas of sexuality destroy our innocent and vulnerable youth. On top of that, you have to be on the lookout for innocent and vulnerable adults who protest events that screen independent erotic features and try to get them shut down for the over 18 crowd as well.The Adult Video News (AVN) awards focus on a particular segment and aesthetic of a global genre, the Feminist Porn Awards are a burgeoning venue for alternative porn, but I do have hazy fantasies where the best of truly amateur erotic and fetish films are screened because they never cease to amaze me with the curveballs of bad budget and niche vision they throw at an audience.
What I’m saying is that a curated selection of the “Best Of Clips4Sale” would be a night of unprecedented surrealist, evocative, and absurdist erotic film and it would be well worth the price of admission to see on a big screen in one night.
But we aren’t talking about my fantasy film festivals right now.
Arabelle Raphael, Maxine Holloway, and Bianca Stone in “Strange”
The Quickies featured a film called “Strange” by my friends and colleagues Maxine Holloway and Arabelle Raphael that also featured the incomparable Bianca Stone as well as BikeSmut (I’ve got a porn crush on them…) and Burning Angel to represent the explicitly pornographic film front. The overwhelming majority of the films in the festival itself, however, were comedic shorts with simulated or implied sexuality rather than raw sex. This is an important thing to distinguish because we need films about sexuality that aren’t hard or even softcore in nature. Although a variety of perspectives on sexuality from queer, to gay, to straight were represented they were not films that faced the same liabilities and distribution limitations that the three erotic entries do.
Sometimes the word “community” doesn’t really fit porn. It’s a complex word. My porno peers put a public face to a very stigmatized profession. We’re out there: facial bone structure, identifying body marks, pimples, drool, bad hair days, and all. We are a community of professionals and when we come together we’re often working on a project of some kind. The nature of that work can also mean that it’s hard to have friends outside of it. There’s the outright harsh “active” stigma against porn and then there are people who have different jobs and “could never imagine doing what I do,” and never stop to think of every instance in their life that has given them a lot of tools to be empathetic to it.
Carol Queen did NOT give any queer porn this check that night. It went to the birds. OFFICIAL event photo.
Within the porn world, the dirty queers have many ways of relating to the mainstream but our motivations and modes of expression are so wildly different we experience marginalization there as well. Queer Porn is definitely something that is growing but it is evolving differently than mainstream porn because it’s blossoming after the great 90s CA porno goldrush. In many ways, Queer Porn is much like a return to the 1920s Parisian “Blue Movies” from the dawn of the medium. I have a growing collection of silent pornos that are primarily French in origin. What I see in these films is the desire to represent the erotic on crude technology with a focus on the erotic as opposed to the heterotic. There are films in which the men will just as quickly fellate one another in a B/B/G film as they would enjoy the warm mouth of their female partner. There are strap-ons, a sense of whimsy, a political edge, and a broad variety of bodies.
While sitting in the audience at the Quickies, I had the sudden realization that more than working within a genre of porn I was actually part of a cohort. We’re still a very small group of people and we’re also an increasingly participatory type of porn. Within “queer porn” the roles of producer, director, performer, production assistant, and editor are shuffled around based on need rather than any solid stratification of roles. It’s not a school of porn that has a lot of money rolling into it but it does have heart, drive, and an insatiable lust. In Queer Porn, the DIY ethos has started to evolve into a DIT, Do-It-Together, mindset.
This was clear to me as I watched Bike Smut pedal their way across the film into acts of perversion that were recorded in Berlin, Germany. Berlin has been another happening place for queer porn and many of the bay area movers and shakers have fucked, filmed, danced, and splattered a lot of ink around to get tickets to the film festivals and galleries that are tuned in to the Queer Porn signal. It was in observing similar tropes and relishing the small differences when I could see this as a new take on an old movement.
Queer Porn: what are we making and why? It’s a question we ask ourselves all the time. We’re making porn but it’s not as simple as that. We’re scrappy but it’s clear that we learn as we go. When no one has a lot of money to take, it’s a little bit easier to avoid the cutthroat tactics because you know it won’t bleed. QueerPorn is not a spectator sport. We need to borrow your house, your lights, some safety pins and makeup sponges and is it possible you could pick up some dicks from a friend and grab some vegan pastries and coffee while you’re out? Although we might complain about how hard it is to work without much support from the outside world, you won’t really see that when everyone gets together for a wrap party to celebrate another film made against the odds.
Maxine Holloway and Siouxsie Q pose for a photo at the GoodVibes Quickies. OFFICIAL event shot!
The recent award show itself has its own purpose and agenda. The Good Vibes Quickies are not a queer porn film festival. In fact, truly erotic films were the minority of the evening. What I valued were my peers cheering each other on with a wide eyed sense of celebration. We don’t see our movies on big screens very often, you know. Moreover, the queer porn films are often the losers at this event and this year was no exception. We’re the bad news bears of porn and we know it. We’re a little hairy, a little loud, totally obsessed with fisting and other fucked up sexual ideas like unicorns and age play scenes from hell. Some of us are theory heads, some of us aren’t. Some of us studied film, others are getting by with iPhones and discarded video equipment.
Still, there’s something about the actual art we’re making that really links us together. Maybe that’s because we’re willing to go through so much bullshit to make it. Whether or not we ever win any awards outside of the “Feminist Porn Awards” for out efforts, there’s still something great about coming out with smiles on our faces, swampy bits in our pants just waiting to bust out, and a willingness to grab a camera and make a movies of ourselves .
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Check out my posts on “The Porning Of America” and “Beyond The Valley Of The Fucks” to read more about how porn valley came to be and what I like about nudie cuties and 70s porn.
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I’ll be at DARK ODYSSEY: SURRENDER this weekend to teach “How To Fuck Like a Pornstar” and “Liquid Nitrogen S&M Play”.
You can catch me at the Godless Perverts Story Hour on Nov 17! I’ll be up at the microphone and I would LOVE your support.
I asked a few people on Twitter that attended about why they thought why Love Birds had won because I was perplexed myself and found it only erotic in a nature is erotic sort of way. I wondered if people are still uncomfortable with the explicit aspect of sex and thought back in the vaults about past years winners–which I do recall a number of Queer winners.The Mexican wrestler one last year and did Princess Donna’s retro one win one year?
I think it won because it was well done (in a creative social commentary sense). But the main narrative was about survival as a living being and relationships. As you know what the festival deems as erotic is a loose interpretation and which is a good thing–let people express their sexuality as they wish but the downside is the event tends to favor the humorous aspect of sex–as noted by Sandy Bottoms who wrote an open letter to the hosts of the event about her discomfort with their commentary on labia and so on. It’s not a real critique of eroticism on film, its entertainment (I guess). It makes me long for a real erotic film festival, which isn’t so much about a winner but a place to showcase what the world or local has to offer. San Francisco should have such a thing. Shall we start one?
I asked a few people on Twitter that attended about why they thought why Love Birds had won because I was perplexed myself and found it only erotic in a nature is erotic sort of way. I wondered if people are still uncomfortable with the explicit aspect of sex and thought back in the vaults about past years winners–which I do recall a number of Queer winners.The Mexican wrestler one last year and did Princess Donna’s retro one win one year?
I think it won because it was well done (in a creative social commentary sense). But the main narrative was about survival as a living being and relationships. As you know what the festival deems as erotic is a loose interpretation and which is a good thing–let people express their sexuality as they wish but the downside is the event tends to favor the humorous aspect of sex–as noted by Sandy Bottoms who wrote an open letter to the hosts of the event about her discomfort with their commentary on labia and so on. It’s not a real critique of eroticism on film, its entertainment (I guess). It makes me long for a real erotic film festival, which isn’t so much about a winner but a place to showcase what the world or local has to offer. San Francisco should have such a thing. Shall we start one?