An Interview With Lorelei Lee, The Kinkiest Intellectual In Porn

The adult industry is facing its biggest crisis ever thanks to something called Assembly Bill 1576 which would require all porn performers to use condoms. At the forefront of the fight against AB 1576 is Lorelei Lee, perhaps the best person imaginable to be representing the industry. Next to Annie Sprinkle, Lorelei is perhaps the most famous porn star with an advanced college degree (Lee has a Master's in Creative Writing from NYU), and is shattering perceptions about people in the adult industry everywhere she goes. At the same time, it's important to remember that within the industry, Lorelei is also famous for her incredibly kinky side, which she has explored with kink.com for several years now. I recently chatted with Lorelei about everything from her work with Kink to her extensive exposure to the American legal system, as well as her love for Dolly Parton.

Tucker Bankshot: Around what age did you first discover that you were into BDSM, and how did that inform your life after making that discovery?

Lorelei Lee: Well, I didn’t even know what BDSM was until I started shooting in it. My first experience with BDSM was shooting at Kink.com, which wasn’t called Kink.com then, it was called Cybernet, and this was maybe my third ever porn shoot, and I went to a creepy looking warehouse (both laugh) in downtown San Francisco. I had answered an ad that said something like, be dominated by a beautiful woman, and I thought, Okay I’ll try that for a hundred bucks an hour, sounds great (both laugh). 

I met Marty who worked there then and runs Sex and Submission now, and I did a few spins, they took some Polaroids, (laughs) and I did my first shoot and it completely blew my mind. I had never experienced anything like that. I had never experienced something with a full body sensation, being completely absorbed in the moment, and so that was what was really exciting about BDSM for me, though I wasn’t going to go let anybody tie me up (both laugh). 

I pretty much only did it professionally for about five years, but then I started dating somebody who was pretty kinky, so I started to do some BDSM in my personal life a little bit. I had always liked rough sex though and I just had never had the words to describe it. 

TB: Okay, cool. Let’s jump around a bit here, because I actually have a question about kink.com, so let’s jump down to that and then come back. Your relationship with kink.com has evolved over the years from just being a worker for hire to actually creating and directing pieces for the site. Can you chart that evolution a bit, in other words, what led you to wanting to take more control over the pieces, and how did you achieve that?

LL: I think everyone who works in the industry for as long as I have, you learn so much from performing about what you like and what you don’t like, and what you think is hot and your imagination gets excited by performing in someone else’s vision, and it makes you want to make your own porn (laughs). I started directing here in 2009 because Princess Donna said to me, it’s time. She basically said, you can do this, I know you can, and I’m going to hire you to direct. And I was like, I don’t know if I can do it! Ahh! So many things that I’ve done in the industry I’ve sort of just jumped in before I knew I was ready, and it turned out I was (laughs).

TB: Which misconception or misconceptions about the adult industry bother you the most?

LL: Oh my God, don’t get me started (both laugh). I’m currently working very hard to fight against Assembly Bill 1576 so I was just talking to a co-worker the other day about the incredible frustration that I’ve had trying to get legislators to understand that performers know more about their own working conditions than most legislators know, and in fact much more than the people who wrote the bill know. When I go to lobby in Sacramento, I have piles of letters from performers, I have a petition with 600 performers signatures on it, and I go and I talk to these legislators, and some of them are very respectful and listen, and sometimes they’ll say things like, for example, the HIV test that would be required by this bill is a lower standard test than the HIV test that we use now in the industry, and I said, why would you give producers the option of using a test that’s less expensive and less effective? And they’re like, oh no, that won’t happen if we pass this law they can still use the more expensive test.

TB: Jesus. 

LL: Yeah, (laughs) and so I’m giving this long-winded explanation to say that what’s most frustrating to me is that they think we aren’t smart enough to speak for ourselves and when you get dismissed like that… I mean as a sex worker you get dismissed all the time, first by your parents, you don’t know what you’re doing, you don’t know what’s right for you, and you get dismissed by interviewers sometimes (both laugh) where they’ll misquote you, you know they ignore what you’re saying. But when it’s someone who has a position of so much power, it’s actually the most frustrating. Power over thousands of people’s lives and livelihoods. So right now, that’s what’s bothering me the most (both laugh). 

TB: Again, I’m gonna jump around a little bit, just to stay on this subject, but what has your experience been like in this fight against AB1576? Any surprising discoveries on your part as far as the responses you’ve heard from people on either side of the issue?

LL: Yes, absolutely. When, for example, Measure B was first up for a vote in Los Angeles, and I wrote an article opposing it, and at that time I wasn’t sure, first of all, what was motivating these kinds of laws. I actually had empathy for the people trying to pass these laws, and I thought, it’s possible that they don’t realize that this actually isn’t helping performers, that they actually do care about us. I no longer believe that. After having many conversations with the writer of AB 1576, with the sponsors of AB 1576, after hearing their purposeful lies in testimony, reading them in print in their interviews, I am horrified, actually, by their motivation. I am really disgusted, and deeply offended and frustrated by it. So to answer your question, nothing has changed, and that’s the thing that surprised me (both laugh).

TB: Yeah, I just don’t get it because, and it happens in all politics, is that they hide behind this guise where they’re introducing things to control people and bend them to their will, but they introduce it as, we’re trying to protect these people. You know, like the religious freedom thing in this stupid Hobby Lobby case, they’ll say, we’re trying to protect people, but they’re basically just trying to institute whatever their will is on all people and I feel that it’s more palatable to the general public if they say, we’re doing this for their protection.   

LL: Yes, and even more than that, the people who have been voting on the bill, it seems to me that they’re often motivated by fear of public opinion. They think that even if this isn’t the best way to protect performers, most of the public believes that condoms are good, this very simple statement, condoms are good, so condoms must be the thing we need in porn. They don’t recognize that there are so many other elements to this law, even if we take the condom question out of it. 

And I truly believe that these legislators know all of the problems with the law, and the problems with us having to release our HIV test results to Cal/OSHA for example, the problems with the testing requirements in the bill being sub-standard and being totally dismissive of the ten years that have been put into performer testing protocols. I think that they understand that, and I think that sometimes some of the legislators have voted to pass the bill anyway because they fear public opinion. So the public opinion becomes more important than the actual effects on people’s health. 

TB: Yeah, it’s absurd, but it sort of rules the day, unfortunately.  So thanks to your extensive lobbying against this bill and your participation in the John Stagliano trial, you have a lot more exposure to the legal system than most performers. Do you find that you have to start over from square one each time when trying to break people’s pre-conceived notions about the adult industry, or has a change occurred in the four years since the Stagliano trial?

LL: Well, I think that in California, that many of the legislators do have the understanding that porn is a business, and that it’s more of a business than it used to be. You actually were talking about this in your interview with Ashley Fires, right?

TB: Yeah.

LL: Right, so performers have become more of business people than they ever were in the past and so I don’t feel that we have that basic misunderstanding when we start talking, or if we do, they at least don’t ask me those basic questions, but everything else is square one. The workings of the industry are still completely opaque to people who don’t work with us. And I think the general public still doesn’t understand that porn is a business, for the most part. It’s still pretty much square one in that capacity. 

I went to NYU also and that was the first time in a very long time that I spent a lot of time with people that had no exposure to porn as a business and I definitely answered a lot of questions there. And also in Berlin, when we were doing the Q&A’s for About Cherry, which I co-wrote, and I had a lot of questions like, are there really women directors in porn or is that fiction? (Both laugh) Or a question of, could this really be a true story, because I heard that porn was run by the mob? (Both laugh) And people think that just because they heard something, or saw something in a movie, that it must be true. I don’t know? 

TB: Yeah, who knows? Who knows where these things come from, but they’re ridiculous. What I was thinking in my head as you were saying that is, if they do pass this assembly bill, they’re gonna learn real quick that porn is a business when all of that money leaves the state.

LL: Yes. Yes. And you know, my biggest concern with the bill is not the industry leaving the state, because I personally would not be horribly affected by that. I could go work in Nevada. (Laughs) I don’t necessarily want to live there, not totally my kind of place. But what I really worry about is the black market for porn that will be created here in California, and the women who will work in that black market, and not even women working who are working now who might then start working illegally even more so than people already are, but when you start working in porn next year, or the year after… And men, women and men who start working in porn next year or the year after, won’t have the experience of our testing protocols that we have in place, and they won’t know what to expect when they get on set, and will be more easily manipulated. 

TB: So this is an interesting question to tie into what you just said, which is do you feel that, as a woman, you have more power being in the adult industry than you would if you were working in the corporate world? 

LL: I don’t know. My jobs that have not been in porn have pretty much been in the service industry and a little bit of professional writing, and in the writing that I’ve done and in applying for those kinds of things, I am never sure whether being a woman or a porn performer has an effect because it’s so much a part of my identity now that I can’t separate, but it is possible. I do think that I’ve been respected as a performer and as a director in this industry by many, many people. I’ve had many experiences that my mom, I’m using my mom as an example and she would hate that (both laugh), but the general public would expect that I would be disrespected in the industry, and that just hasn’t been the case. So yeah, I don’t have a good answer for your question. 

TB: No, that’s fine. It’s interesting because you don’t want people to go on their preconceived notions of the adult industry that at the same time you don’t want to go on your preconceived notions of the corporate world.

LL: Right.

TB: So it’s hard to answer if you don’t have an intimate knowledge of that power structure.

LL: Right, but I will say, just anecdotally, that I do have friends that work in the corporate world who work with all men. I have one friend who is a boss in a company and all the other people who are bosses within her company are men. I work with so many women who are the boss (laughs), and that’s very exciting for me, I love being in that environment. 

TB: Yeah, it’s great, and that doesn’t happen in every industry, so it’s nice that you’ve found it where you are. This is gonna go off the beaten path a little bit, but can you talk a bit about your love for Dolly Parton, and maybe how you went from liking her music to considering her a personal icon?

LL: Yes, of course! I think that I admired Dolly as an icon even before I knew her music (laughs), and then I started listening to her music and I was just like, whoa, she is awesome in every single way! I’ve always admired her because she’s a famous person who was a friend of the queers and because of her famous story about when she was a child and saw a woman around town who she thought was so beautiful that she wanted to emulate her style, and then found out as an adult that that woman was a prostitute. So she has sex worker style, she says that if she wasn’t born a woman, she’d be a drag queen. 

I consider myself a queer femme, because queer femme ideology is something that’s always been very important for me, and recognizing that femininity is something that cultivate, and create, and put on is really exciting, and I think that Dolly just lives that. 

TB: Awesome. I love her too, the story about Porter Wagoner and how she took care of him even though he constantly tried to undermine her throughout her career, yet she was still loyal to him because he gave her her start. 

LL: Yes! Yes, she’s awesome, and there are so many women that you can point to who, on the surface, are using all of the traditional tools of femininity and they’re using them in conjunction with their massive brains (both laugh). So that’s exciting to me. 

TB: Absolutely. What led to your participation in the documentary Public Sex, Private Lives? 

LL: Well Simone Jude was a videographer at Kink, so I had worked with her many times over the years and she asked me to be the subject of a short documentary, because she was entering a documentary competition. So I did that, and then because of that, they wanted to make a feature length documentary, and it was pretty scary, you know, I really let them into my life in a way that, I don’t think I would do now with someone. They got me at the right moment (both laugh). A lot of things were changing for me at that time too, I had just gotten accepted to NYU, I mean even the process of applying to grad school is something that I never thought I would do, so it was a huge period of growth in my life and I was taking chances, and I was open to taking one more chance and letting them film me. 

TB: Well, yeah, and it’s really insightful and honest in a way that, and as much as you are open and honest in your writing, for me it was interesting because there was a vulnerability that I don’t see in your writing. And please do not take this as an insult at all, but you’re very assertive and sure of your point when you write but to see that vulnerability it was great and powerful, and I’m glad that you were able to give yourself over to that experience because it’s fantastic. 

LL: And, you know, Simone really allowed that to happen because she was with me the entire time, and what I mean by that is that she was emotionally present as well. Her being emotionally present during the filming allowed me to do the same.

TB: Yeah, and it definitely shows, which is great. My last question is if there’s anything else you’d like your fans to know, or perhaps anyone that’s discovering you for the first time?

LL: (Laughs) Gosh, I don’t know. I don’t even know what they know (both laugh). Sometimes it seems like they know everything already. Well, after reading your Ashley Fires interview, it was very intimidating that you called her the most fun woman in porn, so I would like them to know that I’m also fun even though I’m very serious a lot of the time.