My Porn Industry Roots and Subsequent Adventures: the 1990s.

For Me, Writing About “The Biz” Means More than Fast-Forwarding.

One of the most popular questions directed my way is how I got started as a writer in the adult entertainment industry. There are usually two major reasons for this question: genuine curiosity and a desire to do likewise. Sadly, the latter’s assumption is often that the bar is set low for writing about sex and therefore anyone who’s taken an English class and masturbated, not necessarily at the same time, is qualified.

The truth, as anyone who writes about anything professionally will tell you, is that gigs are often hard-fought, unstable, and unlikely to make you rich. Although the internet was made for sex, it was not apparently made to make sex writers millionaires. Not yet anyway. Writers will also tell you that we don’t have good sense. The minority of professionals who are fortunate enough to be members of a union aside, most of us write because… well, it’s what we do. For a better understanding of why, refer to the sentence where I mention that we don’t have good sense.

Something amazing and new was introduced to mainstream America during the early 1990s and once I recovered enough from a near-fatal car wreck to own and use a personal computer, I was addicted to its communication potential. The internet didn’t exist yet, but what we had was a short step from the internet. Usenet, FidoNet, and other resources could be reached via local BBSs, which were dial-up networks of computer servers that allowed users with infinite patience to log in and then upload or download files, read news, browse bulletins, and swap messages. It was a wild frontier, with taboo images everywhere, specializing in extreme violence, all manner of sex, and, of course, cats.

During my brief post-university attempt to pretend I was normal, I lost my chance at a respectable position with a well-known national bank that could have led to a banking career. The management found a one-page semi-fiction piece I’d written, and that someone had left behind them in the break room. It was about a Portland woman who had escaped from the trunk of a kidnapper’s car and had a PTSD flashback, The maybe 500-word story freaked the higher-ups out. They thought it was a page from my diary and told me not to come back, not even to pick up my belongings. Well, they told me that via the temp agency I was working through.

Naturally, I went back to my now-former banking client to pick up my belongings.

My suffering within the confines of cubeland did not last much longer. My first ex-husband brought home a trashy tabloid, tossed it on the coffee table, and told me, “You say you want to be a writer. They really need a proofreader.” And they did. The T&A Times (the controversial publisher insisted it stood for Travel & Adventure) was the publication where commas came to reproduce with wild abandon. Although I had never been in a strip club or watched any porn not on a 9mm reel, I called the contact number on the tabloid and soon I was its proofreader. Gotta love the adult entertainment industry during the early 1990s.

At the last minute, I was offered an opportunity to interview a Score Group 40-Something Magazine model and was later informed by the publisher that I had made her sound like a PTA mom. I thought that was a good thing since it meant we’d cut through the porn performer fantasy bullshit and get down to the real, flesh-and-blood human being who shared her naked beauty and passion with us. I’m not sure that’s what the publisher meant.

Not long after I moved from proofreader to columnist and VHS porn reviewer for the T&A Times, the tabloid’s competition, X Publishing, launched a BBS. As I mentioned earlier, BBSs were my jam. I found myself in the middle of an ongoing professional feud that never got better, and I was asked to spy on the BBS, and then report back about its activity. Little did the tabloid owner expect that his more hip competition would figure out who I was and ask me to be the editor of his glossy cover magazine, Exotic, which also covered the state’s strip club scene, only better. Again, ya gotta love the adult industry in the early 1990s.

Between the two publications, I visited a lot of strip clubs and watched a lot of porn. I met Nina Hartley, Jasmine St. Clair, and Marilyn Star, the latter of whom thought I was hitting on her because I told her she was welcome to just hang out at my place away from the hotels and general touring tedium. In retrospect, I understand why she was suspicious. Sometimes my intentions are more sincerely wholesome than people expect. There needs to be more of that in the world. The wholesome intentions, not the unwarranted suspicions. Ironically, I also wrote a book about how to meet exotic dancers, although the big selling point was that Tyffany Million supposedly wrote it. What she did was let me interview her for it. We had lunch when we finally met after publication.

Once firmly entrenched at Exotic Magazine, I managed to both piss off the local Scientologists and attract the attention of Larry Flynt’s Oregon publicist, who was promoting his new book, An Unseemly Man. I received a copy of the book. I reviewed the book for Exotic. Mr. Flynt and I appeared on a local Town Hall show daring to speak well of pornography. I conducted an interview at his hotel, which he said was his only West Coast print interview during the tour, and I was invited to Beverly Hills for a personal tour of the Flynt Publishing Building.

Color me impressed.

My by-then-sainted father had been a member of the NRA. He had once pulled his 38-caliber pistol on me when I went into his bedroom at night for a handkerchief because that’s where they were kept. Based on these two pieces of knowledge, I conjectured that there might be firearms that I could sell and fund a flight to Los Angeles from by selling. Then I could stay with former stripper/then porn-star friend and webcam early adopter, Jacqueline Lick in her Reseda ranch home with fireplace and swimming pool. To this day, I do not understand why there are fireplaces in southern California homes.

As obvious odds would have it, I found two rifles, sold them, and was soon on my way to a job interview with the man in the golden wheelchair in his opulent executive office. It was there, post-interview, that I laid back on his ornate executive office desk, watched the smog collect under the clouds, and thought, “I never want to move to L.A.” Then I sat up, fell off the desk that was farther from the ground than I’d anticipated, did a tuck and roll, and was told I’d “Made his day.” Courtney Love’s cell phone number was on the corner of his desk above his drawer of sex toys, but I was way too adrenalized to memorize it. Mr. Flynt’s wife came into the room, and I was led on a tour of the Hustler office. I’d already met Mike Albo after I’d initially entered the building. I still don’t know why, but word on Usenet was that I terrified him.

After all this high weirdness, I found a pay phone and called my crazy boyfriend in the hopes that he could help me process what had happened and return to reality. Instead, I was brutally chewed out for what I’d done, which pretty much summed up our relationship. Then I paid $40 for a cab ride from a driver who finally turned off the meter because he got lost getting me back to Jacqueline’s house. I call a day like that a success.

Once returned to the blandness that was and probably still is the Reseda suburbs, Jacqueline and her fellow Lick Sister who was also doing porn but whose name entirely escapes me, heard my tale of high weirdness atop Larry Flynt’s executive office desk. The beautiful red-haired performer whose name is no longer in my mid-term memory banks let me know that she’d started her career with an intense gangbang and she considered what I’d just done to be diving into the “deep end of the pool.”

Given my sordid personal history, I still don’t know about that, but at the time, I figured it would make a good story to tell during cocktail parties if nothing else. That kind of thing has value as a topic for gossip in a world where gossip is a drug. Of course, it’s been almost three decades since this happened and this is the first I have said anything about it in print, so I haven’t exactly counted on the story to finance my old age or any stylish alcoholism I might develop along the way. This is a good thing for a lot of reasons.

Now that I’d swam with the big girls, Jacqueline deemed me ready to up my game. It was time to call AVN and offer my services as a writer. Once again, I talked on the phone to a man I’d never met whose word would determine the trajectory of whatever I was doing with my writing career. Fortunately, and unexpectedly, then-managing editor Mark Kulkis had a copy of Exotic on his desk, was familiar with my work, and hired me as a freelancer on the spot over the phone. Did I mention how awesome the 1990s were for the first generation of sex writers to have online communication and publication available? They were awesome.

Once I successfully defended my use of the Darklady pseudonym to then-editor Gene Ross, I became part of the late 20^th century/early 21^st century adventure that became the AVN empire. That’s when things started to get really interesting…