I’m gonna count this as a local story — because, hey, Google’s right down the peninsula. And I’m gonna count this as research — because, hey, it’s my job. While casually looking up photos, for work, associated with the new kinda boring HBO series “Hung” — about a lengthy middle-aged hustler which takes place in my hometown Detroit, at least a suburb of it, and has served for critics who should know better as nothing but a big ol “shit on the Motor City” punching bag — I was pleasantly surprised to find that this image came right up at the top of my safe-mode-off Google Image search this morning:
Ethan Imboden, center. Photo from the blog of Rose Apodaca. The vibrator, in its evolution, has come a long, long way. The first vibrators, which debuted in the late 19th century, look nothing like sex toys as we know them today and everything like like the kind of power tools you’d find in the basement lair of a serial killer. They also came with sexy names like the “Shelton Deluxe-Wayne Vibrator” and “Dr. Ocara’s Pulsocon,” though more appropriate names for these toys run along the lines of the “Pleasure of Pain” and “Use me if you don’t want a clitoris by the time we’re through”. As the decades progressed, vibrator manufacturers continued to struggle with design. The design of 1950s-era vibrators were not a great improvement on the vibrators of the 1890s, as evidenced by this toaster on wheels-made-of-hot-rollers known as the Chic Glorifier. Though utilitarian vibrators have existed for over a century, it hasn’t been until recently that sex toy manufacturers have started realizing that while having an orgasm is sexy, having an orgasm with a something that looks like a power drill is not. Having sex with a person is generally more satisfying if you are attracted to the person in the first place, so why can’t the same philosophy be applied to the act of having sex with a toy? So along came Jimmyjane. Founded by Ethan Imboden in 2003, Jimmyjane is a local company headquartered in Potrero Hill that sells high design vibrators, with price points starting from around $100 to an almost inconceivable $2,750 for the Little Gold Eternity, a gold vibrator adorned in diamonds and etched with hearts that looks like something you’d find on rich cougar’s bedside table (if you were lucky). An expensive vibrator isn’t for everyone (I myself cannot fathom spending over $100 on anything that doesn’t involve a week’s worth of groceries or a plane ticket), but for those who want an aesthetically pleasing vibrator and have the money to spend, Jimmyjane is a nice little oasis in a world of scary vibrators. Even for this skinflint blogger, spending over a hundred dollars on Jimmyjane’s beautifully designed Form 6 is not beyond the realm of possible futures. Ethan sat down with the SFBG to talk about Jimmyjane and the changing future of vibrators.
SFBG:You went to Johns Hopkins and got your degree in electrical engineering, and then you went to Pratt for industrial design. So it actually really makes sense that you’re doing what you’re doing. But do you recall the first moments, in your history as a designer and engineer, when you realized you wanted to make vibrators?
EI: Yes absolutely. It’s etched indelibly in my memory. I was visiting a sex toy trade show with a potential client. That was really the first time I really entered into the world of sex toys and accessories. I was immediately struck by the fact that design had not touched the category and there was such an opportunity to take the same discipline in my background and apply them here. I had some experience with sex toys, but not a whole lot to be honest. And I had no idea how much experience my peers had with these types of products, but when I got back that’s all anyonen wanted to talk about.
SFBG:Looking at your vibes, there’s a perceptible aesthetic. It’s minimal, it’s modern, and definitely ‘less than more’ when it comes to ornament. But what, in your own words, is Jimmyjane’s design philosophy?
By Andrea Nemerson. View more alt.sex columns here. Email your questions to Andrea: andrea@altsexcolumn.com.
Dear Readers:
I recently resurfaced on Facebook after lying low for a year or so. Participating in social media no longer really feels optional — if you want to see people, that’s where they went. I’ve also been fascinated lately by the way the new media are changing our relationships with our own histories. Never before has it been so easy to reconnect with your past, or so hard to escape it. And friending acts as a great leveler: ex-boyfriend = current book-club pal = your best friend in grade school = your mom. You have no idea what kind of person that former girlfriend — the one who eviscerated you in public and left you for dead — really is now, but there she is, posting recipes and kindergarten graduation pix as if nothing ever happened. None of these quasi-connections need feel any realer or more important than the "Which kind of dryer lint are you?" quizzes and exchanges of virtual knickknacks. That moment when her name first pops up in your Facebook e-mail, though, that’s as real as a sucker-punch to the solar plexus, and can feel quite similar. What happens after that is the story. If you’ve got a good Facebook reunion tale, please share it with the class. Here’s the first one:
Dear Andrea:
I Facebooked my high school boyfriend. I received a warm response and an update. He has a wife and kids and a finance career that sounds kind of sleazy. Way back, he was rich and I was from the wrong side of the tracks.
He PM’d me his phone number. I really had no interest in calling him, but I gave him mine, thinking if he really wants to talk to me, he can call. I’m married and have two kids and really didn’t care.
He called twice. I was surprised, but kind of enjoyed the conversations. I think my life now is a lot more interesting than his, and I’m doing just as well as he is. In high school it was always that he was going to go on to great things and I was just going to be a housewife (he told me this once). Now he sounds kind of out-of-control and I am quite satisfied with my life.
Also — he’s cheating on his wife, pretending to be single on online dating sites. Oddly, it sounds like he’s picking up working-class girls, like I was, which is weird for me. He says he doesn’t want a divorce. I told him that sneaking behind his wife’s back is wrong. I told him he should write to you although I doubt he will (and you’d hang him).
I definitely need to break the contact. But, you have no idea how empowering it is to find out I have, on my terms, a BETTER life than he has.
This is sleazy, isn’t it?
Lady Schadenfreude
PS: OMG! When I turned down an invitation to come visit while his wife was out of town, he de-friended me!
Let’s face it: Craigslist’s new “Adult Services” listing is pretty much just like the old Erotic Services one, but with a new name, a higher price tag, more inconvenience, and no more nude photos. But there’s a new Web site coming to town that might change the face of online soliciting for good: Stagslist.
Unlike Craigslist, Stagslist publicly accepts its role in facilitating online sex work. Stagslist exists solely as an online listing of erotic and adult services and gigs, with the difference being no monitoring, no charge, and no personal verification. For some sex workers, the lack of verification on Stagslist (Craigslist currently requires a phone number, a credit card charge of $10, plus a working Craigslist account) will be liberating. Stagslist offers greater privacy and a forum to post whatever you want, because they won’t screen or modify your ads. And for other sex workers content with Craigslist’s verification system, who feel that it offers a barrier of protection between them and the outside world, Craigslist’s Adult Services listing will still be an option. The arrival of a new erotic listing in town with the openness and viability of Stagslist will level the playing field so that Craigslist hopefully won’t be the main provider of an online adult services forum in San Francisco. And it gives sex workers the option of choosing which platform best suits their specific needs.
Stagslist goes live on July 9, 2009, at noon. While right now, there’s nothing on the site, I’m interested to see what Thursday will bring.
An entire classroom of 5th graders from the Elk Grove region, near Sacramento, will find themselves inexplicably having hot-for-teacher fantasies or, what is more likely more likely, nightmares, within the next few years. As reported by CBS yesterday, Crystal Defanti, a 5th grade teacher at the Isabelle Jackson Elementary, accidentally gifted her students with her own homemade pornography in a DVD that was supposed to be an end-of-year ‘memories’ compilation. She definitely gave her students something to remember. The DVD started with a menu screen featuring several different videos taken during the school year. The menu items ranged from classroom footage to um, footage of Ms. Defanti completely naked on a couch, crotch-to-the-camera, with her legs sprawled open. Defense experts say that because the whole thing was an embarrassing mistake, Ms. Defanti will likely keep her job and not face any legal consequences.
I think the question that weighs more heavily on our minds isn’t whether Ms. Defanti should keep her job or not (I mean, the poor woman’s embarrassment is punishment enough) but rather, “How the fuck does one edit a movie for fifth graders and accidentally put their own porn on it?” Because, seriously. Even the most computer illiterate among us know that autobiographical X-rated movies should exist on their own password-protected flash drive somewhere hidden far away from where it might accidentally be stumbled upon.
Local author Stephen Elliott modeling purple fishnet stockings, from Alison Tyler’s blog
Stephen Elliott is not one to hide his overtly sexual side. Nor, for that matter, are any of the writers and performers lined up at the “Sex, Music, Comedy Night with Jill Sobule” to be held next Tuesday, July 7, at the Make-Out Room (3225 22nd St). The event is co-sponsored by Kink.com and The Center for Sex and Culture, and proceeds will support The Rumpus, an online magazine about culture – predominantly indie and alternative in nature – spearheaded by Elliott himself.
The event is solidly sex-themed and will feature readings by former sex workers turned authors Zak Smith, Michelle Tea, Kirk Read, and Madison Young, who will be reading selections from her upcoming bondage memoir. A comedy performance by Kyle Kinane, a film from Wholphin, burlesque by Mariel a la Mode, music by Sig Hafstrom, and special guest musician Jill Sobule round out the night.
Stephen Elliott, the night’s host, promises lots of sexiness for your money’s worth. “Jill Sobule is sexy. Everyone participating in the event is sexy. Doing an event with Kink.com is sexy, and introducing people to Zak Smith is really, really sexy, because he’s an incredible artist who chose to make porn. This is the first time we are having an event with a real sex theme so all the authors are or were sex workers. And I was a sex worker as well, so you even get a sex worker host.”
SFBG’s Justin Juul asks zookeeper Jane Tollini — former penguin keeper at the San Francisco Zoo, and originator of the annual “Woo at the Zoo” tour — about life, love, and sex in the animal kingdom. Read the previous installment here.
SFBG:Do monkeys get off on human porn? Tollini: Apes do, yeah. You can teach an ape anything. If you bring in a human woman and have her demonstrate nursing to a gorilla that grew up in captivity, that gorilla will learn how to nurse a baby. But apes have pretty low sex drives so they probably wouldn’t be as in to porn as we are. The truth about animals is that very few of them actually have sex for pleasure. So there’s not much masturbating going on in the animal kingdom. It’s a little different at the zoo because our animals have more spare time, but masturbating and porn are pretty much human-specific. There are a few exceptions, I guess. I mean I’ve heard that alligators, elephants, and some primates have g-spots. But who the hell knows? I mean, how did they figure that out? You don’t just stick your finger inside and alligator and go “Does this feel good?” I mean, what…do they do give them a cigarette afterwards? Come on!
SFBG:You mentioned gay penguins a minute ago, and that’s something everybody knows about, but I was wondering, are there any other animals out there that practice homosexuality? And if so, what do you think that means for humans? I mean, if it’s not an issue for animals, why is it always such an issue for us? Tollini: Oh my god! There are so many animals out there who just love the one they’re with. Really, you’d be surprised. I’ve seen gay chimps, gay birds, gay everything! Manatees –who are on the endangered species list, by the way, so they have an extra incentive to reproduce– form lifelong homosexual bonds in both sexes. And so do other animals, which to me is proof that being gay is totally natural.
SFBG:Is there any sort of ostracizing that goes down, like how humans gay bash each other?
I don’t really know where to start. There was the waiter making sweet love to his customer on the table, the robot doing it with electronics, the freaky sex clowns and a hot dog ravishingly screwing a tomato ’til it turned into small packages of ketchup. It was the Air Sex Championships at the Independent on June 24, and all the contestants put every bit of their sexual energy to make the voyeuristic crowd howl and laugh. The highlight of the event was an impromptu last minute addition to the competition named Pandora’s Box, who, without any fancy props or even a costume, stole the show with her exotic and erotic moves that left everyone begging for more.
Just in time for your big gay Pride weekend, the talented artists at the HomoChic collective have launched their and improved site, now complete with an online store where you can get your very own designer poppers top. Created by SF’s Leo Herrera and NYC artisan Blue Bayer, these simultaneously classy and slutty swine-themed poppers tops are available in 14K gold plate or sterling silver, and come with a little chain so that you can conveniently wear your poppers around your neck (the coke necklace from Cruel Intentions is so ten years ago). Says Leo Herrera, co-founder of HomoChic, “”This piece of gay history is the best thing to happen to messy sex and sweaty dance floors since the pump lube bottle & the hanky code.” Herrera sat down with the SFBG to talk about the history of HomoChic, the innocent fun of poppers, and what it’s like to be a “chubby chasing feeder twink”.
SFBG: Can you describe, in your words, what HomoChic is? (And it’s absolutely gorgeous gorgeous, by the way). From my perspective, HomoChic is a little bit of everything, from photography to video to design to music to writing to fashion. From a creator’s viewpoint, what are you going for with the site?
LH: HomoChic.com is an artist collective, production house, and as of June 09, an online store for prints and gay artifacts. We produce events, films, costumes and images with a focus on gay anthropology and history. We are also planning on representing artists and performers through online promotion and commerce.
SFBG: How did HomoChic take off?
LH: HomoChic has taken off because of our focus on gay history and repackaging it in a way that isn’t too focused on looking toward the past (i.e. AIDS activism, “traditional” Pride) to shape ways of taking the Gay Movement to the future. At the same time, we are finding the resources and opportunities to create more of our own projects, so it’s something gay men of all ages can identify with. HomoChic started with myself, Jacob Sperber (co-founder of HoneySoundSystem) and my gay brother Allan producing art pieces that revolved around events and vice versa. Whether it is an after-party for an art show, or a film piece produced specifically to be a trailer for a nightlife event. The notion of Chic has always been associated with being a homo. As a lot of us, especially the younger generation, assimilate, we become too focused on being part of mainstream culture and forget that for a long time, the industries have looked to us to show them what’s cool and sellable, not the other way around. Think Madonna’s Vogue, or disco for example.
SFBG: How were you inspired to make your lovely pig-topped poppers bottles?
Confessions of an Ivy League Pornographer is an interesting look into the life of a young man who channeled his creative drive out of the hallowed halls of Brown and into the Los Angeles porn industry. However, Benjamin is hardly the first Ivy Leaguer to go the route of porn. Bill Asher, an ’84 graduate of Dartmouth College – this blogger’s own alma mater – is the President and co-owner of Vivid Entertainment, the world’s largest pornography distributer. H Bomb, a porn magazine published by Harvard students, proudly features “nude co-eds and critical theory”. In addition to racy photos of students sans clothing, H Bomb features student-submitted poetry and essays about politics.
Doesn’t this pic of an Air Sex contestant (having fake sex with a picture of his ex girlfriend) look like it should be the cover of some emo band’s next album? Just sayin’…
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>> Air Sex Championships
Watch the city’s best fake fucking as contestants vie for a place at the World Air Sex Competition later this summer.
>> Cybernet Expo
This three-day event directed at small, entrepreneurial adult ventures, hosts seminars about the industry and provide networking opportunities for industry professionals. Kind of like any expo except, you know, sexy.
Thurs/25-Sat/27, times vary. $149-$199.
Holiday Inn
1500 Van Ness
(877) 865-6578 www.cybernetexpo.com
Madison Young: renaissance porn star. She is most famous for being an adult entertainment performer and director, but she’s also a writer, blogger, sex educator, artist, and the founder of San Francisco’s Femina Potens Gallery, an art space dedicated to bringing visibility to the artwork of female, queer, and trans artists in our community. For Madison’s work as an advocate of queer empowerment in our community – and for personally making sure (via her www.madisonbound.com Web site) that we have plenty of access to hot queer BDSM – we’re showcasing Madison in our upcoming Queer Issue (this Wednesday!) in honor of Pride Week.
Madison recently sat down with the San Francisco Bay Guardian to discuss her work in pornography, the philosophy of Femina Potens, and the importance of art and advocacy in our community.
SFBG: You founded Femina Potens in 2001. How did you come up with the concept of the gallery, one that advances the art of women, queer, trans, and kink communities in SF? Why do you personally feel it is important for these artists to have a space to express themselves and showcase their work?
MY: I always knew that I wanted to create a physical space for artistic growth, collaboration and community connection. When I moved to San Francisco in 2001, I realized the focus that I wanted that space to have due to a lack of existing physical spaces for women and trans community dialogue around art and sex. Femina Potens fills that void. We have created an accessible and visible physical space in the heart of the Castro where the voices of visual, literary, and cinematic artist are being heard. We are breaking down barriers between the artist and audience, creating interactive art works, blurring the lines of gender and alternative sexual cultures, and creating a space for artistic growth of emerging artists who are exhibiting or reading side by side with queer literary and artistic legends like Michelle Tea, Annie Sprinkle, Carol Queen, Inga Muscio, Daphne Gottlieb and more. Its important for us not only to have transitory festivals and events at other organizations spaces but for our community to have a physical space where their work is celebrated. Creating spaces like Femina Potens allows women and trans community an honest reflection of their experiences and their lives. It also encourages more people in the community to exhibit their work. Our audiences range in gender and sexuality, attracting a crowd that is drawn to cutting edge art, alternative sexuality, avant-garde performances, and flocks of tourists who are interested in the “San Francisco Experience”.
SFBG: What sparked your interest in art? How would you describe your level of involvement with the general artistic community?
MY:I grew up in a very small conservative farm town and then the suburbs of Ohio. I always felt like an outsider. I was constantly trying to stretch my wings for something more. I was instantly drawn to theater and art from my first elements of exposure to this world. In a life where I felt unable to to express myself emotionally, I found art in its many forms to be the purest most honest expulsion of what was going on inside of me. Art was a way to connect to others and to communicate. Art was a way to get out of my head and into my body. I convinced my mother to let me attend a performance art school in downtown Cincinnati for my junior and senior year. That is where I truly found myself and knew that art would always be a part of my life. I often tell people that the first sexual experiences that I had were those that happened on a stage in a black box theater. That is where I first was able to let myself go and to energetically connect in an intimate way with another person.
SFBG: Do you think there are noted artistic, political, or ideological differences between the work exhibited at Femina Potens and that of more mainstream galleries?
By Andrea Nemerson. View more alt.sex columns here. Email your questions to Andrea: andrea@altsexcolumn.com.
Dear Readers:
I’ve known people who have sex for money, have sex as a hobby, write about (or perform about or do art about or teach about) sex as an avocation, and still have enough interest and energy left over to have the occasional bit of relaxing off-line sex at home with a partner when nobody’s watching or reading along. But I am not one of them. I get bored. There was a play about vibrators here recently and everyone asked me if I was going, but I said, "Eh, I’d rather see Up." I like to cook and read and watch shows about things that have as little to do with (my) real life as possible — high fashion, for instance, the nuttier the better. I like it when the models wear their dresses upside-down and have monkey-fur eyebrows and a teapot on their head. You don’t?
So … I’m a huge fan of Project Runway and a lesser one of its lesser successor, The Fashion Show. Every season, though, there’s some kind of challenge involving "real women" and, while it’s fun to see the contestants, used to dressing compliant stick insects, wrestle with a mouthy client who dares to voice her own, often scandalously après garde opinions (she often just wants to look nice, of all things), it’s appalling to hear what the designers have to say about the non-model bodies. Faced with the task of dressing a modeling agency admin instead of the expected model, one of the Fashion Show wannabes pouted, "She’s very normal. I don’t do normal."
Well too bad for you, darling! Let us return the favor!
So imagine my glee upon discovering a recent study which found that regular men (as opposed to fashion designers of any gender or sexual preference) not only DO do average women, they vastly prefer us. I knew it! All these years of assuring women that jutting hipbones and sunken chests are not only not required to attract guys, they aren’t even preferred, and now I have at least this one study to back me up.
This isn’t about the "something to hang onto" hypothesis, although I do think that men in general do prefer some padding on those they plan to bump up against, and not only to avoid all the bruising. Men who are attracted to women tend to be attracted to women, and women have boobs and butts and that cunning part in between, where it gets smaller.
The amazing Dirty D at the Air Sex World Championship in NYC
Have a hot imaginary date and don’t know where to go? Head over to the Air Sex World Championships, which will be held at the Independent (628 Divisadero) this Wednesday, June 24, and get up on stage. You’ll be sure to score.
What began in Austin, TX, has become a nationwide phenomenon, as it appears a lot of people really, really like pretending to have sex in front of a live audience. The ASWC has been snaking its way around America and finally lands in our sexy city after stops that have included DC, New York City, Toronto, Chicago, Salt Lake City, Portland, and Seattle. Frankly, I’m surprised this hasn’t arrived to SF sooner — although the whole idea of fake sex is sort of PG-13 in a city known for its unapologetic love of outdoor nudity and inappropriate public sex/masturbation/orgies.
After a year of sold out shows at the Alamo Drafthouse and the Paramount theater in Austin, TX, the World Air Sex Championships are taking it to the road. “Air Sex is sort of like Air Guitar,” said Tim League, founder of the Air Sex World Championship, “except instead of pretending to play an invisible guitar on stage, contestants get up there and pretend to have sex with someone who isn’t there. With their clothes on, typically. They pick a song to perform to and then have two minutes to impress the judges with their overall Airness.”
Like many things that have to do with sex without actually featuring real sex (sex video games, hentai, Dutch Wives, host/hostess clubs) the concept of air sex comes from Japan, where it began as an outlet for sexually frustrated men to act out their desires.
SFBG’s Justin Juul asks zookeeper Jane Tollini — former penguin keeper at the San Francisco Zoo, and originator of the annual “Woo at the Zoo” tour — about life, love, and sex in the animal kingdom. Read part one here.
Part Two: Donkey Shows — not as cool as they sound
SFBG:So! The real reason I’m here is to find out about donkey shows. I’ve been hearing about them my whole life, but I’ve never actually met a person who’s seen one. Have you? Tollini: Yeah, they exist. And yes, I’ve seen one. It was horrible and extremely gross. I was drunk and stoned down in Mexico. Not sure why I wanted to see it, but hey, you’re only young once, right?
SFBG:Have you seen any other cross-species interaction? Chicken fucking, goat licking…anything like that? Tollini: Oh yes, lots! There was this girl – I’m not gonna say here name, but she worked in the primate division — who just loved her apes to death. And we were just positive that she was getting down with them. She would bend over and give them a show in front of everyone and then she would stay late most days doing god knows what in the pens. Also, I have friends who have dogs and I’ve heard plenty of stories about canines sucking their masters off. The thing about the donkey show is that donkeys have pretty sizable dicks so a woman would have to be good and prepared, if you know what I mean. The show I saw looked pretty painful… but, well, you could tell she’d done it before. I also saw a pretty weird thing go down with an orangutan and a couple of cute college girls once. That was weird.
SFBG:Please go on. Tollini: Well, a few years ago, a couple of girls from UC Davis decided to collaborate on a thesis statement about orangutan reproduction. Obviously, they were gonna need some sperm, so they contacted The Sacramento Zoo. The zoo was cool about it and gave the girls permission to use one of their older orangutans, but also said that it might be hard because there were no female orangutans hanging around that weren’t already pregnant at that specific point in time. Also, this orangutan had arthritis so he couldn’t masturbate very well. You can imagine what happened after that.
SFBG:The girls found a different project? Tollini: Ha! No, the girls spent four months giving hand jobs to a grizzly old orangutan.
Accordion Babes calendar covergirl Sansa Aslyum will squeeze her box with the Yard Dogs on Saturday.
There’d be something inherently sexy about the Yard Dogs Road Show even if you left out the scantily clad dancing girls, sultry songstress, steamy squeezebox vixen, and mustachio-ed MC in his underwear. Their brand of vaudeville-style variety show, with its touches of circus, musical theater, and old school comedy, has a visceral appeal all on its own – much like an old film reel of vagabonds and freaks come to life.
But lucky for us, there’ll be no leaving anyone out on Saturday, when the Bay Area-based cabaret opens for the legendary Les Claypool at the Warfield. In addition to sword-swallowing, live music, wacky antics, and the usual stunning costumes, Saturday will feature Sansa on accordion, the beautifully synchronized (and scintillating) Black and Blue burlesque dancers, and Lily Rose Love’s come-hither voice.
There are few acts good enough or brave enough to follow the Yard Dogs. Luckily, Les Claypool is both.
Sometimes, porn takes itself way too seriously. Why don’t porn DVDs come with ‘bloopers’ features? Because after being gratefully exposed to Porn Fail, I feel my overall experience of porn would really benefit from seeing more bloopers. From a naked man doing a pirate jig in the background of a scene, to an overenthusiastic cumshot that makes its way to the cameraman’s eye, to um, trumpet sex, these NSFW ‘porn fails’ are great reminders of what the body is not capable of doing gracefully. If you’ve ever been embarassed about something you’ve done in the bedroom, reassure yourself with the knowledge that it even happens to people who have sex for a living.
Gloria Vanderbilt may be 85-years-old, but she will have you know that she is having none of your boring, vanilla bedroom fantasies. Famous for that whole 80s denim thing, and for being Anderson Cooper’s begetter, Vanderbilt’s erotic novel Obsession (about BDSM no less!) is due out on June 23, and, according to the New York Times, it comes with a healthy dose of flora, though not, apparently, of fauna:
Mint, cayenne pepper and a fresh garden carrot are deployed in the book in ways never envisioned by “The Joy of Cooking.” And there is also a unicorn, though, blessedly, it remains a bystander.
Charles McGrath cautiously sidesteps Ms. Vanderbilt’s own involvement in BDSM (and stiffly acknowledges that her novel “uses vocabulary and describes activities of a sort that readers of The New York Times are usually shielded from”), but I doubt the author is any stranger to her subject.
>> “Love and Sex in the Spin Cycle”
The Marsh presents Lambeth Sterling’s comedy concerning relationships, dating, marriage, and The Secret.
Wed/17, 7:30pm. $10-$15.
The Marsh
1062 Valencia, SF
(800) 838-3006 www.themarsh.org
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>> Frameline
The annual international LGBT film festival presents too many sexy, sensuous, thought-provoking, gender-bending, identity-questioning flicks to list (though I’d love to see Berated Woman, about an Orthodox Jewish woman who falls for a Christian Aryan Supermom). Check out the website for dates, times, and descriptions.
Thurs/18-June 28, times, locations, and prices vary.www.frameline.org
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>> Slinky Summer Tour of SF Strip Clubs
Slinky Productions hosts its award-winning walking tour of North Beach “gentlemen” clubs, this one open to couples. A professional exotic dancer will guide you through SF’s sexy history, host an elborate dinner at Chinatown’s infamous House of Nanking, and take you to Ruby Dolls, where you can pick up your own slink-a-licious outfits to take the magic home.
Fri/19, 6pm. $99/person or $190/couple, including club entrance, two drinks, and dinner.
Register at www.slinkyproductions.com
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>> MILF Fiction, Cougar Poetry and Cheeky Granny Literature
Anna Reed, author of Sleeping around Craiglist, hosts an evening of erotic readings about mature women and the carnal adventures they crave.
Fri/19, 6:30pm. Free.
Good Vibrations Polk Street
1620 Polk, SF
(415) 345-0400 events.goodvibes.com
69-year-old Dave Cummings, the oldest active porn star in America, has filmed over 500 movies and performed over 1,200 sex scenes in his 15-year career in the adult entertainment industry. He swears he doesn’t use Viagra, and when he’s not filming hardcore sex scenes in movies like Screw My Wife Please 32: And Make Her Sweat Like A Pig, Dave works as an educator and speaker, offering online classes on getting into the porn industry. Dave will be giving a seminar at the Cybernet Expo (1500 Van Ness) on June 27 called “Producing and Directing Adult Videos with Dave Cummings,” and spoke with the SFBG about sex, life, and his career in ‘old man porn’.
San Francisco Bay Guardian: First of all, congratulations on being 69! You are at arguably the most apropos numerical age for doing pornography and not many porn stars stay in the game long enough to get there.
DC: Thanks! I love my present life and age, and wouldn’t alter my past or present life at all!
SFBG: Nice name by the way! It can’t be your real name, right?
DC: No, it’s a stage name. Almost everyone in the porn industry uses a stage name.
SFBG: When did the idea of doing porn first occur to you?
DC: It happened as part of my swinging experience, specifically while Playboy Television was including me in a segment they were filming about swinging; that led me to a husband-wife team that filmed amateur porn, and my very first day as a crew member I was forced into doing a “stunt” money shot for the actor who was unable to do it that day. Subsequently, I performed in a few amateur movies, and then decided to try becoming a porn actor. I liked the fun of having sex with hot girls, AND getting paid for it. It was Heaven!
SFBG: What’s the market like for the kind of pornography you make?
DC: Aside from the present financial challenges foisted upon us by rampart piracy and copyright infringement, the market for my porn is unlimited. Although I’m a “niche”, people of both genders and of all ages seem to patronize my movies. The fantasy is that if an old, wrinkled, overweight, bald guy like Dave Cummings can have sex with such beautiful young actresses, then viewers can more easily envision that they themselves could indeed also have sex with the woman if they ever had an opportunity to meet her.
SFBG: Describe the sort of fan base you have.
DC: Mostly men looking for women to masturbate to while fantasizing that they are actually the one in the sex scene (not Dave Cummings!); couples looking for movies that show respect and caring for women; gays who appreciate older males (although I am heterosexual, I fully support their right to enjoy whatever sexual preference they want with other consenting adults); women who want to assert their right to get turned on sexually; and, women into the “daddy thing”.
SFBG: A lot of your titles have words like “Daddy” in them. “It’s a Daddy Thing,” “Sugar Daddy,” and “Dirty Dave’s Sugar Daddy”. You also have sex with much younger women in some of your movies, like “Barely Legal”. Your website talks about “teens getting drilled by Dave Cummings”. Yet the people you have sex with are, obviously, of legal age, and basically you’re just playing out a fantasy for viewers of an older man sleeping with younger women.
Frameline, the San Francisco LGBT Film Festival kicks off tomorrow and a quick glance through the festival schedule reveals that we are in for some sexy little treats. I have not seen any of the films, so I can only conjecture at their artistic or cinematic value. I did, however, sit through the trailers, and after doing so, I now know which films offer sex scenes.
Trailer for And Then Came Lola.
And Then Came Lola is the gay, San Francisco version of Run Lola Run. Because of the allusion to its German predecessor, in And Then Came Lola, Lesbian Lola is by plot’s invisible hand, forced to run – rather than cab – all over San Francisco in order to save her relationship with a girl named Casey. The film is described as a “fun-filled lesbian rom-com of 2009 complete with SF inside jokes and sexy bedroom scenes”.
Still from Boy
Boy is a Filipino movie about a young, rich lad who pays a gogo dancer at a party to go home with him, upon which they fall in love (and will forever have a great story to regale polite company at dinner parties when asked how they met). In the blurb on Frameline’s Web site, Michael Fox ambitiously alliterates: “lengthy, lovely, languid love scene”.
Trailer for Lollipop Generation.
According to its description, The Lollipop Generation offers these things: a bathroom blowjob, masturbation scenes, hooking, punks making porn, and lollipop licking. Shot on Super 8 film, the images might be too grainy to see all the dirty stuff, but at least you know its there.
Still from Dirt and Desire
Dirt and Desire is a set of dirty short films starring “sexy, hot, and porn-arific queers of all genders”. If something is described as “porn-arific,” you can bet there will be sex involved. Featuring shorts with titles like The Leather Daddy and the Unicorn, Kat-I’s Sex Toy Stories, and Tour de Pants, Dirt and Desire offers a feast of naked people doing, you know, all sorts of things.
Trailer for Greek Pete.
Greek Pete is a sexually explicit documentary about a year in the life of Pete, a rent boy in London who jumped in the game because he wanted to make fast money, and hooking was, in his own words, “the quickest and bestway to make loads of publicity”. Well, at least we feel less bad, in that case, for not feeling sorry for him.
Still from Thundercrack
Thundercrack is an underground porno/horror flick from 1975 that maintains the healthy cult following automaticlaly entitled to any movie of that description. The film stars 4 men, 3 women, and a gorilla, and “will arouse, challenge and question you through every torrid moment of solo, gay, bisexual and straight couplings, voyeurism and more”. Though not scary for a horror film, the scarily bad dialogue is truly something to fear. But hey, at least Thundercrack is funny, and there’s lots of sex.
Still from Shank
Sensitive, secretly gay thugs at so hot. In Shank, a sensitive, secretly gay thug named Cal drops trou in a “a sweet patio seduction scene” with a guy named Oliver.
By Justin Juul. Read part two of this interview here.
Woo at the Zoo, the afterparty
Being a part-time sex writer is tough because there’s only so much you can say about the topic. Lovemaking is a lot like eating in that way; we all have peculiar ways of doing it, specific attractions to wildly different things, and often-clashing ideas about what’s good and bad, right and wrong, etc. But it’s not like we’re breaking a lot of new ground when we talk about these things; we’re just sharing stories and ideas about an urge and all the weird stuff that happens when we try to satisfy it. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that sex is boring or that I don’t enjoy writing about it; it’s just that sometimes I need a break. That’s why I tracked down this month’s featured sexpot, Jane Tollini. Tollini is not a sex worker. She doesn’t do porn and she doesn’t work for a dildo company. Why interview her for a sex blog then? Well, Tollini offers something that bookish porn stars, ex-manwhores, and transsexual southerners don’t. She offers a sex writer the chance to talk about something other than humans fucking. Instead I get to talk about animals fucking. Yay!
Jane talks facts of life
As a life-long veteran of the San Francisco Zoo (she lived next to it as a child, served almost 20 years there as a penguin keeper, and now works as a consultant), Tollini has seen it all. From donkey shows, to masturbating raccoons, to highly questionable cross-species relationships; you name it and Tollini’s got a story. By the time she’d been at the zoo for a year, Tollini realized she had enough material to host her own beastly sex forum so she grabbed a microphone and never looked back. Tollini’s “Sex Tour,” now known as “Woo at The Zoo,” is an annual romp through the world of sex in the animal kingdom. It happens every Valentine’s day at The San Francisco Zoo, but you can check it out early this year on June 25th when Tollini will be hosting a special kick-off to Pride Week at The California Academy of Sciences called “How Animals Do It.” Tickets available here.
Part One: Gay penguins, animals with two dicks, and the way it used to be
SFBG:So how did you become San Francisco’s premier animal sex guru? Jane Tollini: I met a pair of lesbian geese named Alice and Gertrude. They stood out to me because, even thought hey had full access to a male goose named Henry Miller, they didn’t want to be with him. Alice and Gertrude laid eggs for each other and then they took care of them as a couple. It was such strange behavior; I just couldn’t help wondering what other kinds of kinky things animals got into. Well, as an animal keeper, I soon found out. When you get to the zoo first thing in the morning, you see a lot of things other people don’t see, believe me. I remember thinking things like “My God, it’s longer than my arm! It’s got a flowering doohickey on the end of it!” Soon after I started at the zoo, I was put in charge of the penguins and that’s when I really started to notice some weird behavior.
Reading this article about the risks of summer sex in LiveScience got me thinking about how I hate it when these sorts of alarmist articles come out, proclaiming the tired cliche that outdoor sex is bad for you. Not bad in the sense that it might land you in jail or cause you public humiliation if discovered, but bad — i.e. dangerous — because you might get sunburned, risk exposure to bacteria that live outdoors, or get your genitalia stung by a poisonous jellyfish (seriously?) from the ocean. We all understand that going outside to have sex comes with certain risks. But we also know that even though every so often another article will be published reiterating the same message, people will still be having sex outdoors. Let’s face it: outdoor sex is fun and people like it.
Even though sex on the beach might be more burning than hot, with the potential of, literally, sandpapering your sexy bits (sand, friction, ouch!), it’s not like people will simply stop doing it. Entire generations have had their fantasies fueled by the beach scene in From Here to Eternity. As a society, beach and other types of outdoor sex have made it on our collective list of “sex acts to have before you die,” right up there with the menage-a-trois and having sex on an airplane. If we didn’t take our outdoor sex seriously, why is there a book called The 50 Places to Make Love in Golden Gate Park? Instead of merely listing the risks, these articles would be light years more useful if they gave people clear alternatives (sex by the pool, for instance, instead of sex by the beach) or helpful tips on how to make outdoor sex safer. That way, we can all stop freaking out and start getting freaky, especially since summer is finally present — or as present as it will ever be — in San Francisco.
It goes without saying that we tend to take our Internet porn for granted.
Naturally, we are so inundated with porn in our pop up ads, our spam folders, and our Google searches (an unfiltered image search for something as innocent as “cucumber” will get you porn on the first page), it becomes the accepted standard that porn will be an immutable fact that as long as the Internet exists and that we will be entitled to free, or at least accessible, cyberporn until the end days. Unless we’re in the business of making internet porn ourselves, we don’t often think of the business or entrepreneurial aspects involved behind the scenes, or the planning and development it takes to get even the most basic of adult websites off the ground. But adult entertainment, as with any other profession, is a part of an industry (albeit one that is on the fringe of the mainstream) that relies on a complicated network of people who work together and interact as a part of a larger market. And, like all professions, adult entertainment is privy to a phenomenon known as the “Expo”.
What industry, these days, doesn’t have its own expo? Every day, in hotel conference rooms all over the United States, from coast to coast, from New York to LA, from La Quinta to the Four Seasons, professionals gather to drink coffee and mini sodas to meet one another and discuss things like customer conversion and marketing strategies. Usually these expos are a staid and boring affair, with keynote speeches by tedious suit-types with topics like “Putting Service Above Self”. We see them all the time in San Francisco. After the open bar closes down, some of the more adventurous professionals will make their way up from the Renaissance Hotel in Fremont to the city, just to go to Ruby Skye.
At least in the adult entertainment industry, expos provide some entertainment value.
Slightly exposed at the 2008 Cybernet Expo
If the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo is adult entertainment’s version of Web 2.0, then the upcoming Cybernet Expo is its version of the TechCrunch 50.
