Art and Porn

It’s all in the angle

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caitlin@sfbg.com

SEX “It’s hard when you’re making out with a babe and it’s really hot and you realize you’ve been videotaping a wall for two minutes.”

No one ever said that making self-filmed feminist porn was easy. But for local self-proclaimed “slut kitten” Maxine Holloway, it’s an important — and incredibly arousing — process. Holloway is the newest webmistress on Femina Potens gallery founder and sex activist Madison Young’s Feminist Porn Network. Holloway’s sub-site Woman’s POV (www.thewomanspov.com) is perhaps the first to feature only shoots which are filmed by the actors themselves — the letters in the title standing in for “point of view,” of course.

Hence, her phone interview with the Guardian last week had turned to tricky camera angles. It can be incredibly difficult to film your own orgasm, Holloway says. But she’s learned a lot since her first POV scene (in case you were wondering, it involved a passel of “Italian babes” and a hotel room). The key, she says, lies in reconfiguring the way you look at having sex on camera — which inevitably involves spending a lot more time in your viewfinder.

Which is not necessarily a bad thing. “You see things that you wouldn’t normally have the time to focus on,” Holloway explains. “Twitching fingers, a hand on a thigh that looks amazing.”

And she’s hoping that fingers will walk to the site to check out its clothes-on segments, also. “We have these really sexy, amazing, vivacious women on our website, and I want people to lust and jerk off to them. But I also want them to hear what they have to say.” Woman’s POV has posted interviews with Kink.com fetish model Eden Alexander on what it’s like to work in the porn industry. Holloway has penned educational letters to the syphilis infection (Hitler, Van Gogh, Beethoven, and Lincoln, it says, were all rumored to be victims of the STI), and conducted an interview with erotic comedian and dandigrrl AfroDisiac.

“We’re showing the wholeness of what makes women attractive,” she says. “It’s not just their breasts or how they fuck, it’s what’s on their minds.” Bay Area women will have a chance to be featured on the site at Mission Control’s monthly queer sex-dance party Velvet on Fri/2 — Holloway and Young will be trucking out a dirty videobooth for self-filmed couplings (or singlings), not to mention conducting a workshop on the empowering and relationship-boosting aspects of filming your hook-ups with a partner. It will be a “fun and safe place for people to explore their exhibitionism on camera,” promises Holloway.

This kind of multi-lateral approach to sexuality is just what Young intended when she started her first website, Madison Bound, in 2005. Although she was already a successful sex performer who had been curating sex-art shows at Femina Potens for five years — having recently pulled together “White Picket Fences”, a multi-disciplinary look at what family and future mean to local queer artists and sex workers — she found the web to be a particularly useful tool when it came to advocating alternative sexualities.

“The Internet has the capacity to reach a lot more people,” she told the Guardian on a recent afternoon in the large, white Mission-Bernal Heights studio that is serving as the Femina Potens office space while the gallery is between brick and mortar locations. “I’m a girl from Southern Ohio and I’m always thinking about the girl from back there.” Despite her central role in a burgeoning alt sex community here in the Bay Area, she feels a responsibility to make images of queer sex available for Middle America. “You’re just not going to have this stuff happen in front of you in Iowa.” Other subsites on the Feminist Porn Network include Perversions of Lesbian Lust, a slutty take on lesbian pop novels, and Femifist, a site devoted to the much-maligned practice of fisting.

Young has known Holloway for years — Holloway has hosted many of Femina Potens’ “Other View” panel discussions on BDSM, consent, and the anti-rape movement — and over the past two has watched her develop a distinctive voice when it comes to directing porn. “I wanted Woman’s POV to be a place where she could explore that voice,” she says. “It’s super empowering for [the webmistresses and actors] because they’re able to find out what they think is hot. Women aren’t usually put in that position to be able to find what turns them on. People are like ‘oh my god that’s hot. Oh my god that’s me!'”

That kind of discovery, Holloway says, isn’t just sexy — it strikes back at the disempowering way that society treats sex workers. She mentions that she sees the site as an important step in the sex workers’ rights movement. When asked to elaborate, she says that the movement’s about “the ability to support yourself safely and creatively.” In other words, it’s not enough to have a safe working environment for adult film actors — although that’s important too. It’s important that sex workers have the opportunity to portray the kind of intimacy that turns them on. What better way to do that than hand them the camera? 

VELVET

Fri/2 8 p.m.-2 a.m., $20 free membership required

Mission Control

Private location, see website for details

www.missioncontrolsf.org

www.womanspov.com 

 

More on the new cuddle porn: Jesse from “I Want Your Love”

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A while back, I spoke to filmmaker Travis Mathews about his feature-length project, I Want Your Love. (While tha film is still in development, a demo clip is available for online viewing). In an effort to get another perspective on I Want Your Love, I spoke to Jesse, who appears in the film and in Travis’ other ongoing project, In Their Room. Jesse offered candid reflections and insight into pornography, sex in film, and staying hard throughout a shoot. Spoiler alert: “penis drugs.”

SF Bay Guardian: Before I Want Your Love, you worked with Travis on the intimate In Their Room project. How did you first get together?

Jesse: Travis asked me to do In Their Room, basically because we knew each other through a mutual friend. I remember he approached me and said he was looking for people who were just comfortable getting super expose about themselves in their own space. I’m a performance maker, anyway—it’s what I do. So I guess he just assumed that I would be comfortable with that.

SFBG: When he asked you to do I Want Your Love, were you at all apprehensive or was it something you wanted to do right away? It’s obviously a lot more explicit than In Their Room.

J: Well, it’s funny. It falls on two sides. On the one hand, I was not at all hesitant, because the project itself and the way it was pitched to me and the way Travis has been thinking about this project, is like a whole set of theories around the way sex operates in film that I’m super behind. Travis has this whole kind of sociosexual idea about their being a savvy and discerning audience that’s ready to see sex integrated naturally into the narratives that they see in film. You can see that more in European avant garde filmmaking, but not so much in the States for all sorts of systemic reasons. The reason why Travis set out to do this project was really interesting and fascinating to me, and I actually thought the story sounded really beautiful. The story of the feature is kind of this person who takes this big, intense, emotional inventory of his life in San Francisco because he’s forced to leave for any number of reasons. And that resonates with me. I’ve moved around a lot and I have a really sentimental connection to place. Place is a really big thing for me. So all that stuff was really great.

In terms of being hesitant about it being more explicit, the jury’s still out. I don’t think I really have a concept of what it means for me to be having sex on film. As a performing artist—I’m a choreographer in San Francisco, and my work is very curious about bodies and curious about bodily functions and responses and fatigue and posture and all these raw physical states. And so I work with nudity fairly frequently. So this to me is just one step further, in a sense. It’s just another exploration of the physical state. And I think I see it as that. But what I’m learning, especially with the release of the trailer for I Want Your Love, is that the way that I make something and that how it’s received by all these people who are seeing this are two very different things. And I think I might find reason to be worried in the future, but so far, I’m just kind of, deer in headlights. I don’t think I really have a concept of what it means for me to be doing this kind of work. I’ve never done it before.

Jesse from I Want Your Love

SFBG: You touched on a few things I wanted to talk about. But before we go into sex in film, I wanted to just focus on porn. What’s your take on the current state of pornography?

J: I have a lot of respect for an industry that employs as many people as it does and that, in a lot of ways, is transgressive and sex-positive. I think, especially in San Francisco, there are a lot of porn companies who are doing things that are not just about getting off, that are actually reshaping the way people think about sex. I mean, Kink.com has incredible politics. There are a lot of companies that have really great politics. But at the same time, I say I have a lot of respect for them because truthfully I don’t know a whole lot about the infrastructure of porn companies.

In terms of what I see when I’m watching porn and how it relates to Travis’ work, I don’t know if there’s a need for Travis’ work as pornography. I don’t know whether people want to keep their porn dirty and their films deep. I’m not really sure what people’s response to that will be. Apparently there’s been a response from a lot of people that I Want Your Love is like a very different and more full-bodied turn-on for them, because there’s something familiar and humble and flawed about the whole thing. But as it relates to contemporary porn, I don’t know. I’ve always just kind of seen porn as what it is, and it’s kind of like a fantasy place. I’ve never really wanted porn to be more realistic than it is for me, as a voyeur of porn. I guess it is what it is. I feel like my sexual relationships and my sexual partners and the world I’ve created there is very satisfying for me, in terms of reality. So I don’t really seek out reality. But there is a weird thing where people are projecting a lot of reality onto I Want Your Love. A lot of the comments on Butt are like, “Oh, it’s just so real. It’s like I know them. I’m in love with them.” It’s funny because, stylistically I understand that this is a little bit of a trick to make it seem more real. But there’s nothing more real about I Want Your Love than any other porn that you see, although I don’t know if we’re calling it porn.

Jesse and Brenden in I Want Your Love

SFBG: You talked about being new to this kind of exposure. What kind of response have you gotten? Between I Want Your Love and In Their Room, are you getting recognized by any strangers?

J: I mean, this probably touches on a lot of my personally psychology and insecurity, but I’ve had a really weird shadowy presence on both of these projects, which is very interesting to me. I was fascinated because on In Their Room, I received less attention or shout-outs or comments than almost anyone else in the film. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that’s a reflection of me being, like, a not attractive or not desirable figure in the movie, but there were a couple things I was curious about. One is that I had a much more sexually explicit scene than anyone else in the film. And I wondered if it was this kind of archaic idea of giving it up too soon, that I was damaged goods or something. Because it’s really interesting. I did receive notably less press or attention than almost anyone else in the film, which is funny.

And then the same goes for I Want Your Love. I mean, my scene partner in I Want Your Love, I think is a very cute, very prototypically attractive guy. For both of these films, I’ve actually been able to kind of—I don’t know if it’s a curse or a blessing. I don’t know if I should feel ugly, or how I’m supposed to feel. [laughs] But I have not actually been approached, talked about, blogged about really individually all that much. It’s always the other guys. I seem to be very neutral or unexciting. I don’t know. I just go into the studio and do what Travis asks me to do. But according to the discerning public, it’s always the others that are more interesting. [laughs]

SFBG: Let’s talk about your co-star a bit. Where do you begin building that rapport and chemistry when you’re filming an unsimulated sex scene with someone?

J: With Brenden, Brenden was someone that I was already having sex with. There was a really great, excited, very honeymoon-y chemistry between us. It was very distinctively sexually. We weren’t dating or anything like this. … Every time we would sit down and talk about new guys, it would be like, “Yeah, but honestly, I could fuck Brenden’s brains out right now and be thrilled about it.” There’s very raw, obvious chemistry. We already wanted to fuck—really, really badly.

SFBG: Well, do you think that adds to the realism people are talking about? Could they be picking up on the history between you guys?

J: Yeah, I guess so. Which makes me think about real porn and how they walk into a studio having never met their partner, and they have to just have it ready. Which then, brings up the idea of the penis drugs. Because Brenden and I, we totally have boners for each other, but then we took the penis drugs, because for a shoot, you have to do extraordinary things with your penis that you’ve never had to do in your entire life. And so, I wonder if it had been someone else, maybe I just could’ve taken a penis drug and I would have been fine.

SFBG: I wanted to touch back on the point you were making about sex in film and how that’s something you see more in European productions. Do you think American audiences are ready for this? Is it going to take more independent movies like Travis’ to push them in that direction?

J: I would say it’s difficult to comment on a question like that in the incubator that is San Francisco. We’re so colored by what the reality of the pervasive national idea is. That said, I think that we are moving toward being more ready for it. I think people need to see specific social cues of independent filmmaking in order to feel comfortable with this. I think if you hold their hand and show them things that make them feel like they’re watching—I can’t even think of an example right now. But if you give them little social cues in this work that remind them that they’re watching something that they would see at the Embarcadero Center or at YBCA—you know, people like to feel like they’re watching art. They like to feel like they’re there and they’re experiencing this thing, and they were a witness to this piece of art. So if you provide little ways for them to feel this way, I think they’ll swallow the medicine a little easier. A spoonful of sugar kind of thing.

Director Travis Mathews makes gay porn intimate, cuddly, relatable

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Travis Mathews is quickly making a name for himself in the San Francisco film scene. A short film culled from his In Their Room series earned him top honors at the Good Vibrations’ Independent Erotic Film Festival last year. Now he’s working on I Want Your Love, a full-length scripted feature. Although Mathews has only completed one demo scene, the project is already generating online buzz. I spoke to Mathews about his inspiration for I Want Your Love and how the short scene fits into the bigger picture.


San Francisco Bay Guardian: The last time I interviewed you, we were talking about In Their Room. What brings you back to erotic film?
Travis Mathews: I have always liked to see people be really candid, honest, raw, intimate, vulnerable. And I think there’s a lot of different ways that you can show that and reveal that in movies, and one of the ways you can do it is through sex. But strangely, I think that’s what’s missing in a lot of porn, is that all of those things that I just mentioned are missing from porn. Instead, it’s just the very carnal “money shot” where it seems often divorced from feeling, from interpersonal relationships, and then all those other things I mentioned, like intimacy, vulnerability, honesty. I consume porn like most people do, and I myself feel disconnected from it, and I don’t really feel engaged with it and I don’t expect much from it. And I hear a lot of other people complaining or echoing similar thoughts. It just seems crazy to me that there aren’t more depictions of real people—whatever real people means—but not chiseled, “I go to the gym four hours a day, six days a week” people, having sex in a believable scenario that doesn’t seem stagey or ridiculous.

Jesse in I Want Your Love

SFBG: The scenario you present in this scene from I Want Your Love is definitely relatable—two friends who haven’t had sex with each other but are thinking about giving it a try. It’s something that many gay men have experienced. What brought you to that scene?
TM: It’s a scene that’s been stretched for the demo for a feature that I wrote. So it’s one of among a lot of other things going on, a lot of scenes and a lot of other mini-dramas. It goes back to the original thing I told you: I want to write stuff and I want to show stuff that people can respond to that feels honest to them, even if they don’t totally relate to it. Like, maybe someone hasn’t had that same experience, but it is an experience that a lot of gay men have had. I think a lot of people can make that leap, that like, “I get that. I think that’s probably something that really happens.” I’m not interested in creating big dramas that overshadow the intimacy and the more nuanced stuff.
 

SFBG: One thing I really liked about the scene is how natural it felt. Was everything there scripted or was there improvisation as well?
TM: That was all scripted. The only thing that was improvised is when they’re having sex—there’s lines when they have sex that are scripted, but the only thing that’s improvised is, there’s a moment when they’re having sex when Jesse says, “Oh, this feels so good. Oh, I like it so much.” And then he checks in with Brenden, and says, “Are you OK? Do you want more?” And Brenden says, “Yeah.” Like, really soft, and I like that a lot. But everything else was scripted. So I gave them the script for the scene and they basically memorized it, and they knew about it, and we had talked about it. During our first rehearsal, it was more of a workshop. I told them from the beginning, “I’m not so married to this script that we can’t deviate from it. I want you guys to bring parts of your real self to it, and I also want you to give me feedback on whether this feels like something you or your character would say.” So we massaged it together as a team and it was definitely at that point a collaborative effort. It was very democratic at that point. Me, Jesse, and Brenden, and my DP/producer Keith sat together and went through the script and tried out lines that I had written to see how they worked.

Jesse from “In Their Room”

SFBG: It’s impressive to me that it’s scripted, because it does feel so real. You don’t really get the sense that they’re acting.
TM: That was at the top of my list of things that I really wanted to keep an eye on, is bad acting. I feel like there’s a lot of other things that you can massage or you can hide or you can choose not to include and insert something else. But if you’ve got bad acting, it’s really hard to recover from that, I think. Because as a viewer, when I see something that’s poorly acted, I lose interest and I just don’t believe it. And I feel disengaged from it, which goes back to the problem of so much porn that tries to be cinema or tries to be like a regular movie.

SFBG: So let’s talk about casting. I know you worked with Jesse on In Their Room, but how did you decide on these guys?
TM: The first time I met Jesse was when I basically knocked on his door and went to shoot him for In Their Room. And then, we had a mutual friend in common, and then we had other friends in common, and we became friends. And I also really liked the way Jesse looked on the camera. Not necessarily physically—although I think that he’s really a sexy, handsome guy—but how the camera would catch his eye, or I would be able to catch him doing something really small that seemed to say a lot more. He’s really good at just leaning into really quiet moments that we all engage with when we’re by ourselves. He’s a performance artist, so I think that’s part of it. I also think that there’s a comfort level that goes along with that. He does it in a way that’s so natural. He knew from the beginning—we talked very little about, with In Their Room, what my intention was, but he knew what I was getting very quickly. And with his own work, he deals with issues of masculinity and things like that, so it’s not like what I’m doing is divorced from the stuff he’s doing. So he got it right away, and that was really refreshing. So I knew I wanted to work with him again, and I was starting to write this feature toward the middle of last summer, and I definitely knew that I wanted him in it in some capacity. When we went forward to do the demo, I told him about the project, I told him I wanted him in it as this character, and he was enthusiastic about it and wanted to be involved.

So then it was a process of finding the person who was going to play opposite to him. We had a casting call on Butt Magazine’s blog, and I put the word out there among boys in San Francisco. We probably had less than a dozen serious contenders, and we auditioned a bunch of people. Brenden was actually the first person that we auditioned. I had seen Brenden out and told him I was interested in having him audition again, and he did. He and Jesse have really, really good chemistry together. They can be playful and sexy together, and that was key for me. A lot of these other guys would have been great, I’m sure, some of them, but it needed to feel like—because they were supposed to be old friends or best friends—it needed to feel like they were comfortable inhabiting each other’s space, and that it was a familiar thing for them to be doing that. So that’s what I was looking for. If it felt like these were two people who had just met each other yesterday, and now they’re pretending to be close friends, it wouldn’t have worked.

SFBG: So the movie extends past these two friends, then. Can you talk a little about what’s going on in the full feature?
TM: What’s potentially confusing, I think, to people is that, you don’t have any sense in just watching the demo, you don’t have any real sense of what this whole feature is about. Or I think people think they do. But the basic log line for it is, Jesse’s character has been living in San Francisco for a decade, and for reasons I’m going to leave a little bit vague, there’s money issues and he has to leave the city. He can’t afford to live here anymore, and he’s moving back to the Midwest to live with his dad. So it’s kind of an opposite Tales of the City story where he’s not coming bright-eyed and bushy-tailed into this Emerald City where everything’s new and he’s going to experience everything for the first time. It’s like he’s done it and the thing that he’s grappling with is how much he’s failed this experiment of moving to San Francisco, or how much the city’s failed him. And the movie takes place in the last 24 hours before he leaves San Francisco. There’s a party that happens the night before he leaves, so there’s all these opportunities for these friends that are interconnected and then with himself to have a lot of quiet moments and reflection and introspection and things about what it’s been like living here, and what it means to be leaving it. There’s also a lot of opportunities for playfulness and sexy times.

SFBG: There’s a thin line between “porn” and “erotic film,” if there is one. I wanted to ask you about your reaction to the term “porn,” and also some of the more recent variations, like “hipster porn” and “mumblecore,” which are kind of contentious.
TM: Honestly, I’m kind of entertained in hearing different people label it different things, and I’ve decided—before I even released this—to not get engaged with debates or arguments or getting in a place where I’m being defensive about what it is. I feel like, I’m going to hopefully get to make the movie that I want to make, and there’s going to be sex in it, and yes, it’s going to be produced by a porn company. If people want to stop there and just label it porn, they’re going to do that. I can’t control how people are going to respond to it, so I’ve kind of let go of that. Some of these terms, I think are funny. Like, “hipster porn,” I know that that has a—what did you say, “contentious”?

SBFG: Just because a lot of people immediately reject the term “hipster.”
TM: Sure. Yet at the same time, I think if you’re somebody who’s well-tuned with the word “hipster” and you heard “hipster porn,” I think your interest would be peaked and you would be like, “What is that? I want to see that.” Although, you know, you might have a knee-jerk reaction and be like, “Ugh, hipster porn.” So I don’t think it’s as simple as it being a pejorative thing. And “mumblecore,” I love Funny Ha Ha (2003). I think it’s amazing, and I actually think “mumblecore” is a funny term. I like it. I know the guys that are sort of spearheading that whole scene kind of hate that they’re reduced to that. I like the intention of mumblecore movies. I think that they’re often really poorly executed, but I think Humpday (2009) was a good movie. I think the dialog was fantastic and it seemed real. And I also think that about Funny Ha Ha. But I mean, you go further: sort of the grandfather of mumblecore movies is Cassavetes. He would shoot things in this cinema verite style and get people to bring their real selves to their performances.

SFBG: You said in another interview that you’d like I Want Your Love to feel very San Francisco, and I was hoping you could elaborate. Why is that important to you?
TM: I come from the country, Ohio—I’m a country boy from Ohio. I don’t mean that I’m a country bumpkin, but I still feel wide-eyed and really grateful for the fact that I live in San Francisco, and that I’m able to survive here. The city has its problems, but I love living here. For a long time now, I’ve wanted to do something that was, in some ways, a tribute to the city without being cheeseball or so obvious but more nuanced. But then, I also felt that there’s a particular brand—there’s a regional gay in San Francisco. I wanted to document the people that I know in San Francisco in a way that felt authentic to me. Not in a way to be like, “Look at us, we’re so cool!” But in a way to show these guys—and there will be women in the feature, too—in the most candid way that I can show. The more I do the In Their Room stuff, or after having done that, I realized how much the guys I shot for the most part and the spaces that they inhabit just ooze San Francisco, without me trying to do that. So that was part of the momentum as I was writing the feature. I was realizing that without really doing a lot of work or without really trying to do this explicitly, I was going to be able to showcase San Francisco in a very nuanced kind of way.

You can view the demo scene from I Want Your Love free of charge at Naked Sword. Perhaps needless to say, it’s NSFW. For more information about Travis Mathews, check out his Web site.

Melissa Febos whips it good

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Whip Smart
By Melissa Febos
(Thomas Dunne Books)

In her new memoir, Whip Smart, Melissa Febos — who’ll be reading at Eros on April 4 — examines, with frankness, generosity, and unexpected grace, the four years she spent working as a dominatrix in a midtown Manhattan dungeon. Readers are invited into the world of high-price humiliation, in dungeon rooms decked to the nines in the accoutrements of masochistic fantasy, where Wall Street types pay huge sums to be flogged, diapered, and pissed on. Her revelations are often funny, occasionally sad, and fearlessly candid. Febos also writes of the heroin habit that led her to accept the job, and details the emotional strain and psychological effort of kicking addiction. She speaks with the SFBG about life as a professional domme and the process of turning that life into memoir.


SFBG: What is the single most frequent question you get asked when people confront your history as a dominatrix?

Melissa Febose: There’s really a list, and they usually come in rapid succession, and they are basically the same questions I answered repeatedly when I was a domme: What did your clients most commonly want? What did you wear? Did your parents know? How much money did you make?  People are pretty predictable.  I get really excited when people ask original questions, when people ask about the writing process, or the experience of publishing such a personal story.  It has been so long since I was a domme, and all the questions are answered very quickly in the actual book.  To me, the process of creating art out that experience is much more interesting than the actual job was. 

SFBG: Before your sessions, you write that you’d be in a state of “happy absence, whose vacancy made room for some other, unnamed thing”. You were free of all sexual desire and you “reveled in its absence”. This seems to me almost like a description of Zen, a sort of ’emptying out’ of ones desires. As you were writing about your experiences.

MF: Well, I don’t think my mental state pre-session could most accurately be described as Zen. I think of a Zen state as actually being a very present state.  There was a way that working as a domme necessitated a kind of presence, a clearheadedness, but I also think I was pretty detached emotionally from a lot of those experiences.  When I showed people early versions of chapters, they all loved the material, were intrigued and compelled, but felt there was an emotional element missing; they sensed that absence.



SFBG:
How did you access the highly specific memories, both physical and emotional, that you describe in your book? What was it like to enter, from a state of “absence”, one of presence?

MF: So when I really dug into writing it, I knew I had to enter, as you say, a state of presence with the experiences I was recounting.  Essentially, I had to experience them emotionally for the first time.  I think this was possible only with the distance I had from those years.  I had thawed out a lot between quitting and writing the book.  Frankly, I wouldn’t have been able to write this book, do the story justice, without a good therapist.  People don’t imagine memoirists doing much research, but that’s a misconception.  I did a lot of research for this book, and some of it was internal.

SFBG: What were the things you enjoyed the most about being a dominatrix, and what did you enjoy the least?

MF: I loved the feeling of power that it gave me, that having a secret life gave me.  I genuinely enjoyed the work, a lot of the time, and I loved many of the women whom I worked with.  Now, I love how much I learned about myself, and the way it made my heart bigger. I didn’t love a lot of the sessions – the way that I compromised what I was comfortable with in some of them. Clients who topped from the bottom also drove me bananas.

SFBG: Judging from the experiences you describe in your book, you pretty much saw the extremes of human sexual behavior. What was the craziest thing you saw during your days as a pro-domme? Does anything surprise you in the bedroom anymore?

MF: Well, I’ve always kept my personal sex life and my work in the sex industry pretty separate. Many of the things I did in session never came up in my own bed, and probably never will.  And if they do, it’s a very different experience. At work, I saw pretty much everything – sweater fetishes, bug fetishes, poop fetishes. You have to read the book for the goods on that front.

SFBG: Have any of your former clients contacted you since your memoir was published?

MF: Yeah, I’ve gotten a couple emails. All friendly. Though they haven’t read the book yet.

SFBG: Once you made the decision to publish your work under your real name, was there a moment between when you signed the contracts and before the book hit the stands, that you had a legitimate freak out?

MF: No, actually that moment didn’t happen until the book hit the stands.  Intellectually, I understood that the book was very, very candid, and that it would probably end up being a lightening rod for all sorts of opinions, judgments, projections, assumptions, and more.  But when the fact of that really hit my heart, it was pretty staggering.  I’m actually a very sensitive person; I want to be liked, I want to be considered for my full complexity as a human being, and when you publish a book about a single narrative from your past, inevitably, the public’s perception of you will be reductive.  That’s unavoidable.  But still pretty painful. 

I seriously considered publishing it under a pseudonym, but I couldn’t stomach the irony of publishing a book partly about eschewing secrecy under a secret identity.  Also, it was important to me that it be clear that I saw my experiences as valuable, not something to be ashamed of.  I love the fact that I am a living example that you can be a sex worker, a heroin addict (now former heroin addict), and also a college professor, a writer, a thoughtful person, an emotionally balanced person, a feminist – these identities are not in conflict. My past and present are all part of a continuum that makes perfect sense.  I want that to be visible.

SFBG: What are you working on now that we should keep our eyes out for?

MF: I’ve got a few novels gestating – when I have time to delve into a long-term project, I’ll see which one calls the loudest. In the meantime, I’ve been working on a bunch of short essays, which will probably be enough in number for a collection at some point. I blog regularly for The Nervous Breakdown, which is a fabulous site, full of great writing.

 


Those interested can meet the author in person during one of her upcoming San Francisco book readings. She will be reading at Eros (2501 Market, SF) on Sunday, April 4, as part of the K’vetsh Reading Series, at 8pm. On Tuesday, April 6, she will read at a RADAR Reading Series event at the San Francisco Public Library, Main Branch, at 7pm.

e.e.’s coming

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When I was a young reader first discovering poetry — and still very much under the thumb of my strict Asian parents — I blushed (for obvious reasons) whenever I encountered e. e. cummings’ name. In those prudish days, were I to know that cummings penned some of the most deliciously sensual poems of the last century, I might have been frightened off literature for good. This hypothetical is redundant, as I wasn’t scared off poetry and eventually outgrew those jejune ideas of virtue. This hypothetical is further redundant because his erotic poems were never published together in the same volume until now, in Erotic Poems, a new collection of cummings’ amatory verses and sketches.

Readers will delight in these works, which are as naughty as they are tender, bemused as they are earnest. Consider the below, from “16”:

(may i touch said he
how much said she
a lot said he)
why not said she

The poem winks at its author’s salaciousness while joyously proclaiming it. Other poems in the book replace cheekiness with bodice-ripping romance:

you said Is
there anything which
is dead or alive more beautiful
than my body,tohave in your fingers
(trembling every so little)?

Reading through these lovely pieces, I was reminded by how beautifully Michael Cain recites cummings’ “somewhere i have never traveled,gladly beyond” in the film Hannah and Her Sisters (by Woody Allen). I hadn’t seen that movie in years, yet as I read along I could hear Cain’s clement voice reading in my ear.

nothing we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility; whose texture
compels me with the colour of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain has such small hands

In the movie, as Cain recites the above excerpt to the sister (played by Barbara Hershey) of his wife (played by Mia Farrow), Hershey is seduced by the poem’s slow cadences and the sensuality of cummings’ beautiful words. The viewer, watching, can’t help but sympathize with her, even as she steals her sister’s husband. You can’t blame someone for engaging in a torrid affair with a man who read e. e. cummings from memory: it’s not the man she wants, but the poetry. The works in this newest collection, which was released earlier last month in time for Valentine’s Day, remind us again and again how thrilling it feels to be seduced by language.