It’s 1999 and I’m living in San Francisco. I moved here on a whim after graduating from RISD. I thought maybe I could find some work assisting photographers. That never happened. Instead, I am slinging cappuccinos, falafels, and ice cream at a coffee shop in Bernal Heights and lusting after my biker boss.
I am friendly with one of the regulars, Mark, a 40 something–year-old acid casualty with long gray hair. He likes to get high and he doesn’t like to work. Instead, he sits in the coffee shop keeping me company. Mark’s girlfriend is Janet Taylor, a sexy 50-year-old porn star from the 70s. She is retired and producing low-budget porn videos for a niche market of fetish collectors. These videos cater to specific male desires such as female masturbation, BDSM, feet, and peeing. I am fascinated by Janet’s stories, and we sit talk sex and porn for hours.
When I tell Janet of my background in photography, and my struggle to find work in the local photo industry, she suggests that I come down to her next shoot in order to meet the director, and “network”. I have no interest in working in the sex industry, and I realize the futility of networking with a porn director, but my curiosity for all things related to human sexuality is massive, so of course I go.
They are filming in downtown San Francisco in a 6-story sex club. The top three floors of the club are gay themed, while the bottom 2 floors and dungeon are straight themed. It is a beautiful Sunday afternoon, and the cleaning crew (consisting of 5 Mexican women) is busy cleaning up the mess from the fucking and sucking the night before. The club gleams under the harsh daylight as sun streams through the windows, it reeks of sex and cum. Mark gives me the tour and eagerly introduces me to the various sex contraptions.
The filming is on the first floor of the club, in the bar. The girls spread out in the bar dowsing themselves in cheap drugstore body sprays, and squeezing themselves into latex body suits and stilettos. The room is alive with the sticky sweet smell of cheap perfume and makeup. Three of the girls are skinny and blond and one is a strung out young black girl in a schoolgirl outfit.
As the crew set up, the three blond girls take intermittent trips to the bathroom, and then come back to the makeshift dressing room to argue with each other about who is doing which scene. I know what they are doing in the bathroom after they offer a hit off their pipe. I’ve been offered drugs many times in my life, but never a hit of meth from two tweaked out porn stars wearing latex lingerie in the bathroom of a sex club. I don’t oblige.
The first scene that they shoot is a BDSM scene between two skinny blond girls. I’m normally turned on by S&M, but this is far from erotic.
When the scene is over, the director comes out of the room looking flushed and excited and makes a b-line to me. He looms over me with a raging sweat pant boner and tells me how he can make me a star. He says that he needs a girl like me, “a young, buxom, fresh freckle-faced girl, that looks like she can take a hard beating”.
It is slowly becoming clear that he is in dire need of a girl to play bottom in the next scene bdsm. There is no way in hell that I am going to let a strung out meth addict whip me on camera for any amount of money or promise of fame. I am low in the self-esteem department, but not that low. Much to their dismay, I refuse adamantly. My refusal means that Janet is now the “bottom bitch” in her own film. One of the blond speed freaks whips her into frenzy for about 20 minutes.
When Janet emerges from the set, her skinny legs were covered in bruises and welts. I hang my head low, feeling like I let the whole team down with my inability to humiliate myself on camera.
The third scene is a solo performance with the prettier of the blond girls. She masturbates with a dildo. The director positions her directly across from me, and she props herself up on a barstool. She stares into my eyes as she fucks herself with a giant dildo, moaning and writhing on the stool, jamming it in and out of her pussy. She fakes her orgasm hard, glaring at me with eyes that say, “I know, that you know, that this isn’t real”. She teeters on the stool with one hand on the seat, and the other awkwardly penetrating herself. We giggle when it was over.
For the fourth and final scene they bring out the big guns, an aging, but still handsome, Jamie Gillis (another 70s porn star). He and the very young, strung out, black girl will perform a domination scene in which he’ll beat her into submission and penetrate her with his hands.
As the filming starts, Jamie verbally degrades the girl with his words and his hands while remaining completely dressed. She is on the floor in her white panties, writhing and crying like a little girl. He smacks her body and her face, while his words kept flying.
The scene lasts 45 minutes. When it ends, the girl is in a ball on Jamie’s lap, gripping his neck, tears rolling down her makeup smeared cheeks muttering, “I love you.”
I stumble out of the room stunned and flushed. Jamie Gillis comes over and puts his arm around my shoulders. He whispers in my ear about how it is absolutely necessary to incorporate domination and submission into all my relationships if I expect them to be satisfying. He strokes my back suggestively and begs me to come with him to a Hell’s Angel’s gang bang that he is filming the next day. Tempted, but wary, I politely decline.
I move back to New York the next month.