I'm Dead
Cool to see a photo of mine in Charles Saatchi’s 2015 book Dead: A Celebration of Mortality. I found it on eBay.
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Filtering by Tag: PHOTOGRAPHS
Neon Green
A neon green curved building in Los Angeles. To see more of my photographs, follow me on Instagram.
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The Zombie
A zombie on an adult movie set in the San Fernando Valley. For more of my photos, follow me on Instagram.
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Makeup
An adult actress applies her makeup, Canoga Park, 2009. For more of my photos, follow me on Instagram.
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Fuck You, Pay Me #22: May the Work Be With You
Pink-haired mannequin, Hollywood, Calif. | Photo credit: Susannah Breslin
This is part 22 of Fuck You, Pay Me, an ongoing series of posts on writing, editing, and publishing.
May was a busy month for me. Among other things, I published a short story I wrote 30 years ago for the first time online, I visited the grave site of one of my heroes, I checked out the freaks at an art gallery show, I saw a correlation between pornography and Cronenberg, I overshared in my newsletter, a TV show asked if they could use my photos, one of my photos was accepted to be in a group art show later this year, I was part of a variety show in a hipster enclave, I read a few books, and I worked on my novel.
REVISITING “THE APARTMENT” — I published a short story I wrote around 30 years ago, “The Apartment,” on my website. The story was first published in an anthology, Chick Lit 2: No Chick Vics, and is about a man and a woman and what it’s like when your entire relationship is built on secrets and passive-aggressive actions. Here’s an excerpt: “Her fingers were moving around and he could now see her in the hall through his own peephole and she was undoing her pants with her other hand.” I made the illustration by taking a photo of my own peephole, adding an eyeball in Instagram Stories, and taking a screen shot of that. Read it here.
GOODNIGHT, MR. LYNCH — I was heartbroken when David Lynch, who is one of my favorite directors, died in January. So much so that I didn’t visit the makeshift memorial at Bob’s Big Boy that was spontaneously created for him. When I learned that his cremains had been buried at Hollywood Forever, I decided to make the pilgrimage. I brought wonderfully fragrant lilies and a card that stated how much he and his work meant to me. In February, I started doing Transcendental Meditation through the David Lynch Foundation, which has changed my life. So his influence lives on.
FREAKS & FRIENDS — I like art, and one of my favorite galleries in Los Angeles is David Zwirner. This month, I checked out Cataclysm: The 1972 Diane Arbus Retrospective Revisited. The show was terrific. When I was a kid, I acquired a copy of the 1972 monograph, which includes the same images as in the Zwirner show. As a young person, I was dazzled by her work. The subjects were bizarre and freakish, too big and too exposed, doubles of one another or clearly troubled. I’m sure her eye shaped my own and what I understood a creative person could be: a fearless woman who considered those from whom others looked away. The show is up until June 21. Give it a look if you’re in town.
PULP | PORN — The other day I was re-watching Eastern Promises, which is one of my all-time favorite movies. In one shot, I noticed a striking similarity to the look of a young blonde curled on herself and on her side to the cover of Pulp’s This Is Hardcore. The former was released in 2007. The latter was released 1998. The first was Cronenberg’s vision. The second was Peter Saville’s and John Currin’s vision. To compare and contrast the two, I made a diptych of the images side by side. What do you think? Was Cronenberg influenced by Saville and Currin? Who knows. I’d love to know. If you know, let me know.
IT’S GIVING TMI — In my newsletter, I wrote about the time I visited the most exclusive sex club in the world and what that had to do with my mother. A snippet from my experience at the one-percent sex cub in a downtown Los Angeles penthouse: “I drifted between the rooms. In a bedroom I noticed the walls were covered in a type of luxurious fabric or leather. A three-way was entangled on the bed. A half-circle of onlookers stood around the threesome, ogling. I went to the window. The red, glowing neon sign on a nearby building promised JESUS SAVES.” Subscribe.
TV IS CALLING — Recently I got an email from a woman who was interested in using some of my photos in a television show. She wanted to see a certain number of them with a specific theme. I emailed those to her. After that, the show’s art director selected another grouping from those I’d sent. The photos will be used as part of a set on the show. Of course, I was paid for the use of my photos. I’ll share more when the next season airs.
NOT-A-PHOTOGRAPHER — Speaking of my photography, I saw online that a photographer I like was putting together a group art show. I sent her one of the photos from my ongoing L.A. Sex documentary photography project for consideration. She liked the image and will be including it in the show. I believe this is the first time one of my photos will be displayed and (hopefully) sold in this way, so I’m excited about that. I’ll have more information when the group show is announced.
READING IN HIGHLAND PARK — Have you heard of Space Stories? It’s a variety show at The Pop-Hop books co-op in Highland Park. I wanted to be involved, so I sent in a fictional short story I wrote (that will be published in an unrelated online magazine this fall). I was picked to be part of the show. I hadn’t read my fiction in public in awhile, but it was a lovely time, with an appreciative, engaged crowd. I wish Los Angeles had more literary events, as there’s a writerly population here that needs it. The next time you’re in Highland Park, visit The Pop-Hop. They do lots of neat stuff.
BOOK REVIEWS — This year I decided to only read books with pictures. This month I read seven books. One didn’t have pictures, but I made an exception because it was David Lynch’s Catching the Big Fish. The book is a collection of musings, reflections, and insights into the Lynchian process. One of the short vignettes is “The Box and The Key,” and the entirety of it is: “I don’t have a clue what those are.” If you don’t get the reference, you should watch Muholland Drive. More of my short book reviews: Books I Read.
A NOVEL IDEA — I’m writing a novel set in Porn Valley. The book takes place over the course of a single day. Its focus is a man who is involved in the adult movie business. This project is based on my nearly 30 years of writing about the porn industry. I guess you could say this novel is my Ulysses, or put another way the San Fernando Valley is my Yoknapatawpha County. The narrative winds its way through many of the diverse cities and communities within the Valley, from Burbank to Panorama City, Sherman Oaks to Tarzana, Chatsworth to [redacted]. I’m looking forward to sharing it.
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Lady Love
The storefront of Lady Love on Hollywood Boulevard. For more of my photographs, follow me on Instagram.
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Harvard House
The Harvard House Motel in Hollywood, Calif. at night. For more of my photographs, follow me on Instagram.
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Call Me Definitely
In my latest newsletter, we’ll take the call, Diddy and male escorts, an adult star gets sentenced, a strip club closes its doors, the Cannes Film Festival screens kink, the Playboy Mansion undergoes a reno, and more.
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Triptych (Highland Park)
Scenes from a recent evening in Highland Park in L.A. For more of my photographs, follow me on Instagram.
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My Photo in an Upcoming Group Show
A photo of mine will be part of a group art show later this year. I’ll have more information when it’s available.
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Take a Picture
Recently, someone reached out to me about using some of my photos in a TV show. I’ll post more about that when it’s available—if my work makes the final cut. For more of my photos, follow me on Instagram.
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Triptych (Girls & Boys)
A Van Nuys estate sale, fake John Cena, and Crazy Girls. For more of my photographs, follow me on Instagram.
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Triptych (Money)
L: Adult movie audition, Canoga Park, CA, 2018
M: Strip club, Memphis, TN, 2017
R: Hotel room, Burbank, CA, 2021
All photographs by me. For more of my photographs, follow me on Instagram.
To inquire about purchasing or licensing my photographs, contact me here.
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Meta L.A.
A storefront in Beverly Hills makes for a meta moment. For more of my photographs, follow me on Instagram.
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Mr. Lynch
David Lynch’s plot at Hollywood Forever Cemetery. For more of my photographs, follow me on Instagram.
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Black on Black
A black muscle car in Magnolia Park, Burbank, Calif. For more of my photographs, follow me on Instagram.
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Estate Sale (North Hollywood)
An estate sale at the North Hollywood, Calif., home of the granddaughter of Academy Award-winning production designer William Cameron Menzies. For more of my photographs, follow me on Instagram.
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Black Mamba
A mural of Kobe Bryant on the back of a store in Burbank. For more of my photos, follow me on Instagram.
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The Porn Convention
Photo credit: Susannah Breslin
This story was written by me and originally published on Forbes.com on July 30, 2012.
“You can’t write that,” Seymore Butts says the moment my hand moves to write down the two words he’s said, two words that summarize this story, that say everything there is to say, really, about the state of the adult movie industry, and one of the words is an expletive.
I’m sitting with Butts, born Adam Glasser in the Bronx, New York, 48 years ago, on two black plastic chairs inside of a square. Around the perimeter, porn stars sit on tall chairs at high tables signing glossy photos of themselves for patient men waiting in embarrassing lines.
The last time I saw Butts was for another story, and it was 11 years ago. I interviewed him in the living room of his ranch-style home with a kidney-shaped pool in the yard in the San Fernando Valley. His young son wandered into the room; his porn star girlfriend occupied herself in another part of the house. Back then the gonzo porno pioneer was in trouble with the Los Angeles Police Department, which had decided a movie Butts made, Tampa Tushy-Fest Part 1, was obscene.
Now things are different.
In the decade since, the adult movie industry has changed completely, and although Butts has gone off the record as I listen, he is telling me the story of everything that happened in between, and it’s a doozy.
***
Once upon a time, pornographers were kings.
I remember what it was like because I was there. The rise of the Internet was spreading porn across the planet like a virus. There were big budget feature movies, stunt sex videos in which lone women competed with one another to have sex with as many men as possible, and gonzo production studios cropping up like weeds across the Valley. With lightning speed, porn crossed over into the mainstream, and consumers couldn’t get enough. Or so it seemed.
A funny thing happened, though. Over the years that followed, porn became ubiquitous, the market was flooded with product, piracy ate up the porn industry’s profits, the Feds served a series of pornographers with a succession of obscenity indictments, and a recession swept across the globe.
By the time I sit down across from Butts at this porn convention on the second floor of the Donald E. Stephens Convention Center in Rosemont, Illinois, over which a steady stream of jetliners descends into Chicago O’Hare International Airport less than a mile away, the adult movie business has transformed totally.
The porn industry as I knew it is dead. And it appears a new industry has arisen.
***
Xaq Fixx is a former Air Force cryptologist and precision-guided munitions specialist. He wears glasses, has a significant scar on his forehead of undetermined origin, and sports a Lenin-esque beard and mustache, the ends of which he twirls into curls.
Fixx is the market research manager for the Adult Entertainment Broadcast Network, an online adult company that bills itself on its website as “THE #1 ADULT VIDEO ON DEMAND THEATER IN THE WORLD!” Among other properties, AEBN owns PornoTube, an X-rated YouTube, and xPeeps, an adult webcam site that encourages users to “xpose yourself.” It also produces the product Fixx is hawking.
I stick my finger into the rubbery, flesh-colored slit on the side of a plastic grey peanut the size of a very large loaf of bread. This is RealTouch, an “award-winning male masturbator” designed by a former NASA engineer that syncs with adult movies to simulate sex for the male with which it is interacting through your computer's USB port. The device retails for $325, and the package includes 120 RealTouch VOD minutes, anti-bacterial cleaner, and a 90-day limited warranty.
More recently, the company has begun marketing the RealTouch JoyStick, the lingam to the RealTouch’s yoni, which is to say it looks like a dildo. Available only to adult webcam models at this time, the joystick serves as a remote control for the RealTouch device, enabling users in remote locations to have “True Internet Sex™!”
Per Fixx’s instruction, Savannah Steele, a busty blonde porn star in a lab coat, moves the joystick, and the mechanism tightens around my finger and increases speed.
“It feels like having sex with a robot,” I announce. I extract my finger and wipe it off with a wet wipe from the box on the table.
I ask Fixx if he’s used the device. He hasn’t. “I’m a Linux guy, and it’s a Windows-only device,” he explains.
Fixx calls over Steve Papp, AEBN’s logistics manager. Papp uses the device regularly.
“I was a bit skeptical,” Papp says, but now he thinks, “It’s the coolest thing ever.” Sometimes, when his wife isn’t in the mood, she’ll tell him, “‘Oh, honey, why don’t you…’’’ And off Papp goes to find intimacy with his peanut-shaped lover.
“As a step on the path, this is a major leap forward,” Fixx tells me. The way he foresees it, one day we will live in a world William Gibson may as well have created wherein “you can create virtual realities that are indistinguishable from the real world.”
If this is future sex, I decide, we are not there yet.
***
The name of the panel is “Everything You Want to Know About Porn.”
Nine porn stars are on the stage. Perhaps 50 onlookers are ogling the spectacle, occasionally raising their phones or cameras to take photos.
An audience member asks what their favorite sex positions are.
“It depends on my mood,” Tori Black, who I last saw having sex with James Deen on a porn set in 2009, offers.
“I’ve always wanted to hang upside down from an elevator,” another girl chirps.
“I’m exactly where I want to be,” yet another starlet answers to a question I miss.
Shortly thereafter, the panel ends, and the girls file off the stage, disappearing behind the curtain.
***
Mr. Pete is not a nobody. He is a somebody.
You might think Mr. Pete is a nobody because no one is waiting in line and asking him to autograph a glossy photo of himself like the porn starlets on either side of him, but that’s because Mr. Pete is a male porn star, and when it comes to porn, the female porn star is queen.
Mr. Pete has been an adult performer for over a decade. I ask him how many movies he’s made, and he estimates somewhere in the neighborhood of 2,000.
Originally, he’s from Las Vegas, Nevada. “Kind of a womanizing guy” is how he describes himself. After he started working in an adult video store, becoming a professional woodsman was practically his professional destiny.
I ask Mr. Pete how business is.
“Business is great,” Mr. Pete says. “The Internet’s the future and the present.”
Nevertheless, Mr. Pete says, it’s harder for new guys who want to get up, get in, and get off for a living to break into the business in this down economy.
“The doors are closing,” Mr. Pete warns.
I ask Mr. Pete what it takes to do what he does.
He shrugs, surveying the crowd. “As long as you have a functioning organ, things will always work out.”
***
“We don’t believe God created pornography, but we believe He loves the people in it,” opines Rachel Collins, a pastor with XXXchurch.com who's standing in front of a banner that reads Jesus Loves Porn Stars when I ask her if the Devil created porn.
Collins has a halo of golden curls, a cherubic face, and a habit of standing very close to the person with whom she is speaking. I assume Rachel loves God and porn stars because her mission with the church is to stop porn addiction and save porn stars from porn.
“Porn is the oldest business,” Collins says, and I want to correct her, to point out, no, prostitution is the oldest business, but perhaps I am splitting hairs.
More troublingly for Collins, porn is “morphing into something else.”
What is it? Whatever it is, it isn’t good.
“It’s becoming more dangerous,” she tells me, looking worried for humanity. “It sells us something that doesn’t even exist.”
***
I press on through the thickening crowd. There are gangs of men leering at porn stars showing off surgically-enhanced cleavage threatening to escape the confines of low-neck prisons, couples holding hands and inspecting rows of paddles, ball gags, and chocolate lollipops in the shapes of male and female genitalia, and I count four men in wheelchairs whizzing along the floor on missions to meet the sex stars of their dreams. Two scantily clad girls ride a seesaw, and it takes me a minute to realize the handles are dildos. A dancer in over-sized hot pink nerd glasses, a black bob wig, and a pink star on her exposed butt cheek grinds away on a platform. At the concession stand, nachos are $4. The air shakes with the dull thud of heavy bass emanating from the customized car show with which the event is sharing space. A man tries to sell bottles of “male enhancement” pills he swears will make you “longer and harder.” An Asian girl with guns tattooed on her hips sells T-shirts emblazoned with her face. A blonde in a sparkly sailor suit and a Playboy bunny logo for a tramp stamp tries to get passersby to sign up for a lingerie cruise. A shirtless, baby-faced male stripper sits in a chair, waiting for something to happen, a giant Magic Mike poster behind him. In the Dungeon Experience corner, a man secures a woman to a chair, a strap across her forehead, her wrists and ankles bound, her male date watching. Porn star Stormy Daniels is selling a “hands-free lube dispenser,” and the man at the table shows me how it works by pretending to pump lube out with one hand and waving his other hand in the opposite direction as if engaging in sex with the Invisible Woman. I take notes in a booth selling sex toys, and “Making a wish list?” the proprietor inquires. A brunette struggles to stay on a giant pink mechanical penis ride before a crowd of appreciative men. Near the restrooms, a black man working a shoeshine booth gives up and takes a seat on a stool. In the bathroom, it smells like porn stars and strippers: peaches and apricots, sticky body glitter and platform heels with slits for tips, humping unicorns and money shot stardust.
***
Walking around the place, you can almost see the fork in the road. The point at which things split. The exact place where one group of pornographers went one way, one group of pornographers went another way, and things were never the same.
“Everyone will have to evolve or die,” Fixx told me, and he was right.
“We’re in the Now Generation,” asserts Shirley Lara, the “all-around person, so COO,” of Chaturbate, an adult webcam site.
According to Lara, 21st century porn is all about control. The porn consumer no longer wants canned movies shot on video a lifetime ago, directed by someone else, and featuring sex that follows a script. The new porn consumer wants to pick the girl, they want to control what happens, and they want to develop an intimate relationship with her, no matter how fleeting.
Jenna Jameson’s unattainability, her Barbie-on-a-pedestal unknowability, has been replaced by an independent contractor who works from home and is paying off her college debt with your virtual tips by having virtual sex with you. She’s a bombshell or the girl next door, the naughty teacher or the punk rocker, the MILF or whatever it is that your wife isn’t, that you don’t have, that you can’t get, that brought you right here, right now, rather than watching some stale free clip on an X-rated tube site that stole their content from a porn producer who is on the verge of declaring bankruptcy in a Chatsworth, California, office park, thanks to you.
***
“What happened? The Internet came around,” Butts said. “That changed the game. Nobody imagined these tube sites would pop up, giving away this content we fought so hard to create.”
A few feet away, his porn star girlfriend signed another autograph.
“Will recorded sex ever go away?” Butts asked rhetorically. “No. It’s for the collector out there.”
In theory, the porn dilemma is the same as the printed-on-paper book dilemma. Some people like the feel of the pages, the smell when they open a book for the first time. Some people like the new new thing, their porn digital and interactive.
Truth be told, nobody is sure where things are heading. The sexual appetite is a tricky thing to predict, and everyone here believes whomever gets it right will be raking in the dollars.
***
Raylene used to be a porn star. Then she left the porn business. She became a wife, a mom, a real estate agent. Until the housing market tanked. Then she came back to porn. Porn took her in with welcoming arms because that’s how porn is. It takes all comers.
Nowadays, she’s shooting eight scenes a month, and it's a hustle.
“I’m a little bit older, being a porn star at 35,” Raylene tells me near a line of men longing for her to return her attention to them. “In dog years, I’m, like, 100,” she laughs.
Raylene has long brown hair and big brown eyes. She’s smart, articulate, and self-aware. She's a businesswoman, and she's adjusted to the new market. Her rate for a boy-girl scene is $1,500—but that’s negotiable. Her rate for a girl-girl scene is $800—but that’s negotiable, too.
“I wish it was like it used to be for the financial aspects,” Raylene says wistfully. “Porn will never go away, but the money isn’t there anymore. There’s nothing left.”
***
On my way out, I stop and talk to J. Handy, the director of Exxxotica, which, as it turns out, isn’t really a porn convention, per se.
It’s “the largest event in the country dedicated to love and sex,” Handy explains, with stops in Chicago, New Jersey, and Miami. They tried doing it in Los Angeles, but there was too much porn there already, and the show was a bust.
Handy started the event at 26 as “something fun to do” with his friends. This weekend, he’s expecting around 15,000 people to show up and check out the porn, the paddles, and the penis ride. The bulk of the event’s revenue comes from ticket sales, and they make money from sponsors and exhibitors.
“You put a couple porn stars in there and call it whatever you want to, and guys will show up,” Handy confides, more and more people spilling through the doors.
***
I take the escalator to the ground level. Outside, it’s hot. Police officers are directing traffic. Two girls in skintight dresses and sky-high heels trot across the street, heading for the show inside where sex is for sale, and everyone’s trying to figure out what you want so they can make another dollar off it.
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Triptych of Women
A trio of paintings by Georgia Gardner Gray at Regen Projects in Los Angeles. Follow my Instagram for more.
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