Flowers in Brooklyn
Flowers (Adult Movie Set) framed and on its way to the Don’t Be a Square group art show at Shag in Brooklyn.
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Filtering by Tag: SEX
Entitled
Yesterday I went to see the It Smells Like Girl show at Deitch in Los Angeles. The standout piece of the show was Nadia Lee Cohen’s Entitled. A giant box contains a virtual girl who gyrates, flirts, and appears to track your movements as you move before her. Poke the screen where her body is and she stumbles, drops, and develops bruises. It reminded me of Marina Abramović’s Rhythm 0. Devastating and moving.
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Topical Matters
I’m happy to share that a new short story I wrote, “Topical Matters,” has been published on failbetter. This story was inspired by a visit I paid to an adult movie set last year. The story line involves a sexagenarian in the San Fernando Valley who discovers that an adult movie is being filmed in the house behind his house.
Here’s how it begins:
“Stuart should have known something would happen on that day when he opened the door in the morning to retrieve the newspaper and noticed a religious tract had been left on the porch. He bent over, winced from the pain in his back, and scooped up the pamphlet. What is the Mark of the BEAST, read the cover. All the words were white except for the last word that was an alarming red. From the stormy sky behind the message, a bolt of lightning reached down to strike a building that was half the Vatican and half the U.S. Capitol.”
Read the rest here.
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A Comics Comment
Have you seen my comics? They’re online here, and they’re available in various anthologies, including here.
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A History of America's Most Notorious Business
Single mannequin, Hollywood, Calif., 2001 | Photo credit: Susannah Breslin
One of the book projects I’m working on is a nonfiction book about the adult movie industry. The working title is When Pornographers Were Kings: A History of America’s Most Notorious Business. The book interweaves narrative nonfiction, investigative journalism, and reported memoir. While the story’s primary concern is the adult business, from boom to bust to boom again, the narrative also includes my own backstory. In other words, it explores how I came to spend a great deal of time considering the manufacturing of pornography and what the means of production of explicit content and its product say about us as a society and a culture.
Currently, I’m reading Linda Williams’ Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible”, which I’m embarrassed to confess I’ve never read. (You can read her New York Times obituary here.) Today I ordered Jacques Lacan’s Desire and Its Interpretation, as I haven’t read Lacan since I was in college and feel it will be relevant to some of my ideas about desire and the Other. I’ll probably also re-watch Brian De Palma’s Body Double, which is a marvelous interrogation of seeing and the sexual object and features Melanie Griffith as the adult actress Holly Body.
Probably the most challenging aspect of this book—outside of revisiting Lacan, ha-ha—is bringing to the fore how my background led me to the San Fernando Valley and the indisputably most interesting thing about it. (To quote the late Evan Wright, in his devastating “Scenes From My Life in Porn”: “I would come to joke that the porn video is indigenous Southern California folk art.”) Both my parents were English professors doesn’t exactly suggest one will grow up to write about the porn business. But maybe being raised in a house that was emotionally chilly and in which intimate relationships appeared to be one way but were in fact another might.
One early scene I chose to include near the beginning of my book is something I’d never written about before. I grew up in a two-story pink stucco house on a steep single-block street in the foothills of the Berkeley Hills. My second-floor bedroom was the smallest bedroom. A set of windows faced the street to the east, and a single window faced the neighbor’s house to north. Sometimes at night I would open this side window. Below, there was a small courtyard off our dining room in which tall bamboo grew, and I liked to listen to the rustling the leaves of the bamboo made. In the darkness, I would watch the bamboo list in the wind and crane my neck so I could see the Moon or Orion tracking across the night sky.
At some point, the neighbors moved out, and, as I recall it, someone else moved in. The new neighbors included a man who may have rented the bedroom across the driveway from my room. He seemed to have a lot of girlfriends. Every weekend there was a new woman. There was a ritual to it. The man and this new woman would appear. They would go in the bathroom and reemerge in burgundy bathrobes. They would kiss and then … slip from my view. I had a sense of what they might be doing, but it was vague. I was witnessing a kind of transgression, I surmised.
Revisiting that scene made me wonder if that was a kind of cinematic experience of the erotic. As in a movie theater, I was in a dark room. In the darkness there was an illuminated frame. Within this frame, people upon whom I was spying acted out a drama of intimacy. When I was writing this part of my book, it reminded me of what an adult movie director once said to me about why he had gotten into the porn business. He was a fan of horror movies as a young man, he explained. But what he really wanted to see on the screen was what happened in the pivotal scene when the knife raised, the woman screamed, and the camera cut away. That was porn.
This was originally written for my newsletter. Subscribe to get it every week in your inbox.
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What I'm Watching (Next): Magic City
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The Audition, Cont.
A panel from My, My American Bukkake Too, 2004
As I wrote on my blog previously, I pitched a story about the most extreme, out-there thing I’ve ever seen in all my years writing about the adult movie industry to a popular podcast. This podcast tends to explore topics on the outer limits, so I thought this may be a fit. They responded, letting me know they were interested and requesting a 10-minute audio audition. Because these events had happened some years ago, I spent quite a bit of time going over everything I’d written about this particular subject over the years. Last Sunday, I created an abbreviated version of the notes I’d taken during my re-research. Last Monday, I made a list of 10 bulleted points and sat down to record. For this podcast, you can have notes and bullet points, but in terms of telling the story, you must do so off the cuff. In any case, my goal was to record the audio in one take, which I did; I figured my first go at telling the story would be the strongest. Then I sent the audio recording I’d made to the producer with whom I had been in touch. Now, it’s a wait-and-see game. We’ll see what happens next.
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My Photograph in an Upcoming Group Art Show
I’m delighted to share that one of my photographs will be part of a group art show in Brooklyn this fall. The show, curated by photographer Ellen Stagg, is called “Don’t Be a Square,” and it will take place at SHAG. The exhibition will be up from September 19, 2025, to January 3, 2026, starting with an opening reception on the 19th from 6 to 8 p.m. My work is titled Flowers (Adult Movie Set); it’s featured in the lower left-hand corner of the invite pictured in this post. I took the photo on the set of an adult movie in Canoga Park, Calif., in the spring of 2009. Below is Ellen’s curatorial statement. I hope you’ll check out this awesome exhibition.
Don’t Be a Square, Group Art Show
Curated by Ellen Stagg
Shag from September 19 - January 3
108 Roebling Street, Brooklyn, NY 11211
“To Be Square: Means to be old-fashioned, conventional, or uncool”
Erotic art is never square, but I asked the artists of this show: “How do you see outside a box when you put yourself in one?”
Making art in a square is not typical, but it can be done. Most canvases are rectangles in Landscape or Portrait, but a square is the same on all sides, creating a canvas for all the artists to be the same, but expressing themselves in their own way, fully and freely.
The artists in this show exemplify just that—all different. From color to black and white, and through the use of media from Photography, Collage, Drawings, Sculpture, Paintings, Video, and Multimedia, they all have a common ground—the square—and their own way of thinking outside their own constraints. By expressing themselves fully with the theme of Eroticism and what it means to them to be boxed into four walls, they are thus exposing their own deepest desires of sexuality and sensuality.
The work flows so well together because of their common canvas, but they are all so different in a playful, sexy, and thought-provoking way. If we are forced to be boxed into a square, how do we test the limits of our sexuality? Stop putting yourself in a box with conventions and don’t be a square.
Artists to show:
Agatha, Amanda Heck, Ames Robin, Daze, Dee Lee, Ellen Stagg, Isa McMullen, Jeff Faerber, Joe Borzotta, Lara Scotton, Leo Brooklyn, Marianna Carlina, Martina Secondo Russo, Micheal Paul, Peekaboo Pointe, Porkchop, subtexture, Susannah Breslin, Sy Rivers, Trixie LaPointe, Tom Tapit and William Thompson
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My Photographic Foot Fetish
Adult actors film a scene, Los Angeles, Calif., 2001 | Photo credit: Susannah Breslin
In my latest newsletter, I try and understand why I take so many photos of feet. Subscribe to get it every week.
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Books I Read: American Ecstasy
I can’t remember the first time I encountered Barbara Nitke’s American Ecstasy series, but it was a very long time ago. And more recently when I realized I’d never owned the book version, I wasn’t sure why. Then I remembered that I was sick when it was published. So, finally, I ordered it. And this book just dazzles. During my career, I have spent quite a bit of time on adult movie sets as a journalist, and I have never encountered a woman who had a similar experience, which is captured in this magnificent volume. In her own words, the words of the performers and crew, and her dazzling photos, she brings to life the often hidden adult business, what it’s like to insert yourself into its making, and what we can learn when we take the time to look at and listen to a part of capitalist production that due to its preoccupation with erotic fantasy is often misunderstood and frequently vilified. I read and pored over this book at a glacial pace because I didn’t want it to end. This is better than Larry Sultan’s The Valley. This is the real thing.
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Jerky Boys
Recently I’ve been tracking down print copies of my older work and posting the stories online. The latest is the October/November issue of Nerve magazine. You may remember Nerve.com. For a spell, they published a print magazine. This short piece focuses on one of the most extreme things I saw in the adult industry.
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The Audition
Awhile back I pitched a story to a podcast. It would involve talking about one of the most out-there, extreme things I ever witnessed as a journalist on adult movie sets (and there were a lot!). The production team requested that I create an audio audition of what the story might sound like. That prompted me to revisit everything I had created that was about that out-there thing: photos, art, writing. I also viewed the adult movies that were created on those sets, which I found on adult streaming sites. During this research process, I re-read “They Shoot Porn Stars, Don’t They?”, which I wrote in 2009 and is about the Great Recession’s impact on the adult industry. I had always felt that I hadn’t gotten the ending right, but when I read it this time, I thought I did. In fact, I think it captures what’s at the heart of my writing on the adult industry: the relationship between fantasy and reality and what happens when you insert yourself into the tension between the two. In any case, I’ll post more thoughts on this audition process down the line. For now, that’s it.
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Adult Movie Set, North Hollywood, 2001
Adult actress, North Hollywood, Calif., 2000 | Photo credit: Susannah Breslin
An adult movie actress poses on a North Hollywood set, 2001. For more of my photos, follow me on Instagram.
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The Actress
Adult actress with script, Los Angeles, Calif., 2017 | Photo credit: Susannah Breslin
An adult actress reads her script before shooting her scene. For more of my photos, follow me on Instagram.
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Scenes From My Life on Playboy TV
“My shtick was that I was the sarcastic one who covered the most deranged, out-there subjects.” Read my latest newsletter, which explores the five years I was on Playboy TV. Subscribe to get it in your inbox weekly.
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Triptych (Porn Valley)
A triptych of photographs I’ve taken in Porn Valley, from yesterday’s newsletter. Subscribe to get it every week.
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Sex $75
In the early 2000s, there was a very cool magazine called Arthur. It was edited by Jay Babcock and, per Wikipedia, “featured photography and artwork from Spike Jonze, Art Spiegelman, Susannah Breslin, Gary Panter and Godspeed You! Black Emperor.” Arthur was printed on paper and about all kinds of things: music, art, L.A. In 2003, I wrote an essay for Arthur, “Sex $75,” the title taken from a photo I took of a wall, on Santa Monica Boulevard, upon which someone had scrawled those words. My story was accompanied by some photos I had taken, including on the sets of porn movies. In any case, Babcock has scanned every issue of Arthur and made them available online as PDFs. It was pretty cool to see a piece I had written so long ago. The main photo at the top of the essay I had forgotten about entirely. I took it on the set of a porn movie filmed in a house above the Sunset Strip. When I arrived on the set, I asked if I could take photos of the male porn star, whom I knew, and the female porn star, whom I had just met, while they filmed their sex scene. When the woman hesitated, the male porn star said to her: “She’s cool.” Anyway, thanks for that moment, and for saying that. Time travel is pretty cool, even virtually.
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Ride It
Girl on a seesaw at a sex expo in the Chicago area. 2013 or so. For more of my photos, follow me on Instagram.
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The Porn Library Archive
In my latest newsletter, I talk about The Porn Library and what’s in this evolving archive. Read it and subscribe.
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Human Furniture
Image credit: Lanee Bird
In this week’s edition of The Reverse Cowgirl, my Substack newsletter: human furniture is fun, an intimacy coordinator reveals all, the wife of the Gilgo Beach killer speaks, the founder of OnlyFans pivots, the CDC issues body hair guidelines for women, and more. Read it and subscribe to get it delivered to your inbox.
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