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Purveyor, Fine Asian Porn
Industry Role:
Join Date: Jul 2004
Location: San Francisco Bay Area
Posts: 38,323
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Quote:
(cont'd)
Do you think there is less party-line rigidity about sexual identification nowadays? Do lesbians still give you grief about being with a man?
They do, but I get a lot less than I did in the '70s. Because I think a lot of the rigidity about what kind of lesbian you are is related to how closeted you are. Gay men always had a lot more confidence about their sexuality and they were also ahead of the game in terms of coming out. When a gay man typically hears that one of his friends has gone straight, there's this great sense of, like, "Oh yeah right. Well, he'll be on his knees begging for a blow job next week." You know, there's this confident attitude that he'll never be able to stop enjoying men.
Whereas with lesbians, there's this inferiority complex of women saying, "Oh no, I heard she's with a man. That's it, the ship's going down! There's only five lesbians left!"
Because lesbians felt the dominant hetero culture was so much stronger than their own?
Yes, yes. And male privilege and that penis just couldn't be competed with. There was no confidence that if you're hot for women, it's something that can't be just shaken off, that it was something more enduring and more primal. But a lot of the work in On Our Backs had that sensibility, that there was a lot to know and get excited about in terms of loving women. And no one can take that away from you.
Your personal life has changed a lot in recent years. You're a mom. You have a 6-year-old girl. Do you ever feel nowadays, well, I've performed my mission in life as a sex crusader, I've been doing it for 10 years or more. I'm a mom now, I'm not a kid anymore. Maybe it's time for someone younger to pick up the banner?
Well, sometimes, but where's the retirement program for sex crusaders? (Laughs) I'm proud of the fact that I've got godmother status now or that I'm top of the hill. But other times I feel lonely, like I would enjoy some competition. I think it's appalling that other people aren't popularizing the ideas that are in my book "Sexual State of the Union." As I've written, I did the book because no one else had the balls to.
What do you think of the state of pornography now?
In books, we have this unprecedented freedom nowadays. There's nothing you can't say in a book any longer. Because text is so harmless. It's pictures that are the problem. As long as it's words on a printed page -- not on the Internet -- as long as it's old-fashioned ink, you can see for miles and miles. The feeling is that only elite people read books, so no one gets threatened by it.
Do you think that's led to a rise in the quality of erotic literature?
Yes, good grief yes. That's why I'm on such a campaign to decriminalize the sexual content in films. Because you can see how much better the literature is when people aren't hedging and changing words and making absurd plot turns to avoid some kind of legal problem. If we had that kind of freedom in film, look out!
What happens when filmmakers can't have that freedom is they get very demoralized about pursuing sexual themes. Look at what happened with "Bound," the Jennifer Tilly-Gina Gershon movie I worked on, which I think was groundbreaking in many ways, and yet the American release of the film had some very beautiful seconds cut out of the lovemaking because it was considered to go too far. And it only went too far in the sense that those dinosaurs on the Jurassic ratings board feel uncomfortable with lesbianism. There was no beaver shot that had to be pulled. (Laughs) It was just their sense of anxiety about how exciting and arousing the scene was that had to be tranquilized by cutting some crucial moments.
And while the filmmakers are very proud of their movie and what they ended up with, they'll never forget the humiliation and the irrationality of that kind of censorship. After an experience like that, many filmmakers end up feeling, "You know, I think I'll make a tornado film next time. Who needs this?"
You can do the same old tired titty shots, but anytime you try anything more innovative or authentic or less generic, you're going to be faced with these roadblocks. Unless you choose to ignore the ratings board and financially structure your film entirely differently. Luckily, some people are doing that.
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