The Bilerico Project | Daily experiments in LGBTQ

Last month I wrote about the use of sexual media to raise awareness around different issues. That post, Porn for Education, focused on written porn, which is almost always an individual production. Getting involved in video pornography, however, requires... shall we say "teamwork." The various interaction of performers, crew, director, and producer, not to mention viewers, leads to a much more complicated set of politics, rife with a history of exploitation.

There is a subset of the porn industry, though, which thinks seriously about such issues, many of which will be gathering in Toronto this weekend for the Feminist Porn Awards. I will be among them and am honored to have the opportunity to screen a preview clip of my upcoming debut film. (Note: the image below the cut may not be safe for work)

I'll take the time to report specifically on the Feminist Porn Awards this weekend, for now, I want to discuss my particular motivations in the film I made.

Most people are aware that the mainstream representation of "girl-on-girl" pornography is often considered "fake" lesbians. Such representations include a variety of inaccuracies and stereotypes. But the problem does not rest with the performers. In fact, many actresses who do "girl-on-girl" are lesbian, bi, or queer, however, they rarely have any decision-making power. Straight men produce the porn for a straight male audience that thinks of the actresses only in terms of fulfilling a fantasy. The performers must conform to the unrealistic expectations of the straight male imagination or get another job, and sometimes that isn't even an option.

In response to that, there is now a decent infrastructure for queer-woman-made porn that offers everything "girl-on-girl" does not. It has real people, real emotions, real sex. There is even a recent growth in trans men-made porn. Yet trans women in porn are still represented almost exclusively within mainstream porn production, which is constricted by unrealistic expectations about what a trans woman is and a society that regularly sees trans women only as a more objectifiable kind of woman.

Having been in mainstream trans women porn myself, I know just how unrealistic it is. While I appreciated the individuals I worked with, I resented being referred to in derogatory terms, requirements that my body perform on command, and being asked to do things that are physically impossible for me but have become standard in the industry. I felt like I had to strip away every symbol of my queerness and do my best to mimic the way trans women and women in general are thought of in male fantasy.

The opportunity for something better has existed for some time. For one reason or another, trans women are virtually never represented in dyke- or trans men- made porn. Fed up with this situation, I decided to follow in the legacy set out before me by my cis dyke sisters, when I wanted something done right, I decided to do it myself.

Having connected with several other trans women who had been complaining about the same situation, I was determined to create something in which trans women were able to represent themselves how they wanted to be represented. After a year and a half of work and several setbacks, Doing it Ourselves: The Trans Women Porn Project is finally in the last stages of post-production. And I couldn't be prouder.