Gig: Americans Talk About Their Jobs Part 27

p.o.r.n STAR.

Brad Armstrong.

I'm an adult performer. That's the politically correct term, at least. So that's what I mostly use. But when someone says, "Hey, are you a p.o.r.n star?" it doesn't offend me.

I get paid to have s.e.x in front of the camera for movies, and they distribute it on tapes or s.h.i.+p it off to cable companies. That's pretty much it. My real name is Rod Hopkins. But ironically that sounds more made up than the name I use in my films, like somebody who's trying a little too hard to be a p.o.r.n star. I came close to calling myself "Steve Steele"-you know, you have to find a macho name-but ultimately I settled on Brad Armstrong.

I've been in the s.e.x business since I was seventeen. I'm thirty-three now. I'm originally from Canada, and that's where I started out. I was a stripper for ten years. It put me through school. I studied art and advertising, just outside Toronto. I was doing the male dancing thing at night and then, one day, Playboy magazine came up here for a talent search and I made it into the magazine. From there I started going down to Southern California every once in a while to do more Playboy shoots and that led to Penthouse and Hustler-the boy-girl stuff-and then it was just a natural progression to get into the adult business, because you're dealing with all the same people. Eventually I decided to pack up my bags, move down here to L.A., and just go crazy.

The first couple of years, total, I probably made around a hundred and fifty movies. Even then, I didn't do as much as some guys, because I was working exclusively with my girlfriend at the time. A guy who isn't connected to just one partner, who's just taking gigs right, left, and center-he could be making over two hundred a year. But getting in with your girlfriend makes it easier. Because, you know, there's a billion guys who say, "I wanna be a p.o.r.n star," but everyone wants to use the beautiful girl. And if the girl says, "I'll only work with him," you're in. You're golden. And my girlfriend back then was very good-looking.

For the past five years or so, I've been contracted to Wicked Pictures. We're one of the top three companies in the industry. We do a lot of worldwide cable sales. Usually it's couples who see our ads on the Playboy channel or on Spice who are buying our movies. It's stuff that you're not afraid to bring home to your wife and say, "Let's watch." It's character-driven, story-driven. There's costumes, and definitely good-looking chicks, good-looking guys, a plot. We don't cater so much to the raincoat crowd, your hard-edged, hardcore viewers. There are companies where that's all they cater to-the nasty s.h.i.+t. We don't do that. There's still lots of a.n.a.ls, and facial come shots, but it's not usually degrading to women. Usually it's something that, as long as the woman's moderately open-minded, she can definitely view. It's an upscale place.

In the early days, before Wicked, I was doing lots of "gonzo" productions, where you're in and out of a shoot in a couple of hours. You'd basically walk in and say, "Hi, my name's Brad, let's f.u.c.k." The acting was just not taken seriously for even a minute. I would sit there after finis.h.i.+ng my dialogue and the f.u.c.king, thinking, I hope my buddies don't see this. The other actors would just be blowing through their lines, not giving a s.h.i.+t.

With Wicked, it's much more involved. You might not realize this, but most reputable performers in this business take the acting drastically serious. Not serious enough to go to acting cla.s.s, but still, we take our time, to some extent, to get things right. A shoot day could last fifteen, sixteen hours. And the filming of the whole film itself usually lasts from four to six days. So it's just much more serious.

A typical day for me, if I'm working, the call time's usually at nine A.M. You show up, get some breakfast from the catering table, then go to wardrobe and clean up and make yourself pretty. There's a lot of sitting around and waiting for hair and makeup. Then you usually sit around some more, waiting for the girl to be ready. All the girls douche and enema before their scenes, especially if they happen to be on the rag that day. It's no fun, when you're doing an a.n.a.l, to look down and all of a sudden notice a bunch of what's referred to as "love gravy" down there. But that's a really rare occurrence. It's only happened to me a couple of times. Usually, everyone keeps very clean.

Sometimes, while I'm waiting, I run over my lines. Other times, I just chill. If it's being shot at a cool house, then I can sit out at the pool and tan. Ours are just like any normal film set-lots of hanging out. Usually we'll do a couple of s.e.x scenes in a day. But for each scene there's usually only one "pop" shot. You know you're done when they say, "Okay, we're ready for the pop shot now." That's when they have enough footage and we can go home.

I really do enjoy the s.e.x, although it's definitely different oncamera than it is off. It's work. You're playing for the camera. You're in difficult positions, under hot lights, or hot sun, and you're f.u.c.king. You might have a lighting dude up between your legs, burning you with a light, while some cameraman is leaning on your shoulder, breathing into your face, and the guy's got bad breath. You have to be able to block that stuff out.

And I don't know about everybody else, but when I'm at home, I'm lucky if I can go for fifteen minutes. That's a good chunk of time. On camera you're f.u.c.king for two hours, realistically. You're thinking, "Okay, I'm ready to come," but you can't come because you have to shoot another hour. I've had to, like, stare at some of these hairy guys on the crew to slow myself down and get my mind into another place, to try not to come. It's definitely work.

Luckily enough most of the girls are cute and you're just into f.u.c.king them. There've only been a couple times that I really hated a girl. But these days I have a strict policy that if I don't know who a girl is, I pa.s.s on the job. Because if it's someone new and she doesn't know what she's doing, forget it, she can't learn in ten minutes. If a chick's giving you head, for instance, and she doesn't know how to give head, and she's f.u.c.king chewing on you, you're going to have to deal with that for like twenty minutes. It's not like you can be talking to her while she's doing it, because the fantasy is that she gives the best head in the world. You can't be saying, "Oh, no, hey, slow down-you're chewing on my d.i.c.k!" [Laughs]

I know guys who have started a scene, never having met the person they're working with until they're on-camera, and they ended up having to stop a whole thing and say, "Whoa, I'm not f.u.c.king that." And it's like a big ordeal because the crew is right there, ready to shoot. I mean, some of the women you're working with can be so beautiful, but sometimes they get spoiled. You know what I'm saying? I mean, even these girls I'm talking about-the ones I personally wouldn't want to work with-the average guy would probably say, "Oh, she's cute." But that guy's not right up in her face, under bright lights, seeing every flaw she has, and smelling every aroma. And remember: you're in there for two hours. It's not like a quickie, wham-bam you're getting blown in the car and you're out. You're there for the duration.

So I only work with girls I want to work with. And so I'm happy. [Laughs] I'm living out a lot of my fantasies. It's really fun that way. Like, the last thing I just did, we were in a s.p.a.ce capsule and I had on a big NASA s.p.a.ce outfit and they put a flap in it at the crotch. So I'm doing this s.e.x scene with this suit and this big mask on, and she's just going to town. She's a little s.p.a.ce nymph. It rocked.

For the most part, in these movies, we don't f.u.c.k in bed anymore. I mean how many times can you watch people f.u.c.king in bed unless they're gorgeous? We do a lot of kitchens, a lot of exteriors, and we definitely are leaning now toward setting the scenes in dangerous scenarios-public places-so there's the danger of being caught. That's a turn-on for most people, and the adult film world has sort of latched on to it. The industry actually has an award now for the most outrageous s.e.x scene. I think the winner last year was a scene in front of the Eiffel Tower.

I like the outdoor stuff because you're not all boxed in and surrounded by hot lights. Outside during the day, those are my best scenes. Some of these situations, though, can actually be kind of hazardous. For instance, if the scene is shot at night, you might freeze your a.s.s off. And there are lots of other variables you might not think of from the comfort of your own home-pebbles and twigs, sharp edges on lawn furniture-it's all stuff that can really cause a great amount of discomfort. You gotta just live with it, though. You just put up. That's the nature of the business. Like about a year ago, and this is a true story, we were using my car in a scene. I have a cool car. A Lamborghini. And we're using it outdoors and it gets really hot. So we're supposed to be f.u.c.king on the hood of the car-and this scene called for the engine to be on, purring away, the whole time we're f.u.c.king-and, at some point, the engine starts overheating. So we stopped the scene and waited a while, then I opened the radiator cap to put in some water, and hot steam just sprayed out all over the place. It burned the f.u.c.k out of me. I still have the scar here on my arm. It was so f.u.c.ked up.

But we had to finish the scene. So I got the car going again, and then the camera rolled and I got back to work. I had to try so hard to be all s.e.xy, because it was really hard to concentrate on having a hard-on and being into the chick when I felt like my arm was about to fall off. It hadn't started blistering yet, but it was all red and it was burning like h.e.l.l. Someone got an ice chest just off-camera, and every time the director called, "Cut!" I would just plunge my arm into the cold ice. So it was like I'd f.u.c.k, f.u.c.k, f.u.c.k, ice, ice, ice, then f.u.c.k, f.u.c.k, f.u.c.k again. Just like that. The crew was dying of laughter.

Like I said, I did it, though. I put up and finished the scene. It's all a mental thing, you just have to put stuff out of your mind.

It takes a special talent to get a hard-on in front of a whole camera crew who's waiting for you to perform. Not every guy can cut it. Especially their first couple times, when they're under the gun. You go in not knowing what to expect and no matter how bad you think it's going to be, it's worse. Seriously-only think about getting into this business if you get hard when the wind blows. Every guy likes s.e.x, especially when it's with a new chick. The new face is the best face. But it's one of those things-if you've ever had a hard time at home, don't even think about it. Don't even knock on the door. If you've ever had s.e.x with your mate and she says, "Oh, it's okay, honey. Don't worry about it," don't even bother calling. Because you've got anywhere from five to forty people on the set while you're trying to f.u.c.k. And if you're doing a big scene-in a bar, for instance- then add twenty extras to that.

Some guys are made for this business. I've seen guys keep a hard-on for hours, but then I've seen guys who, no matter what they do, no matter how long you wait-you could give them ten years and they'll still never be able to do it. That's why you see so little turnaround in guy actors-why there's forty-year-olds creeping around here-because for the guys who can do it, it's a beautiful thing. You're getting to do this stuff with beautiful chicks and you're getting paid for it. And so many new guys who come in have to drop out because they can't get it up. Whereas for the girls, there's always a constant flow of new ones. It's strictly about what they look like-their body and face. The less attractive you are, the harder you have to work. You gotta make up for it somehow-with your performance or just with, you know, what you're willing to do. So the unattractive girls end up being the real workhorses. They're the ones who are doing all the a.n.a.ls and DPs. DPs are "double penetrations."

I've been lucky. I've had a lot of success. When you're doing this, and things are going well, it makes you feel very young and alive. I still feel like a twenty-year-old kid, just goofing around. I'm not strapped with those nine-to-five boss woes, the day-to-day household stuff, the wife woes, the kid woes. I don't lose any sleep thinking about the vacation I have to take with the family. I can't even remember the last time I was going, "Oh yeah, it's Friday afternoon, the weekend." I've never had a regular job so I don't know what that's like. Even in romantic relations.h.i.+ps, which is another common source of major stress, I really have very few worries. I live with someone right now, but she does her thing and I do mine. We hang out with a group of people where there's a swinger thing. It's a very casual situation and that's the way I like it.

I've probably got about five years left as a performer. If I had to stop doing this tomorrow, I don't think it would change me either way, but would I miss it? Absolutely. There's nothing I'd rather be doing, unless of course it was working in mainstream movies. [Laughs] Which is everybody's dream.

I'm just very happy with what I've done. On a social level, I think these movies are helping people's lives. A lot of our crowd, our audience, is made up of guys who maybe aren't the best-looking dudes in town. Maybe they're dorks or disabled or something like that, and there's no chance they're ever going to get laid. And I think the adult business definitely gives those guys an outlet. Otherwise, they'll explode.

And lately, a lot of couples are benefiting from our films as well. I mean, the divorce rate is so staggeringly high. There are so many people who are so unhappy s.e.xually. But now, because of the way s.e.x has become so important in the media and so open, and people are finally talking about stuff and showing stuff s.e.xually, people are realizing how unhappy they are and doing something about it. For the guys to bring these movies home to their spouses or girlfriends, sometimes it can really stimulate their relations.h.i.+p. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. But at least if a guy is unhappy with the way his wife is performing, he can watch p.o.r.no and jerk off maybe, rather than have an affair. Everyone can disagree, but I think it's definitely at least an outlet for guys.

And for women, adult films can serve as great teaching mechanisms. A lot of how-to videos are coming out these days. How to Do a.n.a.l Your First Time is one example. Maybe sometimes a girl is curious, she's nervous, et cetera, and so this film goes through the whole step-by-step process, starting with how to do an enema, and on from there. Usually the video is directly for the female audience, like an educational video, but there's still a story. A husband and wife having a problem and they're working it out. There's still romance in it.

I'm helping people. And it really feels good to know that. It's very rewarding. Self-esteem? I've got it. I'm rolling in it. I would say the ratio of people who go, "Hey, I love your stuff," to the people who say, "You're disgusting," is ten to one. That's ten to one in my favor. Who gets that kind of validation these days? The president? I don't think so. [Laughs] Hollywood stars, athletes-sure, they probably get it. But I do, too. I'm getting positive feedback all the time. Adult video is so big now everywhere. People from all walks of life come up to me saying, "Hey, how do you get into that?" That's the number-one question guys ask, "How can I get into it?" That's got to say something.

The longer you strip, the harder it is

to retain a positive view of men.

STRIPPER.

Sara Maxwell.

I moved to San Francisco, alone, after graduating from a very small college in a very small Virginia town, and I didn't come out here to sit in my apartment and watch TV. I wanted to meet people and enjoy myself, so I went out a fair amount. And one night I accepted an invitation to go to a lesbian nightclub with some friends. On this particular night at this club, Carol Queen, who I was to later find out was a fairly famous "s.e.xpert," was hosting an amateur strip show. Well, I had a few beers and watched the pretty awkward volunteers dance onstage, and I thought, "I could do that." And after a few more beers, I did.

It was not a big-deal first-time performance. I was extremely drunk, and even more nervous. I wiggled myself out of my clothes and did pretty much what the other girls had done, while trying my best not to fall off the stage. The crowd cheered and whistled and I kept asking myself, "What the h.e.l.l are you doing?" Then Carol rang a bell, signaling my exit, and I stumbled back to my table. And that was it. But then about an hour later, a hippieish woman in Birkenstocks leaned over to ask me if I would consider dancing professionally. She worked at somewhere called the l.u.s.ty Lady, a good place for beginners, she explained, because you dance on a stage with about four other women behind a soundproof piece of gla.s.s. It didn't pay exceptionally well for stripping-just thirteen bucks an hour to start and fifteen an hour after six weeks-but there was no contact with customers.

At first I said I wasn't interested, but I took this flyer she had anyway and at home later I started to think about it. My office day job didn't pay all of the bills-especially the two-thousand one Visa kept sending me-and I was already thinking about taking a second job waiting tables, which I had way too much experience at for my liking. So I thought about this stripper thing. And you know, I was like twenty-two and this subculture, or whatever it was, was unknown to me and seemed kind of cool. And I enjoyed dancing, and I didn't particularly mind getting naked, and my boyfriend said he didn't care. So I finally decided it might be a really easy way to bring in some extra money and I went in for an audition.

I took the bus to the l.u.s.ty Lady, a generic club near the financial district. I told the bouncer at the door that I was there to become a stripper, and asked to talk to the manager. He looked me over from head to toe, with a long pause at my B-cup b.r.e.a.s.t.s. I suppose I pa.s.sed his test, because he brought out the stage manager, Shannon, who took me into the dressing room. We walked through a swarm of naked and half-naked women applying makeup, brus.h.i.+ng their hair, straightening panty hose, calling their kids and so forth. Shannon instructed me to take everything off but the heels on my feet. Since everyone else was naked, it didn't seem that weird. I danced three songs on a stage with the regular girls and I guess I did well enough- even though I was the only one who seemed to be sweating-because Shannon offered me four nights a week. I took it.

The l.u.s.ty Lady was a glorified peep show-this wasn't a gentlemen's club where you actually go up to the tables and do lap dancing or anything like that. The dancing stage was U-shaped, encased in Plexiglas and surrounded with booths that customers could enter, pay twenty-five cents, and a curtain would rise to let them see the dancers. The s.h.i.+fts weren't that bad because you were physically separated from the customers by the gla.s.s. They couldn't talk to you and you could only see their heads-so you didn't have to deal with watching them jack off.

I liked the other dancers a lot. They made the work bearable. There was a lesbian couple with the stage names Velvet and Carmen who were dancing to get money for their punk-rock band. There was Wynona, a fortyish Asian mother whose family thought she was a secretary at an investment bank. She only worked day s.h.i.+fts. Then there was someone who called herself Candy who worked as a gradeschool teacher by day and stripper by night. Her husband came in about once a week to watch her dance. And there was Luscious, a single mom who had this weird way of smiling while she yelled obscenities at the customers-they couldn't hear her through the gla.s.s. These people were all pretty cool and funny. And they were nice to me. We didn't really socialize, though. Every now and then, we'd go to a cafe and eat after work, but not much. We never went to bars or clubs. We were all stripping because we needed the cash, so we weren't about to go out and blow it after work.

But the thing was, the cash was really not flowing so great. I had to buy a lot of stuff just to get started-fancy panty hose, four-inch heels, a boa, many bras, lots of see-through lingerie, sparkly makeup-and with those expenses, thirteen bucks an hour just wasn't going very far. So I decided to start working in the Private Pleasure booths, which initially I had told myself I wouldn't do. These booths were in the back of the l.u.s.ty Lady, but they were the place's real moneymakers. Each booth was outfitted with a bench, a box of Kleenex, a microphone and a money machine for the customer, and behind a wall of gla.s.s, a mini-stage, a microphone and a meter attached to the money machine for the dancer. The minimum was five bucks, and that didn't get the customer much-only three minutes of tame dancing. The rest they had to haggle for. I usually charged twenty for dancing in unusual positions, thirty for masturbation, forty bucks for a d.i.l.d.o show. I got to keep half of what I took in. I'd say I made an average of sixty an hour, which was a great improvement.

In a way, though, I missed the stage dancing. One of the many drags about the booths was that you could see and hear the customer. I tried to focus on their faces while they jacked off, but that didn't really help much. The booths were also very physically exhausting to work in-much more so than the stage. When you're on the stage, men put in twenty-five cents for thirty seconds of dancing. Most of them don't stay for long. But in the booth, a lot of the men who go in there stay for quite a while. They can talk to you and they have these fantasies that can sometimes get very involved. And you have an incentive to give them a really good show because you get to keep half of what you entice them to put in the money machine. For example, a guy comes in and says, "I want you to hang from the ceiling." You tell him that you don't hang from ceilings. He says, "I'll give you thirty bucks if you do it." So you hang from a bar attached to the ceiling.

Also, on the stage, you got a ten-minute break every hour-and you'd take it because all you were earning was an hourly wage. When you're in the booth, you could take a break if you wanted to, but you were earning a percentage, so you didn't want to leave. A lot of times, I would be dying to go to the bathroom, but I'd usually wait until my s.h.i.+ft was over. It really got to be torturous, especially because the booths were kept very cold. I don't know why that was- I'm sure it had something to do with men taking longer to get hard in a cold room and therefore staying longer and paying more or something like that. For me, the cold just heightened the feeling of having to go to the bathroom and prolonged the misery.

Shannon, the stage manager, was my boss. Her boss was the owner, who was this middle-aged lady who was never there. Shannon was about twenty-seven, very phony. Most dancers didn't like her. She was only a dancer for one month, then when a management position opened up, she got it because she had a business degree from years ago. Shannon would tell you, "We're all family," but that wasn't reality. She'd fire you in a heartbeat because they didn't want the customers to get tired of the same dancers. The older dancers, in particular, would get fired routinely over insanely trivial things-like forgetting to punch in their time card or something like that. They never had a problem with me though, probably because I was so young.

The majority of customers were perfectly decent, but occasionally somebody would try to mess with you by calling you a c.u.n.t, a wh.o.r.e, or worse. I really dreaded the weekly baseball-capped college kid who would inevitably get p.i.s.sed off that he didn't get more for his five bucks. And every now and then, somebody would get really violent-you know, pounding on the gla.s.s and screaming and s.h.i.+t. That freaked me out. I was protected by the gla.s.s, but still, it's just really frightening to see that kind of anger directed at you. You could call security, but Shannon wasn't always supportive. I mean, her att.i.tude was basically, "You're a stripper, what do you expect them to say?" A lot of times, she'd ask you what you did to get the guy going.

Strippers are constantly propositioned by customers. Like, I mean, every night. Shannon told us to respond in a humorous way. Say something like, "Oh me, I never leave this place, I live here." If that didn't work, you could be more forceful-just say no. I would usually pretend that I couldn't hear them. Or I'd try the forceful no. I never tried the humorous route. I just didn't want to get into joking around with these guys.

There wasn't any kind of typical customer-I dealt with everyone from frat boys to a McDonald's counterman to a schoolteacher to an ex-con to a lot of stockbrokers. And every one of them was capable of turning violent. It started to really warp my sense of men. Every guy I saw walking down the street turned into a customer in my eyes. Even my boyfriend exhibited customerlike qualities. He'd say something like, "You need to brush your hair." And I'd hear it as, "Brush your hair for me." With the implication being, in my mind, that he wanted to have some fun. And of course, he would also ask for s.e.x, which further demoted him to the role of a customer.

When I first started working, I would occasionally get excited while performing for a customer, because you know, you are kind of stimulating yourself. But I quickly learned to control this feeling because I didn't want to give the customer the satisfaction of seeing me stimulated. And after that, s.e.xual stimulation just pretty much became disgusting to me. This carried over into my s.e.x life with my boyfriend. After performing three d.i.l.d.o shows in a night, I wasn't exactly enthusiastic when he would initiate things when I got home. All I really wanted to do then was take a shower. I showered all the time.

The longer you strip, the harder it is to retain a positive view of men. Long-term dancers-at least the ones I met-were all bitter. Except for the lesbians. They seemed to be very grounded and able to deal. But everyone else was really bitter. And, you know, like I told most of my friends what I was doing. And the women weren't judgmental at all-in fact, in general they were very supportive. But when I told my male friends about it, a lot of them would launch into a confessional about how they've been to strip clubs before, and they enjoyed it. Most wanted to see me dance, but I told them that if I saw them there, we really couldn't be good friends anymore, because then they'd turn into customers. It got to be very depressing.

Men fetis.h.i.+ze strippers and give them a mystique. I guess that's a stereotype, but it's true. They have ideas in their heads about strippers- they'll be great in bed, they'll be uninhibited s.e.xually. In fact, it's the exact opposite-I became almost anti-s.e.x while I was a stripper. They also probably think it will be a status thing with their friends. The idea isn't founded in reality. If these men who fetis.h.i.+ze strippers actually dated one, they probably wouldn't like it.

I quit stripping after about a year. It was a very smart decision. Certain people can't handle it-obviously I'm one of them. I think it really depressed and disturbed me. It was much more tiring than I'd imagined. And much, much more sleazy than I imagined. When I first started, I felt like in a sense, it was the theater. I was made to feel like a performer when I walked into the dressing room. There were overstuffed couches, makeup lights. Toward the end, I walked into the same room and felt completely different about it. I saw dirt I hadn't seen before, grime I hadn't seen before-the place felt so slimy. I just wanted to throw up.

I wouldn't recommend the job to anyone. It was a negative experience. You have to be extremely tough, and even then, I think it gets to you deep down. The dancers I met who said, "I love stripping" had only been working at it for a month. Be a waitress.

Our genitals are about as sacred to us

as our typing fingers.

ADULT WEBMISTRESS.

Empress Maggie.

In the early 1980s, I was a college professor. I was the director of bilingual studies at La Guardia Community College, but I didn't want to finish my doctorate, which meant that I was not going to get tenure and was therefore going to need a new job. I was like thirty years old, I'd been in academics all my adult life, and I didn't think I could handle it anymore. I was burnt out and I needed a change. And then I got lucky-I met this guy on an airplane who was crazier than me, and he showed me my first p.o.r.n movies. I thought, "Wow! This is a world I've never seen! I like it!" Next thing you know, we were going to parties that the p.o.r.n magazines were giving and I was like, "I have to get into this." So I did a cable show on Manhattan Cable called Plain Brown Wrapup, where I reviewed p.o.r.n movies from a woman's point of view and I interviewed all the p.o.r.n people that lived in New York.

After that show, I just kept moving through the p.o.r.n industry, doing publicity, marketing and sales for adult video companies. I made a lot of friends and about four years ago these two boys approached me-two young men who were computer gurus in Canada, UNIX people-they wanted to convince me to go into business with them. I had no experience with computers, but I had a ton of contacts in the adult industry. If I wanted the rights to something, I could get them. Whereas these boys had no idea who to call, I knew how to get video clips, images, everything.

The boys said, "This thing is the future. Computers are gonna change p.o.r.n. You have all the content, we have the technological know-how." And I thought, well, why not move with it? You know, once you're in the s.e.x industry, you just go to whatever the newest thing is, so here I am-into computers. I am the co-owner and operator of an adult website that specializes in live chat and live video with real, living women.

I work a lot. I get up each morning at eight and post on various newsgroups for about an hour-just to advertise my site. Then I come in and open the office around eleven, turn on the air conditioning, turn on the computers, maybe do a little bookkeeping or whatever. Things don't really get busy until the girls start coming on live.

We have two video studios that offer live women over the Internet every day from one in the afternoon to four in the morning. The way it works is the girls sit by themselves in a room about maybe six feet by eight feet. They're on a futon that's got cus.h.i.+ons and pillows and we've got a backdrop in there, and curtains, and a keyboard. There's a video camera pointed at them, but other than that, they're all by themselves with their keyboard. I'm sitting in the office outside. They can yell over the top and talk to me if they need to.

Our customers-who are all men as far as I can tell-purchase blocks of time at a buck a minute with their credit cards. Then they get to "enter" the rooms with the girls and, to some extent, control the video camera. They can command it to do close-ups, for instance. They also ask the girls to do things, you know, put on shows. It can be very explicit. The girls insert toys, whatever. They do everything. And they chat with the guys. If it gets busy, I can help the girls by typing for them, or typing with them. If there are like ten guys on at once and each guy is saying something like, "Show me this, show me that," or, "Wow, you look great, turn it around, give me a close-up," I may type quite a lot.

We have fifteen different girls that work for us in s.h.i.+fts. The most we ever have in the studios is two at a time-usually it's just one. Theoretically, you can have a hundred men watching and chatting with the same one woman, so it isn't cost-effective to have too many women. The only reason we ever offer more than one is for appearance sake-you know, for the appearance of variety.

We get our girls mostly through word of mouth. In the two years that the site has been up, we've put out only two ads. The first was because we were just opening, and the second one we put up a couple of months ago, when I found the girls were kind of getting a little burned out and I wanted to pull in some new ones.

My girls are not your run-of-the-mill topless dancers that you're going to see in a club. They are not your standard "trailer park cuties." I hire them, and the girls I pick are literate, can type, and have enough imagination to keep guys going in chat. They also have to be distinctive. What we specialize in-rather than just girls taking their clothes off and writhing around on a bed-is fantasy. So we have girls dressed as nurses, construction workers, we have a goth chick, we have a little girl who calls herself Heidi Hole. Each one has a personality and they play to the guys differently depending on what type of personality they are-that's the whole thing.

This job is kind of like being a bartender. I have to be easygoing, easy to talk to. Guys log on and tell me their life story in thirty seconds and then I'll say like, "Come on at five, I have a girl you'll love." And I chat with all the regulars. I know what kind of girls they like and what they want the girls to do. The regular customers have become part of my life. I even e-mail some of them personal stuff sometimes. In general, I think they are pretty silly. I mean, this job has completely skewed my view of men. I see them as silly adolescent boys and I don't quite understand what draws them to cybers.e.x. But this is what they want, and I try to give it to them. My business is based on never underestimating the tastes of the American male.

I consider myself a feminist. Absolutely. But I think there're two branches of feminism-those who are puritanical and those who aren't. To me, feminism that represses women's s.e.xuality is absurd. You might just as well be a right-wing religious fanatic in that case. My website is women-owned and women-run-no men, none. The two Canadian guys who helped me get into this business have moved on. It's all girls now. We don't even allow men into the office.

There are other live-girl sites-I know a couple of them and I know who owns them-and they do things like the old casting-couch routine. You know, "You sleep with me or you don't get the job." There's even a compet.i.tor of mine-which will go nameless only because I don't want them to get a plug-where the women, in order to get to the bathroom, have to walk naked through their offices. There's nothing like that here and that's why we get the best women. My girls are a hundred percent safe with us. We give them privacy. They have dressing areas. They don't get s.e.xually hara.s.sed. And women who have worked at the other places have come running to us. That's why we don't have to put out ads.

It's a very pro-s.e.x atmosphere here, but it's not sleazy. It's not like we're looking down on these women saying, "Oh, we've got these real poor little girls who have been mistreated in their lives and therefore all they can do is take it off on the Internet." Not at all. Our girls generally are artists in one way or another and do this because they can't make a living at what they really want to do, like design clothing, make feminist videos, play music. Each one has some specialty that for one reason or another is not making them rich and so they need extra income. If I could make money going into those rooms myself, I would. In a heartbeat! But n.o.body wants to pay me for it anymore. [Laughs]

I don't feel we're degrading women and I don't think anybody who works for me feels that way. Our genitals are about as sacred to us as our typing fingers. It's merely body parts. If we can make more money showing one body part rather than another, you can bet we're going to do it. And from a feminist's point of view, if women don't get into this industry, this industry will always be degrading to women.

Unfortunately, I'm not making much money at this. The problem is that it's very compet.i.tive. There are ten thousand adult sites and some of them are big guys-I mean we're batting up against Penthouse, Playboy, Spice Channel. We are trying to find a special niche- the live girls-and that niche involves a lot of overhead. The rooms, the computers, and the girls all cost a bundle. So I'm not getting rich. In fact, I've never really made any money in the s.e.x industry. I've made enough to live on-I mean, I've been in the same apartment the last eighteen years and I've paid the rent all by myself-but that's about it. [Laughs] At least I'm never bored. And as long as it makes some money, I'll keep at it.

I love the job. Who wouldn't love being their own boss in a room full of women that you like? Lotta laughs-playing at s.e.x, making fun of the guys sometimes. I love the freedom. You wear whatever you want. No makeup. I'm not part of the corporate world so I can say whatever the h.e.l.l I please. And the people that I deal with, being mostly in the adult industry, are the same kind of free. If I want to say "f.u.c.k you" on the phone, they think it's funny. In the corporate world, even though they all say it in their minds, they can't say it out loud.

You know, it took me till I was twenty-one years old to be able to say "h.e.l.l" and "d.a.m.n." I said "heck" and "darn" till I was twenty-one. I didn't smoke or drink till I was almost thirty. Not because I was brought up by Puritans-I was just this sort of heavy-duty intellectual who thought that the most important thing in life was to have read all of Kafka and seen Stravinsky in person. I had a streak of perversion, definitely, that I was kind of repressing, but basically I was a very straight person. Now I talk like a truck driver and I indulge my perversions, which I like. And I think I am a more natural and happy and better-adjusted person for doing this.

It's not as glamorous and easy as

people may think it is.

TRANSVESt.i.tE PROSt.i.tUTE.

Tracy.

I'm a prost.i.tute. I've been one for about twenty years. I just had a birthday. I marked forty-two. For real. I was born in Bellevue Hospital on December 4, 1954. That's in Manhattan. I been working all over. I've worked Park Avenue, I've worked Paris, I've worked Florida, I've worked Kansas-all over. But here, New York, that's my favorite. There's nothing greater than New York. I guess it's because the Big Apple is where I was born at-that's why.

These days, I work the Meat District-it's just north of the West Village. It's a neighborhood. They've got a lot of meat-processing companies down here, so they call it the Meat District. At night, it's all prost.i.tutes, mostly transvest.i.tes. The money's very good. You have to remember, if you get guys, you get like a hundred and twenty to onefifty each guy-a minimum of a hundred dollars each guy-and you can get like ten guys in a night. It's like at least seven hundred dollars a night out here. A slow night-if it's cold or raining or snowing-maybe I make two, three hundred. But that's a slow night. I make seven hundred a night regular. It's a great deal. Some girls that roll guys, they may get a thousand bucks in one roll, but I don't do things like that.

I've been a woman for twenty years. That's when I got my b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Yes, honey-old school. I have no silicone.

I went to prison and did ten years for almost killing a guy. Someone who tried to f.u.c.k with me. I got out in '93. I was at Comstock, Greenhaven, Sing Sing, Rindy's-you name it, I've been in every max. With the big boys. I cut up my face there. As a transs.e.xual in jail, I caused a lot of problems. I had a lot of problems. But I can hold my own. You understand what I'm trying to say? I cut like seven people while I was in prison. I was sentenced three-to-nine and I wound up doing ten years. Because I wasn't a goody-goody n.i.g.g.a. I was quick to the knife.

See, when you live a life like this, it's very dangerous. It's not as glamorous and easy as people may think it is. You have a lot of wackos out here. You have a lot of nuts. You have a lot of everything. You may meet people that wanna rob you. You may meet people that wanna beat you up. And being a transvest.i.te, it's worse. You may meet people who wanna do anything to you. You understand what I'm trying to say to you? Transvest.i.tes can inspire the worst in people. Because they think they can get away with whatever they want with us.

When somebody f.u.c.ks with you out here, you have to be quick and do what you have to do. I hold my own weight. I weigh like two hundred and ten pounds and I'm six feet tall. And I've been through a few brawls in the twenty years that I've been around. I don't have a pimp. Most transvest.i.te prost.i.tutes don't have pimps. Mostly that's just girls. Some of them do, though. Not me. I'm a free agent. [Laughs] A pimp is unnecessary if you can hold your own.

Most of the transvest.i.tes out here now are into c.o.ke, so they'll smoke crack-you know-I'm being honest with you-they'll do certain things. But a lot of them live safer than what people think. I have a pocket full of condoms. Many of us use condoms. But a lot of us are sick, too. A lot. There are some that are HIV-positive. I mean, knock on wood-thank G.o.d, darling, I've never had a disease and I've been a prost.i.tute twenty years.

You have johns that don't wanna wear them, but I don't do them. I don't care how much money they give. You don't wear a condom- and this is before I heard anything about AIDS-you go find yourself somebody else, because I don't want you. I don't know what kinda disease that you have or how many girls you've been with or how many prost.i.tutes you have dealt with, so that's that. I can't do what other people do. I'm more or less into me.