They (Still) Shoot Porn Stars, Don't They?

Life and death in a rough trade

In the wake of the recent death of porn star Jesse Jane, I found myself thinking about “They Shoot Porn Stars, Don’t They?”, my 2009 investigation of the Great Recession’s impact on the porn business. At the time I wrote the story, I was living in Virginia, and I flew out to Los Angeles for a week to report it. I knew I was in the right place at the right time when I pulled into the parking lot behind the Hollywood Roosevelt in the car I had rented at LAX and spotted Ron Jeremy waiting to get his car at the valet. That week, I drove from Hollywood to various places across the San Fernando Valley. I talked to porn directors, porn agents, and porn stars. The business had been really devastated by the Recession, and it was kind of appalling to see how far things had fallen since 1997, when I had found myself standing on the set of an adult movie for the first time. But one thing was the same: There was no shortage of shocking things. I watched girls have sex with machines, listened to a discussion involving a “sperm omelette,” and encountered a giant vagina costume. There were glory holes, a porn movie intended to break the spirit of its star, and a gokkun robbery. It was fascinating; at least to me. How could it not be? Life can be deeply boring, but boring is one thing the porn industry will never be. I was supposed to be writing the story (it would end up running over 10,000 words) for a well-known website, but when I went home, wrote it, and filed it, the editor, a woman, wanted to do things to it that would have made it into something I did not want it to be, something it wasn’t. So I withdrew my story, shopped it around to other outlets, and got no takers. Later that same year, I self-published my investigation. Slate included it in "Seven Great Stories About Paying for Sex and Being Paid to Have It”; Longform deemed it “unflinching and devastating.” A post I wrote about self-publishing my work, "The Numbers On Self-Publishing Long-Form Journalism," was taught at Harvard and NYU. Originally, I published the story on its own website, which was designed and illustrated by Chris Bishop, who also designed the logo for this newsletter, but after a few years, I let the domain lapse and moved the story to my website. In any case, back in 2001, Martin Amis wrote a story about the porn business in which he deemed it “A Rough Trade.” He was not lying. At times, I, myself, have referred to the adult business as a meat grinder for the human condition. But Porn Valley is also a landscape that reveals our secret fantasies, and the stories we hide are worth investigating. This past week, when I heard that Jesse Jane had passed away, I cast my mind back in time to 2014 when I took this photo of her in motion on the red carpet at the AVN Awards in Las Vegas. Where do porn stars go when they die? I don’t know, but I hope it’s heaven—or something like it.

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