My First Porno: Or, How I Learned to Stop Trusting “Loveline”

by Siouxsie Q February 26, 2014

In the winter of 2009, I sat in my tiny bedroom in the Inner Richmond — a glorified laundry room with a linoleum floor and a futon mattress in the corner. I stared at my laptop screen. On it flashed the model application for The Crash Pad Series, an independent queer porn site based out of San Francisco. I recognized many of the models on the site — some from porn, most from dance parties in the Mission. The site was bright and friendly looking: soft lines with pink and white letters. Everyone looked like they were having such a good time — queers of all shapes and sizes having intimate, silly, and sometimes filthy sex while a voyeuristic camera captured it all.

I had discovered the site long before I moved to the Bay Area. It served as a beacon of hope as to what the sex-positive San Francisco dream could look like. I knew from an early age that I was different from my peers. I was fascinated by sexuality; I also liked girls, boys, and (especially) people who landed somewhere in the middle.

Starved for information, as a teenager I spent many nights huddled next to the radio, listening to the sex advice call-in show, Loveline, at the lowest volume possible (parents). Though the hosts were often jerks, it had been my first window into the world of sexuality and served as a crude source of sex education. So at the end of my senior year of college, when I began to consider the possibility of doing porn, I turned to Dr. Drew and…