SLUTEVER

Hey guys, I need your help! I am making a little film with the help of a lovely and talented director, and we need a boy to act in it–someone who looks about 16. He would have to live in or around NYC. If you are interested, or know someone who is, please email me at karleysciortino@gmail.com. With a photo included please. Don’t be shy! We’re not looking for someone super hot or experienced, but there will be some “acting” involved, so just keep that in mind :)

THANKS!! xoxo

My friend Matthew Stone has been nagging me for about six months to start a Tumblr. I told him the last thing I needed was “one more internet thing”, but he eventually convinced me by talking about the great “community” that exists on Tumblr, and the ability to re-Tumble each other stuff, and blah blah blah. Anyway, I’ve already gotten pretty into it. My Tumblr won’t be another blog like this where I write long, involved posts. (Although I might re-post things from here occasionally.) It will be mainly just images that I like, as well as random, embarrassing and overly intimate photos of my life, like the one above. Enjoy the SLUTEVER TUMBLR!

I’ve been enamored with Justin Vivian Bond from afar for a while now. You probably know Mx Bond as Kiki DuRayne from the drag cabaret phenomenon, Kiki and Herb. By the way, ‘Mx’ was not a typo. Bond has adopted the prefix ‘Mx’, believing that it “clearly states a trans identity without amplifying a binary gender preference.” Mx Bond also prefers the pronoun ‘v’ to ‘he’ or ‘she’. It’s sort of confusing–especially to write–but v has a lot of interesting things to say about the transgender identity on vs website, so if you take the time to read his statement, the whole thing makes a lot more sense.

But anyway, Mx Bond is amazing! Aside from famously portraying the old lady alcoholic Kiki DuRayne, v is also a performance artist, a musician, and a writer. Last year v published the memoir Tango: My Childhood Backwards and in High Heels. V also starred in John Cameron Mitchell’s 2006 film Shortbus, and in 2007 v was nominated for a Tony Award for Kiki & Herb: Alive On Broadway.

My specific interest in Mx Bond came when I read that v is a dendrophile, meaning someone who is sexually attracted to trees. Pretty hot. V is also a Radical Faerie. If you are unfamiliar with the Radical Faeries, they are a group of gay men–and a few women, too–with a free spirit nature vibe who believe that being queer is part of their spiritual identity. Every year they hold about fifteen Faerie Gatherings across the world where they all dress up in costumes, paint their faces and cover themselves in glitter, and then hold Pagan sex/love/happiness rituals in the woods. Their mission statement goes something like this: “We are a network of faggot farmers, artists, drag queens, leathermen, political activists, witches, magicians, rural and urban dwellers who see gays, lesbians and trans-genders as a distinct people, with our own culture, way of becoming, and spirituality.” Sounds cool, right?

I recently got the chance to have a lovely chat with Mx Bond about tree fucking, Tilda Swinton, and just generally being a freak. Enjoy!

You’ve talked publicly about being a dendrophile. Do you have sex with trees?
Mx Bond: Well, I’ve communed in deep, meaningful and sensual ways with tress, and I have sex in trees a lot, and I’ve had sex under them and against them and on them. So technically I have not had sex with a tree, but we’ve definitely commingled fluids.

So how does one have sex with a tree, exactly?
Well, I suppose there are people who top for trees, and people who bottom for trees. Personally, there is normally no dominant in my relationship with trees. I feel like we are equals.

Tell me about being a Radical Faerie. I’ve always wanted to go to a gathering, they look so insane.
They are! The Radical Faeries started out as mostly gay men who were trying to escape the recurrent gay mentality–the mentality of the urban clone–who were reaching for a deeper spiritual connection. For me it’s a bit different–it’s a place where my freakishness makes me normal. And although I embrace my freakishness and love it, and certainly take a lot of power from it, sometimes it’s nice to be able to relax and just be one of the freaks, instead of being the freak.

Have you always been this much of a freak? What were you like when you were twenty?
I was in college, and I was much more closed off and conservative. I hadn’t really blossomed, so I was trying to fit in and to hide my truth, because I felt it was dangerous to expose it. The world didn’t seem ready for it, and I wasn’t ready to fight to be myself at that point. In hindsight I think it was actually wise, because you can only be as strong as you can be, and at that time I didn’t have the skills or the support network to really be myself. I think that’s part of growing up too–not only finding yourself but finding the people and the places that will allow you to be yourself, and that you can gain strength from. And that takes time.

So what was the turning point for you?
When I graduated from college I started working as an actor. I was living in Washington DC at the time, but everyone kept telling me, “You have got to move to San Fransisco!”, so I got myself fired from my job so I could collect unemployment and just left. On the way to SF I was wearing a watch–the last watch I ever owned–and I was driving on the highway outside DC going over a bridge, and I thew my watch into the Potomac River and I swore to myself that I would never be a slave to the clock again, and I never have. And then I got to SF and met all of these amazing queens and queer artists–people who were so vibrant and non judgmental and who were experimenting with so may ways of living that I felt I could just relax and open up, and it was wonderful to finally fit in. So that was the turning point, and it’s been a lot better since then.

Last year you published a memoir. Where does the title Tango: My Childhood Backwards and in High Heels come from?
Well the book is the story of my first love relationship. I was lovers with one boy from the time we were eleven to sixteen. A few years ago he was busted for impersonating a drug enforcement agent and leading the police on a high speed chase outside of our hometown, and his DEA code name was Tango. So it started off as a book about him, and then the second part comes from a famous quote about Ginger Rogers saying that Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, except backwards and in high heels. And it just made sense for me, because when I was a child I walked around in imaginary high heels all the time, and I was always looking backwards over my shoulder, because if you’re a trans kid you’ve gotta watch your ass.

This is random and off topic, but I know you’re good friends with Tilda Swinton and I just wanted to say that I love her.
We all love her Darling.

How did you guys meet?
I was living in San Fransisco and Edward II was playing at the Castro Theatre, and these queens came to me and said, ‘Girl, you need to go see Edward II, there’s a witch in it who’s moppin’ your look!’ And I said, ‘Oh, she must be beautiful!’ So I went and Tilda was rocking this Dior Ice Goddess look and I was smitten, perhaps a bit narcissisticly, but not really because sisterhood is power. I try to surround myself with people who inspire me, and Tilda is one of those people. Sometimes I find myself asking, ‘What would Tilda do?’, because I’d rather believe in her than Jesus.

Me too! So what are you up to next?
Well I just put out my first solo record, Dendrophile. I’m going to start working on my second record this winter in LA, because, you know, everybody has to do a California album. When I turned forty I went to London and got my masters degree at Central Saint Martins. I was like, “Botox or a degree?” And in the end I chose degree. And now that I’m approaching fifty, I think it’s time to release my California album. You know, just ticking off the boxes.

Makes sense.
I also wrote a musical with Sandra Bernhard called Arts and Crafts, and we’re going to try to get that produced. We play cousins in it, which I think is good because cousins is an undermined genre within musical theatre.

Agreed.

Barbara Nitke began her career as a photographer taking stills on the sets of porn films. This was the 80s, however Nitke’s photos didn’t aim to further the extravagant facade of the big budget shoots of the day. Her behind-the scenes images showed a more raw, intimate side of the industry, catching a porn hunk yawning between takes, or a starlet taking a mid-gangbang nap. In the 90s, when the hardcore porn industry moved from New York to LA, Nitke began shooting on the NYC sets of fetish and BDSM movies. Soon after, though her involvement with the The Eulenspiegel Society – the country’s oldest support group for sadomasochists–she began documenting the sex lives of real couples within the S/M community. These powerful, romantic images lift the veil, showing the human side of people often written-off as piss drinking, scary monsters in leather masks. More than anything, Nitke’s work enlightens us about the true nature of people who dare to be sexual deviant.

How did you start working on porn sets?
Well, I was married to a guy who owned a chain of movie theatres around New York. In the 70s he figured out that you could make a lot of money showing porn, and he also produced a famous porn movie called The Devil and Miss Jones. I had taken up photography as a hobby, so when he was making The Devil and Miss Jones Part II he got me to take stills on the set. One job led to another, and then I got divorced and had to make a living.

What was it like being on a porn set for the first time?
I was pretty desensitized, actually. By the time I was on the set I had seen over 100 porn movies. See, somebody had to screen the movies at my husband’s theatre before he played them to an audience, but he didn’t want to bother most of the time so he would send me to do it. The first few I watched were a huge turn on, but after a while I’d seen so many that I’d just bring a magazine. But then on set, getting to watch sex in a live environment, ignited a whole new cycle of excitement. I felt so honored to be in such intimate situations with other people like that.

I wanted to talk to you about this new generation of porn stars–people like Sasha Grey and Stoya–who are recognized as women who love sex, who are intelligent, feminist, and who seem in control of their careers. This feels like a change from the way porn starlets were perceived in the past. It feels less exploitative.
I couldn’t agree more, and I think it’s fantastic. I witnessed that change happening in the 90s–suddenly this new wave of girls were showing up with clip boards, with business plans and lists saying, “These are things I’ll do, these are thing I’m not comfortable doing.” They really had it figured out. In the 80s it was different–there was more shame around it.

So you think people got into porn for different reasons back then?
I think it was a mix. At the very beginning, in the 70s, some of them were trained actors who, post-sexual revolution, decided to move into the porn business. Then in the 80s things changed and there was more of a “lost soul” vibe. Not everyone–a lot of the people I worked with were sexually free, were exhibitionists, and had they been born ten years later would have been more in charge of their careers. It’s just that the culture around them hadn’t caught up to them yet. But there were also a lot of people who were drugs addicts or who were generally just down in life, and that was difficult for me because I would think, “Am I supporting someone’s downfall by being here?” Especially as a woman. And then AIDS came along, and no one was using condoms in the beginning, so then I was going, “Am I standing here watching people who are going to die?” I had a lot of emotional ups and downs in the 80s.

If people stayed in the business, fucking without condoms during the AIDS epidemic, it must have been out of desperation, right?
No, they were in denial. Most of the people could have made a living doing other things. They were usually bright people who had college degrees, and it almost never felt like they had no other choice.

But since we live in a culture that doesn’t honor or celebrate sexuality, there is always going to be an element of shame that one working in the sex industry has to overcome.

Very true.
But going back to intelligent feminists, we can’t forget to mention people like Candida Royalle, Nina Hartley, and Annie Sprinkle, who were early porn stars who were totally in control, and who helped to ignite that shift that we’re talking about.

Just yesterday I was looking at photos from Annie Sprinkle’s performance piece, Public Cervix Announcement, where she opened her vagina with a speculum and invited the audience to look at her cervix with a flashlight.
Oh yeah, I was there for one of those performances. It was so hysterical! Men are so fascinated with those spread vagina shots in porn, and I guess we should all be honored that they love the vagina so much, but she just took it to the final frontier of extremes and said, “Here guys, look all the way in, look at my cervix! In fact, here’s a flashlight!” Only Annie could pull that off.

What made you move away from hardcore in the 90s?
Well, around that time the industry moved to LA, but I just don’t like California, so I stayed in New York. But then fetish shoots started to get really popular here, partly because it was a way to have safe sex–the performers would just act out the fetish, so there was no exchange of bodily fluids. Then it was my friend, the porn star Rick Savage, who introduced me to the real S/M scene.

How so?
Well, Rick had fallen in love with a woman who was a member of The Eulenspiegel Society. He wanted me to meet her, so he took me down to my first meeting. When we got there there was this big, really domineering black woman at the front desk, and she looked at me and said, “Oh, I’m so glad you could come!” It made me feel so special that she was so happy to see me. It took me ten years to find out she said that everybody who came for the first time.

What were the Eulenspiegel meetings like?
They were very big on safety, so every meeting would start with a presentation–like demonstrating how to safely do a suspension scene, or whipping, caning, how to use hot wax, that type of thing. And then the second half would be circle where everyone would just talk, like any support group.

Your book Kiss of Fire: A Romantic View of Sadomasochism documented the sexual practices of many people in the S/M world. On your website you say, “What fascinated me most was the genuine love I saw all around me. Coming from the been-around-the-block porn world, it was a breath of incredibly fresh air.”
Well, I always enjoyed the whole, ‘sex worker, I’m bored looking at my watch’ thing, and I loved being part of the porn world, but I did it for twelve years. So after that, walking into this new group of people who weren’t performers, who were really in love and so passionate, was just so enchanting. People at meeting would say things like “Oh my god, my boyfriend spanked me and it was so amazing!” Where on a porn set it would be like, “Oh, just another spanking scene.” So they were infusing everything with their joy and their love.

Some of the work is so intimate, photographing people having sex in their homes. Did you ever end up joining in?
I never did. My friends were always shocked that I didn’t, like, “What is your problem girl!?” I wanted to take pictures in people’s bedrooms, and be like a fly on the wall. But that could never really work because my being there would always inevitably change things, so the energy of it often turned out to be more like a threesome.

So they were still sexual experiences for you?
Yes, there was always a sexual charge. One of the things that scared me along the way, especially when I was getting deeper into the S/M scene, was that I was pushing my own sex drive and into the photos so much that it was taking the place of having an actual sex life. Then I became almost superstitious, like if I got a boyfriend and was having regular sex that my artwork would go down the tubes. I didn’t really want to mix the two though–I didn’t want to compromise my role as the photographer by becoming a participant. However I think the reason why my work was ever any good was because I always felt that charge.

I work as a Dominatrix, and the feeling I get during sessions is strange because although there is a sexual energy, I don’t necessarily get turned on. It’s more about adrenaline. Like I wouldn’t masturbate thinking about a session later on.
Yeah, same for me, but it’s still sexual. It’s hard to explain. I also think being a pro-Domme is a different experience to watching a real S/M couple. I don’t know if you’ve seen anyone play outside of a paid session, but there is this exchange of energy that’s really incredible. Whereas pro-Dommes are being paid to provide a service, so that’s still sex work.

Yeah, I’ve actually seen a Domme whipping someone with one hand and texting with the other.
Ha, yes exactly. I was hanging out at Pandora’s Box dungeon once. I’ll never forget it–all the girls were hanging out in the back reading magazines and watching soap operas, and the manager came in and said to one of the Dommes, “So-and-So is here to see you,” and she was like, “Oh god, no!” and trudged over to her locker, yanked on all of this leather paraphernalia, and then trudged out the door. I thought, this has to be my next photo essay! I love that the customer is buying into this fantasy of a woman who sits around all day thinking about nothing but dominating him, when really it’s the last thing on her mind. That appeals to my grand sense of irony.

So why, over the years, had you always stuck with the subject sex?
I’m just fascinated with human sexuality in general, and the diversity of it and the may different ways people find to sexualize things. It’s just unbelievable.

Sex is endless, basically.
It’s true! But my goal was never to titillate. My goal is to make people think about sex and the people who are having these various types of sex in a more human way. Because really they are just people–it’s your neighbor, your lawyer, it’s you, it’s me. For me sex is an art form, and that means all the variations of it: sex work, vanilla sex, private sex, public sex, S/M, whatever. Everyone I’ve photographed has taught me something new about the nature of sexual desire, humanity, and the fact that no matter how we’re wired to express love, freedom is having the courage to be who we are.

Barbara Nitke is currently raising money to publish AMERICAN ECSTASY, a documentation of the twelve years she spent working as a still photographer on porn movie sets.