A couple months ago, while on a trip to San Francisco, I had the pleasure of being an audience member during the filming of Public Disgrace. This was extremely exciting, as I’m a huge and long-time Public Disgrace fan. (Sorry mom!) If you’re not familiar, PD is a porn site that’s part of the Kink.com empire–Kink being the largest BDSM porn company in the world– that specializes in hardcore, public sex. Most episodes of PD follow a similar pattern–a submissive girl is dragged out in front of an audience, after which she’s stripped, bound, punished, gangbanged, ass-fucked, tortured, etc. Hot, right?
Public Disgrace was founded by Princess Donna, a porn actress/director, and she runs the show on all the PD shoots. So basically in each video Princess Donna acts as the dominant woman, and she controls the humiliation of the female sub by directing how the gangbang ensues. Along with founding Public Disgrace, Donna also founded such classics as BoundGangBangs.com (another fave of mine–can’t get enough of those against-her-will gangbangs these days!), and UltimateSurrender.com, a sexual wrestling reality show (lol). The following is a quote from Princess Donna that I particularly liked, from an interview she did with the Village Voice: “I grew up in a Silence of the Lambs culture, a culture where rape and killing women are very common themes for movies and TV shows. Society isn’t afraid of sex and violence; they are afraid of women owning their own bodies and controlling their own sexuality—which is what happens in BDSM.”
But back to San Francisco. I was there with Richardson magazine, helping out with a project they were doing with Kink, which meant I got to hang out in the Kink studios. Pretty cool, considering it’s the place where the best fetish porn in the world is currently being made. Also, the Kink.com mission is to “demystify and celebrate alternative sexualities,” which I consider an important goal of Slutever too, so being there felt, you know, “meaningful” or whatever.
As I briefly mentioned in the San Francisco episode of the VICE Slutever show, the Kink headquarters is an old military armory. The company purchased The Armory–a giant brick fortress the takes up an entire city block in SF’s Mission district– in 2006, and they’ve since transformed into into an insane bondage playground. The energy inside the place is incredible. When you walk in, as you move through the hallways, it has the appearance and professionalism of any standard film studio. But then you open a door and it’s like, ‘Oh, a woman being fucked by giant machines.’ And then you open another door and two guys are fisting each other. And then behind another door there’s a gangbang. But it’s all very casual, like, “Oh hey I have three dildos in my ass, but sure I’ll shake your hand, welcome to Kink!” #nbd. I was only there for one day, but I’m pretty sure I was involved in more conversations about enemas during my time there than ever before in my entire life. Every time you turned around someone was talking about having just had an enema, or needing to get one later, or once a man just shouted, “Anyone need an enema?” at a group of actors lounging around a set, and everyone just smiled and shook their head like, “Not right now, but thanks for asking!” I can’t lie–that made me feel a little weird. Then there was one point when I was watching this French girl have sex with a fuckmachine, and I started to feel sort of awkward, like “Am I supposed to turn away? Is it creepy if I’m smiling?” But as I looked around the room I realized that I was clearly the only person who was feeling any weirdness, which made me feel even weirder because I was like, “Wait, am I a square?!” Although I suppose it was sort of humbling to be the “normal” one in a sexual situation for a change.
The Kink Armory–impressive yoBack to Public Disgrace. Since the series is usually filmed in front of an audience, there’s generally a couple hundred people from the San Francisco area invited to be in the crowd, and to partake, to an extent, in the gangbang action. The episode I watched had a house party theme, and lucky me, I got to ride in the production van from the Kink Armory to the shoot location. Also in the van was Princess Donna, pornstars Cherry Torn and Skin Diamond (who were the two female subs about to be publicly disgraced), two male porn actors (who join the crowd and lead the gangbang), and the rest of the crew–cameramen, makeup artist, producers, etc. During the ride one of the male actors–a cute, 23-year-old with curly blonde hair–confessed that this was his first hetero porn scene, and that even though he was straight, he’d only done gay scenes up until now. He seemed pretty nervous, and was asking Donna questions about how it would all go down.
“So, like… are you going to tell me when to fuck the girls?” he asked from the back of the van, his voice shaking. “How do I know when it’s the right time?”
“Yeah, yeah, I’ll help you,” Donna replied, not looking up from her phone.
“OK but like how–”
“Look,” she interrupted him, vaguely annoyed. “The main thing is, just don’t take your dick out if it’s not hard. No one wants a wet noodle–that’s a killjoy. And keep your clothes on. We don’t want you to be the naked person in the room. We want the girls to be the naked people in the room.” After that the boy didn’t ask any other questions, and instead spent the rest of the ride talking to the other male actor about how he might move to Australia because it “seems cool there.”
Meanwhile, I’m in the front of the van with Donna, contemplating whether or not I should fan-out at her about Bound Gang Bangs. I eventually went for it.
“Yeah, oh my god, it’s just the best,” I was saying, eyes wide. “My favorite episode is that one where the girl gets dragged out of that crib thing and then fucked by a group of men in stocking masks.”
“She’s in a cage?”
“No, not a cage, a crib.”
“Huh… I don’t know if I remember that one. Is the girl crying?
“Um, she’s not really crying but she’s life screaming for her life. I think they’re in a foreign country?”
“Oh, the Russian birthday rape! Yeah, I remember that. Really fun shoot.”
Princess Donna in makeupOnce we arrived at the location, it was time for hair and makeup. While in the makeup chair, someone asked Cherry Torn the inevitable question: What do your parents think about what you do? Cherry just shrugged. “Given my troubled youth, by the time my mom found out I did porn, she was just like, “At least it’s legal.”
The heavily dolled-up makeup artist was suddenly very interested. “Oooh, tell us about your troubled youth!” she said excitedly.
“Well, I just really liked sleeping with 40 year old men off the internet,” said Cherry. “From 15 on I was a total jailbait ho, basically.”
“Oh, I love that!” said the makeup artist, clapping her hands.
“Then at one point I ran away for a month with this 42 year old guy, and my mom, who works in law enforcement, ended up finding out where I was and came and found me in this really spectacular manner. But the real eye-opener for my mom was when I did this long interview for Huster’s Taboo, and the production assistant stupidly sent my free copies to the address on my license, which was my mom’s house. Inside was a photo of me expelling a milk enema, and me talking about how I want black eyes, how I like getting my ass reamed, old dudes, slavery–all of it. My mom was like, ‘They make some of this stuff up just for the magazine, right?’ I was like, ‘Yes, yes they do!’”
Cherry and Skin pre-gangbang Casual pre-gangbang photoshoot!By the time the show was about to start, the venue was packed with more than a hundred people. Princess Donna got up and addressed the crowd. “Feel free to get involved!” she said with a smile. “You can touch the models, slap them, touch their boobs, you can put your fingers in their pussies and their asses, but no fluid exchange,” she said sternly. “And no telling the models that they’re bad at their jobs. OK, enjoy!” I found those boundaries sort of strange–ass fisting from stranger: OK; professional insult from stranger: NOT OK–but I went along with it. And so did everyone else. I was genuinely surprised by how involved the crowd got, how comfortable everyone was in the situation, and just the overwhelming positivity of the atmosphere. I mean, I know this is “San Francisco sex mecca” or whatever, but the people in the audience weren’t your stereotypical sex freaks. They were hipsters. It was literally a hipster gangbang. And it was SO fun. Afterward I was having a conversation with someone about the possibility of something like Public Disgrace, or just interactive public sex in general, becoming a socially acceptable form of entertainment. Like, “What should we do on Friday–bar or public gangbang?” It seems a bit extreme, but that night seemed proof to me that it’s not an implausible future.
View from my hotel–Bye!