Berlin, July 2023. Saskia Vogel arrived at the table where William Minke and I had just finished lunch. She and I had an appointment for drinks in the same neighborhood, 30 or so minutes later, with Akynos (head of the Black Sex Worker Collective) and Dr. Mirielle Miller-Young (author of groundbreaking academic work ‘Brown Sugar’). Saskia asked how William and I met.
William had been working on a photo book about porn conventions and gun shows. He took portraits of me at Venus Fair Berlin, the year I was awarded Best US Newcomer—2008. My hair is greasy because I couldn’t figure out how the shower worked and hadn’t yet brought Nacho Vidal to my hotel room. (Nacho, being European, knew how to turn the shower on warm-but-not-scalding.) I can handle a quick cold shower but not a full dousing of my head with ice water, and I cannot tolerate scalding.
You can see me, one size smaller than Digital Playground’s biggest star, Jesse Jane, on the Pirates 2: Stagnetti’s Revenge poster on the booth wall behind me. People asked where I was in the actual movie. People who had seen the movie didn’t know where I was in the film. I was in the back of an orgy.
Other contract girls had come into the company saying they wanted to be big stars. I had said “I think I’ll make a few movies, see what it’s about, and go to college. It’d be cool to have a decade long career though.” I remember Sam Lewis, one of the owners of the company, repeating “a decade?” with her eyebrows rocketing skeptically towards her hairline. Everyone else said “I want stardom.” I said “maybe basically nothing, maybe basically the impossible.” When it came time to film the largest project the company had ever produced, I, the erratic and odd one, was relegated to the back of the orgy.
In fall of 2007 Digital Playground released their first DVD with a scene of me and a man together. It was Jack’s POV 9. I was on the cover. This was not my first movie for the company, but it was the one they chose to release first.
Firsts are a big deal. Most of us feel this is inherently true—common knowledge, one could say—and it is true across much of life. I can tell you with absolute certainty that firsts are the biggest deal in porn. They get the most attention, they make the most money for the production company and, with a good agent, therefore the performer. This is why so many performers’ careers in the 2000s and 2010s followed a model of first solo, first girl/girl, first boy/girl, first anal, and so on.
In the behind the scenes videos, there were often questions about firsts. From fans, there were often questions about firsts. From press, questions about firsts. Specifically, sometimes, the first time I had sex. I never wanted to say, because I was either almost 14 or just turned 14. I know people make porn out of anything (rule 34) and I know people will wank to what I’m about to say. I can’t spend my whole life dancing defensively around things people might wank to in a way that makes me feel weird.