Many years ago — and though it shakes me down to my bones to admit this, maybe even seventeen years ago — a friend of mine asked me if I wanted to have a non-sex cameo in a porn film she was directing. As an adventurous twentysomething, my answer was obviously, “Yes, of course.”
I don’t remember a ton about the cameo itself: I think I was sitting in the kitchen of a Manhattan apartment in a schoolgirl skirt and sluttily styled button down shirt, and that I said some inane line about the Fuck House (which was the name for the apartment that served as the location of the film). I doubt my performance was particularly awe inspiring — I’m not even listed in the credits on IAFD (the porn world’s IMDB), which… honestly, I’m okay with that. Truly: most of what I remember from the experience was sitting in one of the apartment’s many bedrooms with Bella Vendetta — then the owner of an eponymous extreme fetish site — talking about how people ordered custom clothes from her without understanding that custom clothes were necessarily going to be more expensive than items that they might buy off the rack.
But I bring all of this up because the film — well, the film in question was 2007’s The Bi Apple, directed by Audacia Ray and released by Adam & Eve. Back in 2006, when I was sitting in that bedroom talking about custom-designed clothes with Bella Vendetta, I did not know a ton about the world of big porn studios like Adam & Eve. My primary awareness of the adult industry was firmly rooted in the doings of indie, web-based productions — sites like Burning Angel and SuicideGirls and a bunch of others that have been lost to the annals of history. So it did not strike me as odd that the star of The Bi Apple was a bi woman, that the first two scenes were boy/girl*, that there was a lesbian scene, that it was only in the final scene that we saw some bi male action in the context of a boy-boy-girl threeway. Back in 2006, The Bi Apple seemed like a freewheeling, pansexual free-for-all, which, at the time, is what I assumed bi porn was.
But all these years later, after several years of covering the adult industry as a journalist, I’m just… wait, what?
As I mentioned last week, when most people in the adult industry talk about “bi porn,” they are specifically and exclusively talking about bi men. While female bisexuality is rampant within “straight” porn, with porn movies — back when there were porn movies, back when people still bought DVDs and it wasn’t simply about individual scenes — routinely including a “girl-girl” scene in the mix with standard hetero fare, it largely goes unnamed. To be a bi woman in porn is simply to be female talent, because male fans frequently want to see female performers partnered together, and it can be lucrative to cater to their desires, even if you are technically, actually straight.
But male bisexuality, well.
Traditionally, “bi porn” — which again, is porn where male performers have sex with both men and women — has been treated as an offshoot of the gay porn industry. (Notably, The Bi Apple was nominated for GayVN — the gay porn world’s version of the Oscars — in 2008.) Women are certainly in bi porn — they are, obviously, a major component of what makes it bi — but they’re not the focus, not the way they are in straight porn. On the porn site WhyNotBi (which is a porn site, so do not come complaining to me if you click that link and are immediately confronted with porn), the male models vastly outnumber their female counterparts. While all the scenes include male talent getting frisky with both male and female co-stars, few (if any) feature female bisexuality.
So again, it is strange to me to recall that The Bi Apple — undoubtedly made “bi” by the final threeway at the end, hence the GayVN nom — was so focused on a woman’s journey, so centered on female talent. Then again, it was also released by Adam & Eve, a straight porn studio, so perhaps this was also about their comfort zone. (And what Adam & Eve was doing releasing a bi porn movie, I’m not sure — though I think part of this was due to 2006 being a year when the success of the more freewheeling online porn pushed major DVD studios to get more adventurous in their content, right before the rampant piracy perpetuated by tube sites led them to get way, way less adventurous.)
And yet: while I would not call it a perfect film, I do have to wonder what it might be like if more “bi porn” had the same pansexual free-for-all vibe as The Bi Apple, if “bi porn” was less “these dudes are gonna bang each other and also a lady” and more a space in which performers were simply free from boundaries. More a space like what many of us think of as “queer porn,” but with more enthusiasm for “straight” sex being in the mix as well.
You know: what would it be like if “bi porn” was more representative of actual bisexuality rather than a fetishization of a “transgressive” male sexuality? I’m embarrassed to say that this isn’t a question I’ve given much thought to — even as a bi woman, even as a bi woman who wrote professionally about porn for years. And yet I think it is a question well worth asking.
Especially because — and I will write about this soon, once a colleague of mine gets me some data he’s digging up — it’s apparently been found that bi people are overrepresented among the porn watching population.
What would it be like if all those bi porn viewers were given access to porn that felt more like being bi?
* Well, sort of. One of the “male” performers later came out as a trans woman — but at the time of the shoot, she presented as a man getting fucked and sucked by a female co-star (aka her wife).
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