I’ve been splitting my time between Ashley & Kisha, Damon & Hunter, and Matt & Khym. When I get stuck on one, I shift to the next, and if I get stuck altogther I spend time on sales and marketing, or working in the garden with Mrs. C. Earlier this week I got enough done on Ashley and Kisha to put up a teaser, when I had a sudden revelation: Ashley and Kisha are young, black, and gay. I’m old, white, and straight.

Of course I’m being facetious. Even if I had somehow missed it when we shot (I didn’t), you can’t spend day after day working with footage of one black woman riding another black woman’s face without realizing that the footage you’re working with is of young, black lesbians. The revelation was that maybe I’d have to take this into consideration in helping Ashley and Kisha: The Right Fit find its audience. I sent a note to Shine Louise Houston, a San Francisco filmmaker, valued colleague, and young black gay woman:

“I don’t think the Ashley and Kisha page is getting the attention it deserves on our site, and I suspect that some, if not a lot of the reason for that is because I’m so hopelessly white, middle-aged, and straight that I don’t really even begin to know how and where to market it. Ultimately I think A&K have a story that will transcend race, gender and sexuality, but I think the place to start building an audience is with lesbians, especially lesbians of color. I feel somewhat awkward talking about their race and sexuality like this, but both play an important role in their story and their reasons for working with us, and the most important thing is that their story be heard.”

Well as a result of one of Shine’s suggestions, on Friday afternoon I had the most wonderful, hour-long conversation with Jessica Holter, founder of the Punany Poets. You may have seen her and her troupe featured on HBO’s Real Sex 26.

At first I felt a little awkward (”Hi, I’m white and I’m calling you because you’re black.”) But as our conversation ranged from our shared vision of making art about sex that is both passionate and provocative, to the nuts and bolts of production, through the ins and outs of making a self-sustaining business and back again, the awkwardness quickly gave way to a feeling of having found a new friend. Even before we were through talking, we had both stuffed a couple of our films into jiffy envelopes and had them addressed to one another, and we’ll be meeting in person next month when Jessica brings her show to New York.

In the meanwhile, I have gotten some feedback on Ashley and Kisha; from men and women, white and black, gay and straight:

Says Linda Graham 11, “Damn. I don’t normally like g/g stuff, but that was hot!”

Says Lindi, “Nice clip!”

Says Loraine, “I’m not usually moved a great deal by any of the girl/girl scenes I’ve watched in porn. However the two clips from Comstock Films I watched in the last couple of months, including the rather good face rocking action in the Kisha and Ashley clip and a another for Tina and Jenn — have both created a distinctly good feeling in places where it is good to feel good.”

Says JAGnLA, “That scene looks delish to me - as do the two women. And I’ve gotta throw myself in with those that don’t normally go ga-ga over girl-girl stuff: but when they are two sexy women like this and the sex is genuine - not Playboy male-fantasy lesbian sex - it can really be a turn-on.”

I am encouraged by this feedback. In the past few years, sexually explicit material has fractured into an ever-increasing number of what the industry (mis)labels “fetishes”. There are segregations by sex act, by race, by age. There are videos that show nothing but young white women getting fucked in the ass by black men, or videos that show nothing but asian women having sex with each other. I don’t suppose there’s anything wrong with people wanting to see what they want to see (a photo I saw at an early age of Sophia Loren has left me easy prey for the word “Latina”) but as this fractured view of sexuality more and more defines pornography, it seems to imply that the way to reach the audience for graphic sex is by focusing on the most objective, quantifiable elements. I don’t think this is so. I think there ways to depict sex that can transcend race, gender, or sexuality, and Jessica, Linda, JAG and the others are helping to sustain me in my belief that by focusing on the subjective aspects of the sexual experience, I can reach across boundaries of race, or gender, or sexual taste.

Of course differences still matter – Jessica is a African-American woman, raised in the South by old church-going lady who “still had cotton under her fingernails.” I’m second-generation Irish and Jewish, raised the white, middle-class suburbs of the West Coast – but those aren’t the only things that matter, and they’re not always the thing that matters the most. You don’t have to be African-American to be inspired by the story of the Tuskegee Airmen; you don’t have to be Jewish to feel the horror of The Holocaust; you don’t have to be young, black, or a lesbian to know when you’re watching Kisha ride Ashley’s face, you’re seeing something that’s as right as rain.

-T.C.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 23rd, 2005 at 4:37 pm and is filed under Ashley and Kisha, Jessica Holter, Punany Poets, Race. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.