 There might be fewer books ever written that could be stranger than this one, but even fewer still can claim to be as fascinating or as unique. Simply because it happens to be a story that only I could tell.
That was the original premise upon which 'In Lust We Trust: Adventures in Adult Cinema' was created, since it is a memoir of a particular period of my own life, during which I was summoned by an unlikely confluence of events to report on the American adult film industry, while I was working as a music critic based in Los Angeles, California.
How all this happened is, as they say, a very long story. It is, however, summarised in the opening chapters of this book. Most of this memoir documents the meetings, interviews, events and, of course, film and video shoots that formed a large part of my professional life back then.
For the most part, I wrote about the glamorous lives of American porn stars in a column called "Cinema Blue" for Penthouse Variations magazine and later I became the International Correspondent for AVN Online, a trade journal dealing with adult online content which allowed me to focus on porn stars, producers and directors from Europe, Asia and Australia.
It's a dirty job but someone's got to do it.
Some people think that I became interested in the adult film industry because I came from Singapore, which had, ironically, produced Asia's only really famous porn star, Annabel Chong.
This isn't true at all. At the time that I first became involved with the industry, in 1995, I hadn't seen a single one of her films. I never even met her till 1999.
I was actually intrigued by it for two reasons.
The first was the fact that I had already read several reports about what a big business it was. At this present time, it is a US$12.6-billion business. A staggering 13,588 movies were released in 2005. (There were only 8,946 titles released in 1998, the year that AVN Online first contacted me about working for them.)
I started taking a more than passing interest in porn after a friend of mine had roped me into her editorial team at Spice Interactive, the multimedia arm of the famous adult cable channel (now owned by Playboy). This in turn led to the second reason why I wanted to report on the industry: the people I met.
Sure, a lot of them were crazy. (But I had been a rock critic, so I knew I could handle crazy.) For the most part, though, some of them were fun, and some even smarter than most people outside the business would ever give them credit for.
Two porn stars I met and interviewed, Asia Carrera and Nicole Sheridan, were members of the high-I.Q. MENSA organisation. Asia Carrera, in particular, was well known as a stock-market wizard and so I wrote a story about her for ‘The Wall Street Journal’. (She also appears on the cover of this book.)
It still remains a fabulous paradox to me that most of the people I knew in my years covering the adult film business were actually more forthright and honest than the people I had encountered in the mainstream Hollywood film industry or (worse still) the music business, which is largely populated by a den of thieves.
All this gave me both impetus and inspiration to start writing this book, which I finished while I was living in London at the end of last year.
In fact, the very last interview I did was with Anna Span, an English porn director who had been a film and video graduate from Central St Martin's School of Art and who is now completing her Master's degree in Philosophy from the University of London.
She had a lot of say to me about liberal feminism and erotica, of course, but she also told me about Jacques Lacan, the French psychoanalyst who had inspired her with his thesis that personal empowerment was about gaining access to the things that gave you pleasure.
For her, working in adult cinema was her form of empowerment.
This was a common theme I found deeply entrenched in the life stories of pretty much everyone I wrote about in this book, and it thrilled me in much the same way that the late Susan Sontag, arguably the greatest of contemporary American thinkers, had first instilled in me the idea that lust as an emotion was worthy of addressing in literature (in her brilliant essay "The Pornographic Imagination," published in 1967).
In the end, as someone once sagely said, there are four big issues in life: birth, death, love and sex.
The last one is the one we are least likely to discuss in polite company, yet it's the one that I think happens to be the most important of all.
And that's why I called my new book ‘In Lust We Trust’.
About the author
Gerrie Lim is a best-selling author. His previous books are: 'Invisible Trade', 'Idol to Icon', 'Inside the Outsider'.
To find out more about his latest book 'In Lust We Trust' visit www.monsoonbooks.com.sg |
