I want to see porn that shows how great BDSM can be with people playing hard to get closer to each other. I want to see porn that matches my experiences of play, and models values that are important to me. So, I’m being the change I want to see in the world, and I’d love to inspire other people to do the same thing. I’ve made quite a few videos that demonstrate it’s possible to both hit scary intensity and also show joy and intimacy.

I can’t fault big studios for not showing much intimacy. They’re trying to maintain professionalism, and come up with something newer and bigger and more creative under deadline, over and over and over. The performers are working with relative strangers and a crew of people in the room. They have to do all this in order to be large and commercially successful. They are enabling a lot of people to put food on the table, and I’d like to be clear that I think that’s *really* valuable. I’ve stayed small on purpose because I think this may be the only way to create what I want, but there are tradeoffs.

The other thing I do is try to show more happiness- I think we lift each other up when we play and don’t take ourselves too seriously. ‘Bad’ is sexy, but we’re doing this because we like it. Posturing about how eeeeeevil we are sells, both at play parties and in porn, but I think there’s both need and demand for a wider range of depictions. Enjoyment can have a lot of forms, both for tops and for bottoms, but I’d like to see more of what my play actually looks like in our media.

The ‘evil’ tone to BDSM has been around forever- de Sade’s dribblings about how awful the world is, the first 80’s SM porn I saw with its overblown scoring of oh-so-ominous organ music, InSex’s ‘horror’ self-labeling. I did a lot of my early exploring in the gothic/industrial club scene, and ran a party for fifteen years that was all about dark atmosphere. I’ve done some really scary scenes. As much as I enjoy playing with that shadow though, I also want to be a counterweight to it. I want to show the alchemy of a person giving themselves joyously to an experience that they’re struggling with, accompanied by someone they care about, and clearly enjoying the fuck out of it.