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).
I haven't really been following the video porn market but am interested in the subject of queer pornography more generally from, again, the indie side of things, since I've been quite personally invested in fanfic and comic porn. It's a market that is much easier for the individual to produce as it doesn't require access to camera gear and actors. Much like the indie queer porn scene there seems to be a lot more tolerance for boundary crossing and pansexual free-for-alls in sites like Slipshine and collections like the Iron Circus Comics "Smut Peddler" anthologies, though you will still find other strong category divisions in places you wouldn't necessarily expect. Fan fiction has traditionally had a very strong "het VERSUS slash" division and you still find people arguing in this decade that adding a woman to a slash (gay male romance by default) pairing is somehow ruining gay representation with her fearful woman touch.
Most of what I remember about bisexual pornography in the more mainstream industry spaces was the huge argument about condom requirements vs. HIV testing requirements, how gay porn tended at one point toward requiring condoms for all actors and no testing versus heterosexual porn tending toward testing with no condoms and refusal of work for anyone with a positive test. The split in approach meant that men who mostly worked in the gay space could be stealth about a positive HIV test and still get work but it meant there was a resistance toward crossing over to work in het porn (which at the time paid better, IIRC?) and there was some concern that requiring condoms would mean that a performer was then protected from having to reveal their HIV status which the performers in the mainstream het space didn't like. I have no idea if this argument is still going on now that PrEP has changed the transmission question but it was a big part of the conversation in the oughts.
It seems to me that the dynamic of bi porn is quite similar if not the same as hetero, mainstream porn. I find myself often thinking of what porn would look like if I could write and direct porn suited to my own tastes vs. trying to chase the tastes of an amorphous slice of people, whatever their proclivities.
I have always felt that much of the bi male porn out there does a great disservice to bisexuals in general and bi males in particular largely due to the trope of male/male sex being a byproduct (pun intended) of a MMF threesome. Even worse, there is quite a bit of bi male porn in which the set-up is a male being "tricked" into m/m sex. YUCK.
I find women beautiful and/or cute and very often sexy. I find some men handsome and/or cute, and sometimes very sexy. I like all the sexy bits, male or female. Those thoughts can stand alone. They don't need any set-up or trickery.