Written By: Bryce B. Higgins
Photos By: Jason Jones
The last time I took Amazonian mushrooms I was so incapacitated that I almost ruined a wedding. The second time, I wound up in a penthouse suite at the Fairmont, Banff Springs Hotel, clothes sticky with champagne at the expense of our host’s idea to crowd us into a shower and let loose an entire bottle of Crystal. It was for these reasons that, in the bathroom of a sex-club with three grams of compressed psilocybin in my hand and the sound of Billy in the next room—the biologically female porn-star who self-identifies as a male and who was currently riding a pink dildo to the beat of four ejaculating old men—I had mixed feelings about my decision to take this latest brew of hyper-compacted earth-medicine. I had come to the sex club, Oasis Aqualounge, under the pretence of covering a story on ‘Money Shot’, the live pornography shoots they make available to public eyes on the last Tuesday of every month. The night catered to spectators of creative adult filmmaking—a kind of neo-pornography that didn’t seem too far off the sort of material you would find on your local porn site, aside from HD video, diverse looking models and an emphasis on consent.
I took the marble-sized shroom pellet I had acquired a week prior from an old friend and popped it under my tongue. It was time to interview the event organizer, Fatima. She stood across from me butt naked in fairy wings and rhinestones glued to the corners of her eyes ; I wore a pool-towel around my waist for now.
A warm sweat hung in the air, gluing a stoned look to my face and red eyes that dried slowly in their sockets like shrivelling raisins.
“So how would you describe creative-pornography?” I blurted out.
“Creative pornography tells a story and implements interesting elements into your standard porn activity.” Fatima explained. “Me in fairy wings on a minotaur getting fucked by a girl with a dildo, for example.”
“So you believe in a more liberated view of sexuality. Is there a point where it goes too far?” I asked.
“To give you an example, when the [birth control] pill came out, all of a sudden it was like ‘oh, women can have sex!’ but what people didn’t consider was STIs and AIDS and sexual violence. With a more broad scope of sexuality, comes more considerations and responsibilities. But it’s becoming a lot more of a concept and community rather than just something that people do. It’s not as animalistic or instinctual as it used to be. There’s a lot more conversation.” Fatima responded.
She was making some great points, but goddamn was it getting hot in the room. After twenty minutes it was high time to get out of there, so I took to the bar and ordered a gin and tonic.
When the textures in the room started to breathe I knew it was time to take a soak in the hot-tub. I sat with a few other naked individuals and felt my heart rate rise. Before I could settle into the slow gurgle of the hot-tub jets, one of the models, Abbey Mars, came floating around the corner insisting I join her in the heated pool on the roof.
I must have spent a good half hour on my back in the water looking up at the stars. My hallucinations grew increasingly menacing. I took another quarter pellet to be safe. Butt-naked I approached the star of the porno, Billy, and mumbled some indiscernible nonsense that somehow got him* interested in talking to me. I tried to remain confident in spite of my fumbling hallucinatory state. My heart-rate was through the roof. At that moment a cluster of men entered the room with cameras and light equipment hanging from their arms and he* was off to shoot another scene.
“Give me 20 minutes!,” he* called back. I just sat there and tripped balls.
Photo By: PurpleVideoProductions
I struggled to form sentences with the naked-and-friendly orange-haired man beside me, largely relying on phrases like “You know what I mean here, don’t you?” By the look on his face, he didn’t. I was saved by a portly man in gladiator gear who took his place over Billy and bound his* naked body in tight braids. The film had begun. Nervous eyes assessed me from all corners as gladiator-man took a stance above Billy with army black boots while snakes unraveled from his open palm down under Billy’s thighs and coiling his* wrists. Is this fucking BDSM?
Bondage, Domination, Sadism and Masochism—these are not the themes you hope to encounter through the lens of a powerful psychedelic. Let alone at the side of multiple nude porn-actors and actresses, nervously side-eying your frantic note taking and drug-addled state.
I turned to meet the once-soothing eyes of orange-haired man, that now wandered to the sides of his skull, and finally, completely abandoned of his face altogether. Jesus!
I scanned the room for cues on how to compose myself at the foot of this bizarre scene, but the only faces I saw were stretched-out demon faces with dark shadows outlining their pointy features.
“Rrrready for that interview!?” Billy bounced back into frame with a spritely glow. The scene is over? I pulled him* into a neighbouring room for a private interview. I had overheard Billy in an interesting conversation, where he* expressed frustration with the porn industry. “I find that the mainstream porn industry revolves around cis-gendered men’s pleasure. And a lot of trans people get pigeonholed into categories like ‘shemale’—which are either derogatory, or don’t necessarily fit with your gender—just to have a demographic. I find that super harmful.” Billy explained.
I gave him* encouraging head nods and said “amazing!” as often as possible to keep him* talking while I tried to determine the best place to vomit, should the drugs continue to push. “Porn should be a political statement. There’s Indie Porn Revolution and Queer Porn TV and Trouble Films and all of these things that are sex-worker run, queer or trans people run, by these people for these people. And the market is totally there.”
“I’ll speak for myself but I’d rather see queer disabled folk fucking and having a good time and smiling, than what I watched when I was a kid on PornHub—the kind of brutal, you’re-not-sure-if-it’s-consensual, really grey area cis-porn that’s all about ‘Oh, the guy came, it’s over!’”
It was a good point considering he* had just described every porno I had ever jerked off to.
Photo By: AdalaClothing
I thanked Billy for the interview, and wandered around the sex-club thinking about what he* had told me. I entered a room with a droopy-eyed old man, just staring at a TV with a sad and confused look on his face, completely flaccid despite the vigorous gyrating of the naked woman on screen. Who was this man and what was he looking for here, sitting dormant in the back room of a sex-club?
It was then in my drug-frenzied state that I realized the sad and horrible truth—we were all that man. Like Billy’s skullet, bondage, the drugs I had taken, sex clubs, Fatima’s fairy wings and old dudes that masturbate mere feet from other people having sex—it was about the right to exercise freedom.
Creative porn is about consent, representation, experimentation and respect—without these qualities your freedom is repressed. Billy experienced this in the form of sexual trauma and unfairly-defined gender roles. Queer, trans and disabled folk experience this from a lack of representation. Female pornstars are subject to this through the precedence put on the needs of the male, and in the case of the consensually-grey-area “gonzo porn.” Creative porn attempts to reach past these things and into a more progressive era of exploration with an edge of responsibility.
I for one salute the movement—a long pink dildo raised high in the air.
Photo By:PurpleVideoProductions
*In the interest of respecting Billy’s gender identification, he is referred to with male pronouns. If you were confused reading the article, you can learn more about the importance of gender-neutral pronouns here.*
