Naked Ambition: Adventures in Porn

Telling people that I produce pornography either begins or ends conversations. Straight men want to convert me, gay men want to befriend me, and wives or girlfriends typically shun me. Yet everyone wants the juice.

"How did you get into this?" "Do you ever get tired of watching women go at it?" "Does your family know?" "Can I be a fluffer?" "Fisting -- doesn't that hurt?"

Then there's the South.

"You do what? Photography? Wait, did you say 'pornography'? I thought so ... can you pass the peas, please?"

My mother hoped I would get my law degree and open a small-town law practice in Georgia, like my father did. I am a lawyer, so I made it that far, but mine was a different path.

When I was growing up, I didn't even know what a lesbian was. I learned about women who kissed women on the Howard Stern show. Somehow I uncovered a secret stash of porn that my dad had hidden behind drawers in our family room. I pored over pictorials in my brother's copies of Swank and Penthouse. I subscribed to Playboy my very first semester of college. But I couldn't find anything that felt real to me.

I wanted to see sex in pornography like it was in Bertolucci movies -- hot, natural, but somehow very glamorous. Of course, later on there was The L Word, but just like in most films, the sex stopped exactly when I was ready for it to start.

So I quit my job.

I was working at a law firm in Lower Manhattan, near Wall Street, with a team of about 20 other lawyers. Boring shit -- banking litigation. For months on end we would do nothing but play "movie pong" and share Internet phenomenons like that maze game that pops up with Linda Blair's horrific Exorcist face. I felt like I was dying one day at a time. My office brothers -- my gang of funny straight male companions -- suggested that I start a sex blog, so I did.

The blog evolved into an erotic social network, and then I left the law.

Then the porn stars came to me. My social network was the first of its kind and a surprisingly very welcome women-only spot for sharing sexual experiences. The contact was made; I had the glimmer of the seed of a cast of porn stars. I could start to move in the direction of movie-making.

Doing something -- not just saying you want to do something or dreaming you want to do something -- is kind of rare, I've discovered. I actually made a film series of lesbian pornography, and this shocked people. They didn't respond in an "ew, that's so slutty" way, but rather with the flavor of "How the hell did you pull that off?"

I'll tell you that and so much more, but you have to read the next column.

It's a mad, mad business, this sex stuff. When you're building a business to rival the crumbling Playboy, the only way to go is up ... unless you're talking about down there.