Secondly, why not?
Thirdly, I get why you wonder. I mean, my parents are both pharmaceutical scientists. I grew up in the “right” school district, in a house with a big pool and a remodeled kitchen, with cable but not HBO, with family dinners almost every night and family vacations a few times a year. We went to a blandly pleasant Episcopal church on a semi-regular basis, we volunteered twice a month at a food bank in the city. I never touched drugs, I only slept with two girls in high school, the only trouble I ever had with the law was a speeding ticket one morning when I was late for class.
No, I was never destined to do porn. After high school, I was destined for an undergrad in film studies and the same sort of life my parents had before me and their parents had before them, except I planned to be wielding a camera instead of a microscope.
It was a series of accidents that altered my trajectory, that sent me spinning out of orbit and into the uniquely heavy gravity of the porn world.
It started with my theater teacher approaching me after school in the spring of my senior year. He had a friend who was filming a commercial for a local community college, and would I like to give him a call? It would be easy work and the first non-retail line on my flimsy resume, and even though I wanted to be a director or a cinematographer, it never hurt to explore acting too, right?
I did the commercial. And then I did another, this time for a dating website aimed at college kids, which led to a commercial for a “companionship” phone-line, a dying service in 2005, but apparently still strong enough to pay for a television ad. I never lied to my parents about what I was doing, and to their credit, they never tried to dissuade me from it, even though it must have been awkward for them to see my phone sex commercials while they were trying to watch CSI reruns.
And that’s how I accidentally got into the commercial business.
This lasted about three months, and the day after graduation, while I was squinting at my computer screen, trying to parse my UCLA orientation email, I got a call from the director of the hotline ad.
“Hey kid, I’ve got a friend who likes your face, and he’s short an extra for a little movie he’s filming next week. You’d get fifty bucks a day, plus lunch. You in?”
The only thing I had planned for my summer was my part-time job at Best Buy, and honestly, getting paid to stand around on a film set sounded like a much better opportunity. I quit my Best Buy job and drove up to the set that next week, assuming a “little movie” meant an indie film or maybe a made-for-cable shlock-fest.
I was wrong on both counts. After meeting with the casting director—who was also the script supervisor—I was led back to the pool, where a woman lay on her back moaning, her hand buried inside of her lace panties. I remember watching, mesmerized, as the director occasionally called out instructions—more about the mechanics of her masturbation than about her acting.
“Spread your legs a little wider, Tara, we have a shadow.”
“Okay, now use both hands.”
“Rub your chest a little, please. Good.”
I glanced back over the thin script I’d been handed. I hadn’t read it over yet, because I knew I didn’t have a speaking role, but now I read the lines with avid fascination. Lonely housewife. Seductive gardener. And me, “Pool Party Guest #2,” who was scheduled to linger in the background with a red Solo cup and a veneer of partygoer merriment.
And that’s how I accidentally got into the soft-core porn business.
From there on out, it was a series of gradual steps onward—or downward, depending on your point of view. The director liked me, and I came back the next week for a film about a naughty college cheerleader who falls for her professor. I played her jilted boyfriend—a role that required a scene where I received a blowjob, something that I initially had mixed feelings about. On one hand, no eighteen-year-old male has ever felt despair at the prospect of a blowjob, but on the other hand, it felt strange to be sucked off and then handed a check.
Not wrong, necessarily. But strange.