Let’s face it, a lot of people watch porn to escape from reality. It can be easy to forget that the actors on the screen are real people, with real lives outside of the fantasies they’re enacting. But San Francisco documentary filmmaker Simone Jude wants to remind us. By exploring what happens behind-the-scenes and in the personal lives of three women in adult entertainment, Simone hopes to change the perceptions that people have about porn performers. Her upcoming film Public Sex, Private Lives, follows the professional and private lives of Lorelei Lee, Princess Donna, and Isis Love, dynamic and complex women who are much more than the characters they play in adult films. Simone’s film focuses on their struggles, relationships, and ambitions as they juggle multiple identities — as mothers, daughters, artists, professionals, students, and performers — in their daily lives. Intrigued, I contacted Simone and asked her a few questions about what made her want to make Public Sex, Private Lives.
Appropriately, it was Lorelei Lee who first interviewed Simone. In 2006, as a student at SF State, she contacted Simone for a research paper she was writing on gender in queer communities. They became friends, and in 2009, the tables were turned when Simone and her friend Jesse Kerman co-directed a documentary on Lorelei. The short film was the impetus for the longer film, Public Sex, Private Lives.
When I asked Simone why she decided to solely focus on female performers she explained, “I wanted to delve into the love-hate relationship America has with strong, smart, sexual women. The stigma around women performing in porn doesn’t seem to exist for male performers. I was intrigued by the way we as a culture build a mythology around femininity and sexuality, and how they come to a head in our treatment of porn performers.”
I wondered, too, how the porn industry in SF compares to that in, let’s say, the San Fernando Valley (where I’m from!). Simone said that authenticity is a big deal here. “The producers at, say, Kink.com or Pink & White aim to capture real orgasms and genuine sexual exploration rather than focusing solely on the viewer’s experience,” she explains. SF also produces more feminist, queer, gay, fetish, and bondage-oriented porn than Los Angeles. And the people making the films are more diverse, too. There are several female queer producers in the city, including Pink & White, Queer Porn TV, and Madison Young.
Simone has been self-financing Public Sex, Private Lives for nearly four years, but she needs help finishing the project. She started a Kickstarter fund to raise $22,000 she needs of post-production costs and to pay lawyers fees and cover film festival submission costs (all those things really do add up!). As of writing this blog post, Simone has nine days left to raise about $4,000. If you’ve interested in seeing this movie, this is your chance to do a good deed!
