Inside a warehouse at the edge of Potrero Hill, Shine Louise Houston plugs extension cords into a power strip. On the other side of a plywood wall, the lights go on. She walks down the corridor, around a corner and opens the door to one of the most exclusive apartments in all of San Francisco.
The space is small, maybe 15 by 20 feet, but it feels much larger owing to the placement of the bed and to the walls, which do not quite reach all the way to the ceiling. The room is tastefully decorated with paintings of birds, stacks of books and a cabinet of artfully arranged dildos. On the bed a fresh set of sheets lies still cubed in store-bought plastic, and just above, propped against the pillows, a lighting dummy sits—supine, feminine and glossy.
“There’s a stereotype that if you make porn, then you’re not a real filmmaker…it’s not easy to make sex look pretty.”
This is the set of the “Crash Pad” series. “Crash Pad” is produced for Pink & White Productions Incorporated, an independent film company specializing in the production of queer adult films. Like in all porn, the production rests on fantasy, and the premise of “Crash Pad” reads like the legend of Brigadoon: that somewhere in San Francisco there is an apartment with an open door, where whoever enters can have their every fantasy fulfilled.
Houston is Pink & White’s founder and director. “I don’t like all porn, but I certainly do love porn,” she explains in Shiny Jewels, her 13-minute documentary on the process of adult filmmaking. “It’s right there pushing the boundary of free speech. It’s keeping the arena open for everyone who wants to talk about sex.”
“There’s a stereotype that if you make porn, then you’re not a real filmmaker,” she says. (Shiny Jewels starts out with a shot of Houston at a computer editing, clearly exasperated by the giggly audio of an unseen film.) “It’s not easy to make sex look pretty,” she says.
Pink & White Productions is a piece of what makes the San Francisco porn scene so unusual. Larger studios in SoCal can make more money simply by starting with more money. Distribution platforms — “tube sites” like Xtube, RedTube or YouPorn — produce no original content but make money selling data to advertisers (the Facebook business model for the adult-film industry). Companies that can’t compete against either porn empires or, more often, distribution platforms owned by companies like MindGeek have to be both niche and nimble.
Pink & White offers an unusual product (queer porn with a lesbian perspective) managed by a small staff (two) producing content on a single film set (a bedroom of fantastic myth). Luck doesn’t hurt either. At least part of the credit for Pink & White’s success is owed to its customers.
“We’ve deduced that we have a pretty loyal fan base,” says Houston. “We stopped doing DVDs a while ago. We just do Internet videos now, but we still haven’t seen any of our recent stuff pirated.”
“We’re very tight on piracy,” explains Jiz Lee, Houston’s marketing director and the author of Coming Out like a Porn Star.
In a city that has a school for the making of handmade books, an artisanal corner store and now cannabis sommeliers, Pink & White Productions feels emblematic of the cottage model — assuming there can be such a thing as cottage pornography—in step with a general tendency toward the crafted and homespun, offering up the personal and idiosyncratic as a challenge to the mass produced. And in talking with Lee and Houston, for all the fantastic optimism of Pink & White and the “Crash Pad” series, the only aspect that strikes one as unrealistic is that somewhere in San Francisco, there is an open apartment.
The vast majority of actors working in porn are independent contractors. It’s a less-than-glamorous lifestyle spent drifting between studios and webcams. It may be potentially freeing for letting one have so much control over one’s own schedule, but it’s also a drain because one has to balance so many hustles and spend time stuck in traffic.
“Driving is the worst part of porn,” says Mia Li, a San Diego–based performer who frequently travels up to the Bay Area for work.
It would be easier to work out of Los Angeles, where the big studios are, but the Bay Area’s diversity in adult-film production sets it apart from larger competitors in southern California.
“I feel all the qualities of my otherness all the time,” she says about the LA scene. In SoCal, performers are expected to adhere more closely to a stereotypically gendered “type.” The Bay Area adult film scene, being smaller and more self-directed, allows performers a great deal more freedom in their art.
Both behind the camera and in front, porn is still largely a boys’ club with all-male crews, male-run companies and products made for the benefit of men. The Bay Area may not be the center of adult-film production, but it’s a hub for alternative porn.
“I’ve been lucky to work with female directors in LA,” says Li, “but it’s more likely I’ll encounter an all-female crew up here in the Bay. It’s more likely I’ll get to work with a director who’s a person of color.”
For its own part, Pink & White is almost exceptionally open minded, providing little in the way of direction. Like the Bay Area as a whole, Pink & White attracts its share of folks who identify with all spectra of gender, orientation and exhibitionism.
“Our basic starting line is that people show up with an open attitude and a willingness to create,” says Jiz Lee. “Performers mostly self-select in or out of productions.”
The adult-film industry has faced similar challenges as the journalism and music industries. Porn had its golden age in the 1970s, when the industry moonlit as Hollywood’s alter ego, and film technicians collaborated in producing marvelous sets and glamorous sex. That began to change with the introduction of home recording equipment, which opened the field to amateurs and then changed further with home distribution — first tapes and DVDs, then the Internet.
As late as the early 2000s, porn was profitable simply because you almost always had to pay to access it. Internet piracy dealt a severe blow to the industry, with distribution platforms — the “tube sites” like Xtube, RedTube, and YouPorn — stripping away small profit margins. To stay solvent, producers cut costs. Most adult films made now are extremely low budget, without a crew, equipment or scripts to focus on, and with an almost exclusive focus on hard-core, penetrative sex. The results are cheap in both senses of the word.
“It was like the meteor and the dinosaurs,” says Houston, “and all the weird, little scurrying creatures were the ones to survive.”
The interpretation is optimistic only because in Houston’s analogy, her company is one of those little scurrying creatures. In an era when profit margins are ever-decreasing and producers offer shockingly little pay for explicit sexual acts, Pink & White has actually doubled the amount they’ve been able to pay performers for participating in “Crash Pad.” One of the dinosaurs, then, would be Kink.
When Kink.com purchased the Armory in 2006, they turned a defunct military complex into the Hogwarts of BDSM. Taking a tour of the place feels like being given a preview of what hijinks might occur were those cunning Slytherin lads let loose with whips and bondage rope. In a walk through the lower levels, guests are coyly guided past chains, exposed lighting and industrial-size drums of lube. Everything seems either upholstered in velvet or appropriately and necessarily dank.
Porn was produced on-site in both the posh upper floors and in the basement. Kink also offered educational opportunities: civilians could sign up for such titillating workshops as “Electroplay: Add Some Spark to your Love Life” and “How to Drive a Vulva.” But as of the end of February, adult films will no longer be produced on-site. Kink will continue to administer its website from the Armory and offer tours and workshops as part of their lurid academy, but porn will no longer be made there.
The building does feel emptier now that the most salacious chapter of its history is coming to a close. In walking around the Armory now, one gets the sense of having missed out on something — like a spectator at the Coliseum arriving a millennium too late. (To its credit, Kink did keep a film set styled like an old Roman bath — in the defunct natatorium, naturally.)
“It’s very sad that [Kink] is closing,” says Mia Li. “Not only because we don’t know the fates of our Kink shoots, but because we won’t have this connecting space. The green room was always filled with all kinds of performers.”
“My heart is ripped,” she says. “That place symbolizes my ho family.”
Like nearly every other product on the market, the large- and medium-size makers of porn have to be omnivorous in their production and distribution if they want to stay solvent. The small makers of porn have to be artisanal. The distribution platforms, the “tube sites,” need only worry about amassing enough content so that no viewer could ever exhaust the supply, no matter which orifice they favor.
To be clear, Kink.com is not closing. And nor, for that matter, is the Armory. Mike Stabile, media consultant for Kink and the Armory, has been very active in promoting the venue’s next incarnation as a concert hall and event space.
Kink has invested heavily in refurbishing the Armory. Every figure Stabile cites is divisible by four. Four million dollars invested in repairs and upgrades. A 400,000-square-foot venue capable of accommodating four thousand people. A steel truss that can lift 40,000 pounds. The Armory won’t be a porn studio anymore, but it will be a convention center and concert hall. The space has already been booked by Square, Airbnb and the Chemical Brothers.
As media manager, Stabile is pragmatic. “There are a couple of reasons we won’t be filming at the Armory anymore,” he says. “The fact that there was an adult business, even though it was separate from the event space, was causing issues in terms of booking, concurrent with the fact that we had shot that building pretty aggressively.”
Kink had been using a lot of the same sets to the point of fatigue. How many more stories could be filmed around the jail cells or old Roman baths? How many more plot lines hinging on overstuffed cushions and red curtains? The management felt that the time had come to change.
“We wanted to allow the directors a little more creative freedom for what they did,” says Stabile. For some time Kink had a plan to open up satellite studios that producers could design according to their specific needs and to change the Armory’s function to an administrative mothership.
“It’s a new era for the company,” says Stabile. “We’re not folding; we’re just changing the way in which we do production.”
Tours and workshops have been very popular with the community, even as film production comes to a close, and there is no plan to discontinue either. “We’re taking it as it comes and figuring out what the best way forward is,” says Stabile.
For Pink & White, Kink was never a competitor but a collaborator. Shine Louise Houston and Jiz Lee see reason to be optimistic, even as they mourn the ending of a crazy, weird and beautiful decade in San Francisco porn. In a vision of their own future, Lee imagines Pink & White as taking on the role of pornographic incubator, offering apprenticeship programs, teaching business management and providing resources to filmmakers who don’t yet have a leg up.
“It’s sad that the Armory is closing, but at the same time the vacuum is exciting,” says Lee, “Directors and crews will have more free time to work on their own productions. And if PinkLabel.tv can host them, then I’m excited to see what they come up with.”
Given the Bay Area’s diversity with respect to race, gender and identity, and all the ways there are to connect, porn may very well be in the midst of a second golden age—perhaps not as cinematically glamorous as the first, but a lot more progressive.
“[Porn] can validate,” Houston explains in Shiny Jewels. “It can give you permission to do things that you are interested in. Or say yes—other people do this thing that you also like to do. And it’s OK. You’re not a total freak. Or maybe you are, but that’s a good thing.”
