Kinky art
A look into the fantastical world of independent adult films.
An astronaut gives in to the temptations of a mysterious rubber pool filled with colorful and transparent orbs from outer space. // Photo by Ryan Suits
Written by Luisa Loi
In September 2015, filmmaker Sam H. — who prefers to remain anonymous — walked through the thrift store, his eyes scanning the dolls on the shelves in search of the finest synthetic locks of hair he could find for his black-and-white investigative short “Film Bonoir.”
“Truly the creepiest action I’ve ever done,” Sam recounted, laughing.
“I imagined having to explain myself,” he said. “And being like ‘Oh, it’s for my friend’s penis.’”
Sometimes, the beautification of a penis puppet with googly eyes and a miniature fedora comes at the price of a doll’s own pretty looks. Perhaps a bold choice and a cruelty to the doll community, but cheap and bizarre accessories are part of what make Sam’s films stand out.
Of course, not as much as the extravagant performances.
Sam is an independent porn creator and performer from Seattle. He described his films as humorous, joyful and unusual. The kind that “If a pubescent 15-year-old had only this on a desert island, they would delete the film,” he said. But also something his parents are proud of, in a way that reminds him of sports parents.
His latest short, “Animal Style,” won in the Best in Show category of HUMP! Film Festival for its witty screenplay and is now touring the country.
HUMP! is a show that features short erotic and pornographic films from independent creators and amateurs, founded in Seattle by author and LGBTQ+ activist Dan Savage. One of the show’s destinations was the Pickford Film Center in downtown Bellingham in late April.
The awareness that your bank and the people who monitor your movements on Snapchat know what you’re up to can be awkward in these circumstances. However, the embarrassment of watching two hours of people getting kinky with about 70 strangers turns into amusement as soon as Savage pleads with the audience not to get carried away by masturbating or flashing people in the theater.
The shorts, each up to five minutes long, included erotic and pornographic films portraying a wide variety of kinks, sexual orientations, body shapes and artistic visions. For those who may be unfamiliar, erotica tends to be sensual and emotionally evocative, while pornography places more focus on unsimulated sex.
“I love that people are being exposed to things that wouldn’t necessarily turn them on, or sexual orientations, bodies or kinks that they’re not used to and may never see otherwise,” Sam said.
With the performances of full-body men in animal costumes and the starring roles of the — now fedora-less — “puppets,” “Animal Style” is the most unusual high-stakes documentary of reproductive behaviors in the animal kingdom.
Although it may be far from being a PG-13 story, saying you shot a porno at a dog park and a beach in San Francisco without getting caught is quite the power move that could confer the Coolest Guest at the Party badge on you.
Like his previous films, “Animal Style” is the product of his and his friends’ playful imagination. “There’s so many stupid puns and jokes we try to fit in,” he said. “Everyone got to modify the script for what felt real for them.”
This was the first film of his that he didn’t perform in, however Sam is still a regular. In the past he has appeared on screen with his group of sex-positive friends who share his sense of humor and are “wonderfully down to be a porn star.”
Having regular discussions about consent and boundaries is crucial to creating a fun experience, even when working with old time friends, and is something that Sam and his team value deeply.
“I want them to realize that our friendships and relationships are way more important to me than the film,” he said. “If we make it, I want it to feel like a wonderful enough experience [so] that if it turns out that the camera wasn’t on the entire time, we still had a great day.”
He believes humor and personality are often missing in porn’s portrayal of sex. With his films, Sam wants to communicate the idea that there can be playfulness and equity in sexy and very “non-sexy moments.”
“Anywhere where there’s something unspoken, there’s humor,” he said. “Sex has so many unspoken aspects for a lot of us in society that there’s so much humor there, and I want people to feel a sense of ease with things that have felt taboo and scary.”
Under a canopy of helium balloons, a man wakes up in a psychedelic circus dimension, his wrists and ankles struggling against the balloon handcuffs that keep him tied to the bed.
Suddenly, a clown in drag makeup tickles the man’s feet, setting off a freaky metamorphosis.
After shedding their wicked clown skin, Michigan-based artists Rachel Britton and Jeff Boese laugh as they serenade their audio recorder with kazoos, squeaky dog toys and slide whistles, creating the sound effects for their first kinky-and-comical film.
“Circus Birth” is a feverish and unpredictable explosion of colors and sounds that “come out of things they shouldn’t be coming out [of],” born from Britton and Boese’s dark sense of humor.
“We wanted to do something silly and dark, colorful but wacky,” Britton said.
Jugs, played by Rachel Britton, prepares to torment her frightened victim. Will he survive? Film still from Boese and Britton’s short, “Circus Birth” // photo courtesy of Rachel Britton
Circus Birth was scripted, shot and edited in a month and a half, just in time for the HUMP! submission deadline. The crew was just the two of them, and having limited resources made filming challenging, the couple said. They took turns holding the camera to film as they performed, trying to shoot while the balloons were still floating and the clown makeup was still in place.
“We were so tired by the end of our shoot day and we both knew we didn’t have everything we wanted the way we wanted,” Boese said, recalling the image of Britton holding their head in their hands as they sat on the bed.
“When we were doing it, it didn’t feel like fun. But once it started coming together, we got really excited about it,” he said.
They filmed the short in Britton’s apartment bedroom, after removing all of its furniture and leaving just the bed.
After a long day of shooting, the couple ate pizza on the bed. “We went to bed with all the balloons on the ceiling, but when we woke up, they were all on the floor,” Britton said. “It looked really cute in my bedroom.”
In the film, anything can be a kink: tickling, feet, clowns, even balloons. However, Boese and Britton said the film is mainly comical and abstract, as balloons and confetti are used to simulate the sexual scenes. “The erotic part is just sprinkled there,” Britton said.
“Our number one goal is not people spanking it to our stuff, but it’s more of sharing a creative vision through this dark surrealism and eroticism,” Boese said. “I think bodies are a work of art, and we approach eroticism from that artistic point of view.”
Surrealism, humor and the concept of the body as a work of art are also elements in Ryan Suit’s film, “Celestial Bodies,” which they described as “seductive sensations in space.”
The film follows two stylish and “punny” astronauts as they explore an alluring alien spaceship, a dreamlike set created in Suit’s own home with the help of their partner.
“I’ve always been very keen on science fiction, diving into the unknown, I thought that would be interesting to explore in an erotic journey,” they said.
Glamorous and brave astronaut Sierra McKenzie is on a mission to face the mysterious alien that hides inside a spaceship // photo by Ryan Suits
The film, which is Suits’ first erotic short, “is plot-driven while heavily focused on sensory play and eye candy.” The first draft of the script was less provocative, but became kinkier thanks to the lead performer’s insistence.
Suits is the founder of Atomic Cheesecake Productions, a film and photo production company that celebrates plus size femme bodies and stands out for its ethereal imagery and use of neon lights and glitter — lots of glitter.
Suits started taking photos of their plus size friends, which gained the attention of more people with similar body types who wanted to be immortalized in Suits’ style.
“For most of my lifetime, mainstream media has been extremely fatphobic,” they said. “Knowing it was resonating with that audience as a reflection of their idealized selves made me approach the work with more intention.”
Suits said they used to convert adult DVDs into videos on demand. They quickly noticed that most movies starred similar-looking performers and the same positions, which as a filmmaker they found very boring.
“Mainstream porn is designed for cis men and has all the problematic elements inherent to media designed for that audience,” Suits said.
Suits sees indie erotica as more engaging and diverse, representing a wider range of underrepresented experiences. “It feels more like a collaboration of passionate people than a factory pumping out the same product with new packaging,” they said.
Filmmaker Inka Winter said that while she acknowledges that not all women like the same things, there is a general consensus on what they don’t like about mainstream porn. The degradation, coercion and the female performers’ fake moans, to name a few. To Winter, seeing genuine pleasure is pleasurable itself. And it can be pleasurable to men as well.
Winter is the founder and owner of ForPlay Films, an independent production company that creates porn through a feminist gaze.
Winter said that, when comparing female produced porn and mainstream porn, the visuals are what stand out the most. “I think women’s sexuality is something that involves more senses.”
Lighting, music, location and clothing are chosen with attention to visual pleasure, whereas she said mainstream porn scenes tend to be “all about the genitals being very lit.”
Winter works with amateur and professional adult performers. Before shooting, Winter asks her performers who they want to film with, which often tends to be friends or partners they share a lot of chemistry with.
“I think a lot of them have experience with being in spaces where they’ve been watched at least once before,” she said. Patience is key when performers feel nervous, but most people she has worked with are very sex positive.
In 2017, Winter was looking for a couple to perform in her upcoming film, “The Punishment.” The requirements were good chemistry and being unafraid to perform in front of a camera and a film crew.
Partners Crystal Johnson and Mandroid, whom she knew through mutual friends, checked both of those boxes.
Johnson and Mandroid had never had sex in front of a camera before. At first, Johnson was afraid of performing and being caught by her family, or just feeling uncomfortable during filming.
“It helped that we were working with a production company that was staffed only by women. The only assigned-male-at-birth person in the room was Mandroid,” she said. “So to be in a room with all of these badass professional, supportive women … felt super comfortable.”
Johnson described the experience of working with Winter as magical. “I wanted it to be rich, textured and beautiful,” she said. “I [didn’t] want it to feel male-gazey and objectifying, I [wanted] it to feel romantic.”
Both Mandroid and Johnson are kinky in their private relationship, but unlike Johnson, Mandroid enjoys being objectified in front of a camera. “That’s something I’m into,” they said.
After performing in “The Punishment,” Mandroid appeared in two more films. “I think this is just kind of a natural expression of me being a lot more comfortable with myself, my body and my sexuality … Portraying a connection isn’t necessary for my participation.”
Moments before engaging in consensual bondage, a man tenderly holds his partner’s hand while holding the rope bundle she gifted him. Film still from “Tie Me Up,” directed by Inka Winter // photo courtesy of Inka Winter
When writing scripts for Forplay Films, performers share what their skills are and what they’re into, sexually and artistically. Johnson and Winter worked together on the concept of the film. Johnson wanted the film to be truthful to the sexual relationship between her and Mandroid.
“It’s exactly the kind of sex that we have,” she said.
Two of Winter’s latest films, “Versification” and “Tie Me Up,” made it to this year’s edition of HUMP! and star different performers.
In “Versification,” pleasure and art meet in a seductive exchange of origami flowers — an idea David Lee, one of the lead performers, came up with — and poems, culminating with the characters having sex. Winter’s films follow a prompt but leave space for improvisation, which adds to the authentic chemistry, leading to intimate conversations between the characters.
For “Tie Me Up,” Winter found professional performers who were into bondage. The film is a portrayal of consensual and non-hardcore bondage, dominance, sadism and masochism, or BDSM, an approach to the genre that aims to inspire people who are new to the practice to try it out.
In Winter’s opinion, women feel empowered when they see what they like being accurately represented in porn.
“Every time I tell a woman what I do, there’s always this sort of excitement,” she said.
After gently unfolding the origami flower created by her lover, a woman reads a metrical prompt as part of a sensual game // film still from Inka Winter’s short, “Versification”
According to Mandroid, porn and erotic films “can be a fun, sexy type of expression … a super fun way to connect with friends and to explore your own sexuality.”
The film Johnson performed in was featured in the Vienna Porn Film Festival and HUMP!. “It feels like a big accomplishment to be a part of a piece of art that has value and that people want to see and celebrate. Especially because it’s so personal to my relationship with [Mandroid].”
Some time after shooting the film, Johnson moved to Germany for four years, keeping a long distance relationship with Mandroid. Their ardor never faltered, despite living over five thousand miles away from each other. It’s forever preserved in their film, a memento they look back on with fondness when they’re apart.
“[It] was like reading a love letter,” Johnson said.