Good Vibrations Magazine

It’ll probably be ignored by more mainstream bastions of contemporary, even pop, culture, but a minor miracle happened this week at the Adult Video News awards ceremony in Las Vegas — the so-called “adult Oscars,” where porn movies and their stars, directors, and box cover designers get recognized for their excellence. “Excellence” has sometimes been a relative term with regard to porn — many people new to watching the genre bemoan thin scripts, lack of attention to detail, and the substandard acting skills of many of the players. Porn has always had its true thespians — Jamie Gillis went from doing Shakespeare in the park to smut on a Lower East Side mattress — but most of its denizens didn’t exactly come straight from summer stock. In this business, everything is relative, and it’s not like society wants Meryl Streep fucking on camera — or would honor her with an award if she did.

So what happened that was so amazing? This year, the newest video from GV alumni Shar Rednour and Jackie Strano, Hard Love and How to Fuck in High Heels, was up for an award: Best All-Girl Feature. The mainstream adult industry is tight-knit and has a relatively small number of companies; occasionally a new phenomenon will come down the pike in that world that forces the industry to take notice, like amateur porn, but mostly the honors go to the insiders. Certain insiders can step out and do very non-mainstream things — for instance, Nina Hartley and Miss Sharon Mitchell came to San Francisco in the early ’90s to make Suburban Dykes with Fatale, the video company then owned by On Our Backs magazine, and Chloe appeared in the independent, dyke-run S.I.R. Video Productions’ last video, Bend Over Boyfriend 2. But most outsider porn — and all lesbian-made porn has been outsider porn so far — gets nary a nod from the industry, and no distribution either. That’s why it can be hard to find this material outside of urban areas — small video companies have even fewer ways than small book publishers to get the word, and the product, out. Lately outsider material has been creeping into certain categories in the AVN awards (”Best Specialty Video,” for instance) — but it never wins the established, mainstream categories.

In spite of this, entrepreneurs Shar Rednour and Jackie Strano started S.I.R. Video (the acronym stands for Sex, Indulgence, and Rock ‘n’ Roll), and have done all they could to get their cutting-edge work out into the world. Getting videos reviewed in the pages of Adult Video News is one way to ensure video stores in the hinterlands know they’re available and big stars don’t hang up on you when you call to ask them to be in your next feature. This time, Shar and Jackie’s dark-horse strategy paid off. Just like a first-time Vegas gambler whose slot machine just keeps on spitting quarters, S.I.R. Video Productions’ cherries lined up — and they won! Non-pornophiles may not understand how amazing it is that a lesbian video made by and featuring actual lesbians won when up against more mainstream industry “girl-girl action,” but it is downright amazing — especially for an underdog tape featuring butch dykes along with their femme hotties to take the category.

At the awards, those in the know were exulting over Shar and Jackie’s win. I ran up to hug Miss Sharon Mitchell — the only adult actress to ever credibly play a butch dyke onscreen (in the aforementioned Suburban Dykes, where she played a butch top dyke escort poured into leather pants, sent to spice things way up for a poor couple struggling with Lesbian Bed Death). “Isn’t it amazing that a movie with butch dykes made it!” we were saying, only to be overheard by Midori — another of our favorite stars here at GV. “A video with butches? Where?” she said. I had the distinct impression plenty of girls in the room would be glad to track this video down. Hey, maybe there’ll be a revolution in the San Fernando Valley and in the future the mainstream porn girls won’t have to wear Lee Press-On Nails to do their girl-girl scenes. (Don’t get me wrong — many of adult’s biggest female stars are not only glad to do girl-on-girl, they’re downright inspiring when they do it. But because the industry still thinks of men as the material’s primary audience, and they don’t think men want to watch butch-on-femme sex, all the women in the shoot have to be femmed out.)

The beautiful thing is that, even with the adult industry’s ideas about what is standard and saleable, AVN’s review panel saw Hard Love and How to Fuck in High Heels for what it is — hot-hot sex packaged creatively — and recognized it with an award. It was a wonderful Las Vegas jackpot for a terrific movie, a great cast, and a company that intends to keep producing what the people want: uncompromising hot sex and good alternative sex information. Kudos to the mainstream industry for recognizing there’s a hot new player at the table.