Good Vibrations Magazine

^{Walking into the offices of General Video of America-Trans World News for the first time in April of 2007, I admit that it was with some reticence. Its location was not exactly ideal and its worn and weathered offices in no way rivaled the super sleek testaments of modern architecture that dominated the landscape a few blocks west. Having been a prospective candidate for employment at some of the highest profile companies in the Cleveland – businesses that were in the literal and geographical heart of the Northeast Ohio corporate body, it was a bit anticlimactic to find myself in what was, by all appearances, an aging artery.}

^{Did I mention I’d be working in porn?}

^{Not to say that I have an issue with pornography. I would be lying if I said I’d never seen one, but since to me they were about as interesting is watching paint dry, they really didn’t do anything for me. That, and, despite my generally progressive outlook, I’m a shy, old-fashioned girl at heart. To my way of thinking, sex is a personal matter, and there is something inherently unsettling to me about graphic and exhibitionist displays of it. Not to say it was wrong, only to say that it was, for me, a tad disconcerting.}

^{My temporary workspace was located the office where movies featuring every conceivable expression of legal sexual activity imaginable were reviewed for defects. Burying myself in my pile of spreadsheets, I tried to keep the sounds of overacted orgasms from burning their way into my psyche. Porn was uncomfortable. Bad acting was downright intolerable.}

^{However, after a few weeks of lessening tendency for averting my eyes from gratuitous displays of human genitalia and what some people choose to do with it, I was struck by a blazing epiphany. It dawned on me that the parade of pornography before me wasn’t a representation of someone’s idea of sex, it was a representation of someone’s idea of entertainment. Maybe not my idea, but it was someone’s. And, like any form of entertainment, it’s a distraction. Pornography is a form of entertainment that takes one of the most the visceral, most fundamental components hardwired into the human individual – sexuality – and displays it in a variety of scenarios designed to engage the full array of the senses. The fact that pornography has stirred controversy since its beginnings is a testament to its success in its ability to distract.}

^{This success, however, can also work to its detriment. The distraction is often convincing enough to create a pseudo-reality that is often far more appealing than the actual reality that some people live in. The result is distraction from the understanding that the emphasis in the phrase “Adult Entertainment” is not “adult”, but entertainment. And while the word “adult” should only carry with it the connotation that the type of material involved is not suitable for those not mature enough to understand the fictional or fantasy quality of it, it instead carries a stigma that evokes a fear of sexuality and its myriad forms of expression. It is this stigma that has given rise to Ohio’s Community Defense Act.}

^{For those of you who may not know, the Community Defense Act places statewide restrictions on the operation hours of adult businesses – clubs, bookstores, video stores, cabarets and any other venue that involves nudity or semi-nudity, forcing them to close at midnight. It also prohibits any touching in clubs, meaning no garter tipping, no lap dances, not even friendly hugs, else you are penalized with up to six months in jail and a $1000.00 fine. In Ohio, that is the exact same penalty imposed on you if you commit vehicular homicide. You are exempt from these provisions if you happen to be related to the adult performer – then its legal to touch them. Incestuous, perhaps, but legal.}

^{Call the Community Defense Act what you want – The Stripper Law, the Porn Bill, The Ill-conceived Brainchild of a Group Quasi-Religious Ultra Conservative Wackos. You can even take the CCV tact and call it an anti-crime bill rather than the piece of legislative crap it is, if you want. But, the truth is that the Community Defense Act is a restriction on the First Amendment -guaranteed right for people to choose how they wish to be entertained.}

^{Now, while playing the Constitutional card might seem to be the equivalent of using a Howitzer to swat a fly, it isn’t. The Community Defense Act is a reaction to the stigma of adult entertainment, not the reality of it. The stigma of porn is that it is immoral and unraveling the fabric of our society. The reality of porn is that it is as valid of a form entertainment and expression as football, soap operas and Star Wars. As such,, it is protected by the United States Constitution as surely and as equally as any other form of entertainment. The CDA strips away those protections like a dancer in a g-string.}

^{I had been working at GVA-TWN for about two months when news of the CDA hit. Reading the provisions of the bill, I felt the stirrings of revulsion building inside me. I had been familiar with the CCV, and with Phil Burress from my Miami University days, when he attempted to have The Robert Mapplethorpe photography exhibit at the Cincinnati Museum of Art shut down. Burress seemed to believe that homosexuality was the black plague of the 20th century, and that pornography is its means of transmission. His existence is offensive to me. He has all the mental stability of an earthquake and an agenda that wreaks as much havoc. The fact that he seems to be firmly ensconced in the political structure of Ohio is nothing short of alarming.}

^{In May of this year, the troops, consisting of GVA employees, several adult store and club owners in Ohio and the Buckeye Association of Club Executives (B.A.C.E.) were rallied, and the effort to bring some common sense back to the legislature began. Articles expounding on the negative impact the CDA would create appeared in every major newspaper in Ohio. Letters were written, calls were made, meetings were held, and despite every rational argument that was made against HB 16’s passage – the loss of jobs and tax revenue in an already severely depressed economy, the killing of any chance of Cleveland being able to leverage itself into a convention destination, and the basic principle of separation of church and state to name a few – it cleared both the house and senate hurdles to land squarely on Ted Strickland’s desk. It remained untouched and unsigned for the requisite ten days that would allow it to pass into law without the gubernatorial seal of approval.}

^{I told Rondee (Kamins) and Joel (Kaminsky), the CEO and COO of GVA-TWN, respectively, that I wanted to be involved with the campaign to get a referendum for the CDA on the November ballot. My passion about this issue had been stoked and I wanted something more constructive to do with it than despise Phil Burress from afar. I learned long ago that the Burress’ of the world cannot be argued or reasoned with. They are too deeply entrenched in their own malignant narcissism to consider that their problems, real or imagined, (in his case a “former” porn addiction) are their own. That, and in my idealism, I believe that while grassroots political activity may not be everyone’s idea of a good time, it is time well invested. It provides the opportunity to participate in the political process of our country. All the better if the activism is for as socially divisive an issue as sex can be. Deep down, however, I knew that this fight, for me, was not about activism. It wasn’t even about Phil Burress. It was about something that I believed in, though I could not have articulated at the time what that belief was.}

^{As the monumental task of gathering the nearly 250,000 signatures needed to put the referendum on the ballot (as opposed to the paltry 120,000 it took to get it to the legislature) wore on, I found myself combating an encroaching disillusionment over the widespread lack of understanding about what was at stake. Too many people too busy to listen, too frightened by sex, too eager to cling to comfortable apathy to give thought to what passage of this law would mean. The constitution guarantees certain rights, true, but democracy is a participatory state of government that relies on the people to help preserve it from threat, and the Community Defense Act is just such a threat. It erodes the cornerstones that our country is based on – majority rule, the right to vote, separation of church and state, the freedom of expression, the right to choose. The number of people that didn’t seem to comprehend or care was more frightening than pornography ever could be.}

^{But still I continued tying to impress upon anyone who would listen the importance of what was at stake for Ohio, for the country, if the Community Defense Act stood. The signs of exhaustion setting in hadn’t been enough incentive to slow down. No matter how many signatures I gathered, no matter how many extra hours I devoted to both this and my “daytime duties”, no matter how much sleep l lost, there was always more I needed to do. A friend of mine, a veteran in the activism arena, referred to this state as “activism overdrive” – The point where the drive to wage war overtakes the physical ability to fight. By her way describing it, it seemed akin to a state of Zen. To mine, it was a Belief.}

^{Belief in what?}

^{It was the first time I had asked myself this question. And with one day left before the second-round signatures were due to the Secretary of State’s office, I found myself blessed with a clarity that only three months of sleep-deprived insanity can inspire. This was not an obsession with the CDA, or with Phil Burress and the CCV. This belief was a quixotic and relentless devotion to one of the few ideas that I hold to be sacred and true about America and that which makes it truly great. I’m not talking about baseball, hot dogs, apple pie and Chevrolet. I mean the belief upon which America is founded, and that which I had not previously been able to name: Freedom. Our forefathers (and mothers) were the architects of it, our leaders swear to defend it and our soldiers and patriots fight and die to protect it. And while the CCV would argue that the CDA protects the greatness of America, their idea of America vastly differs from the Real America that I believe in.}

^{In the Real America that I believe in, people are free to express themselves as they choose, and are free to be entertained, or not, by those expressions. In the CCV’s America, people are free to be entertained by what the CCV defines as entertainment, and that freedom changes when their definition changes. In Real America, people are free to believe in whatever god or gods the wish, and there is a separation between religion and government. In their America, you are free to believe in their god, the way they believe in it, and the church IS the state. In Real America, the Constitution is a contract – an agreement and a sacred trust to uphold the Idea of America, to protect that Idea from the forces that seek to destroy it from without and within, and a detailed outline on how that idea can be protected and upheld. In their America, they strive to protect America at the expense of the freedoms that we are all guaranteed. In Real America, Freedom is the heart; in their America, it’s a cancer.}

^{I don’t like CCV’s America. In Real America, I am free to do that. In their America, I’m not.}

^{None of us are free.}

^{And the Community Defense Act is a chilling glimpse of an America without Freedom.}

^{“What it comes down to for me,” I said to Joel in a rare moment of conversation about the CDA crusade, “Is that yes, this is about protecting the company I work for, the jobs of the people that I work with, the right for people to think and decide for themselves and that’s important in the grander scheme. But for me, personally… I’m just not ready to accept that the Constitution no longer applies. I don’t want to believe that the heart of our country, the foundation of our society is irreparably broken. Because if it is…where does that leave us?”}

^{With all the Zen of a Jedi, (or as I like to call him Obi-Wan Kaminsky) the perpetual half-smile he almost always wears broadens slightly. “It’s always something”, he says. “This is a battle that we’re always, in some way or another, fighting. Today its this, tomorrow it will be something else. But what defines us as a company is the fact that when the time comes to stand up and fight, we fight.”}

^{For the next three days, I tried to think of something that sounded more quintessentially Real American, and failed miserably.}

^{Several weeks have passed, and at the time of this writing, the fate of the referendum to put the CDA on the ballot is still up in the air. More than one piece of information has surfaced to suggest that the fix was in long before we started down this path, and that the influence of religious conservatism on Ohio politics might run deeper than previously expected. Nothing has been decided, and so the fight continues. On the back deck of the building, I overhear Rondee, describing her recent experience at the Secretary of State’s office verifying petitions that were miscounted, vehemently proclaim “I am even more determined to fight now than I was before. I can handle losing, but now we are just being wronged, and I can’t take that!”, and can’t help but smile.}

^{GVA-TWN has proven to be a lot of the things that I expected when I first walked through its doors: interesting, challenging, unusual. It has also proven itself to be something that I had not even begun to imagine: a place that stands up not only for its people, but for THE People, our rights, and the freedoms that we are able to enjoy. And while a humble artery of NEOH corporate body may be its location, the heart Real America is its home. And I call my self fortunate to be one of the people that helps keep it beating.}