A few words from Stephanie Swift

From “Neither Adult Nor Entertainment (It Turns Out),” Willem R. deGroot and Matt Rundlet, Première magazine, September 1998 issue: 

To be fair, some of the nom­in­ees’ titles really are con­fus­ing. Triple Penetration Débutante Sluts 4 is up for Most Outrageous Sex Scene—along with Wild Bananas on Butt Row and 87 and Still Bangin’—but loses out to a scene the pro­gram entitles “Anal Food Express” […] from some­thing called My Girlfriend’s Girlfriend. Paul Thomas’s Bad Wives wins Best Film. Evil Angel’s Buda wins Best Shot-on-Video Feature. Bad Wives also wins Best Actress (Film) for Dyanna Lauren, Best Supporting Actress (Film) for Melissa Hill, and Best Anal Sex Scene (Film) for Lauren and Steven St. Croix. Ms. Stephanie Swift wins Best Actress (Video) and tells the crowd: “Thanks, every­body. My gang bang was a blast.“³⁶

^36. Though Ms. Swift won for Miscreants, she is here allud­ing to her and dir­ect­or Rob Black’s real break­through video in 1987, Gangbang Angels, which is essen­tially a one-woman show and fea­tures the years’ most infam­ous scene: twelve wood­men line up and do an about-face, and S. Swift per­forms ana­lin­gus on each one in turn; she then adopts a prayerful/compliant pos­ture as the twelve do a right-face and form a patient line and take turns hawk­ing and spit­ting in her face. 

In addi­tion to Best Actress (Video), Swift took home an award for Female Performer of the Year, per­haps in at least par­tial recog­ni­tion of her game, shall one say, par­ti­cip­a­tion in the above described film. Well do I, and sev­er­al oth­er vet­er­ans of Première magazine, recall the fact-checking ses­sions for that piece; sit­ting in the sec­tion of our offices that we called “the pod,” leg­al pads in our laps, count­ing one, two, three, four, yes, all the way up to twelve gobs.

That was sev­er­al months after the actu­al awards—we had to wait some time before we had suf­fi­cient room to pub­lish the piece—so let me flash back a moment to the actu­al AVN Awards of late January 1998. The actu­al author of the piece was, of course, David Foster Wallace, who would pub­lish a some­what dif­fer­ent ver­sion of the piece under his ori­gin­al title “Big Red Son” in the col­lec­tion ‘Consider The Lobster’ and Other Essays. (One indic­a­tion of how dif­fer­ent is that foot­note num­ber 36 in the Première ver­sion is foot­note num­ber 51 in the book ver­sion.) On the even­ing of the awards them­selves, our pho­to­graph­er Nathaniel Welch mostly stood in the hall­way out­side the ball­room of Caesar’s Palace, tak­ing por­traits of the vari­ous award win­ners; hence, the por­trait of Swift with her two statuettes. We had devised a little game, Dave, Nat, our fourth mus­ket­eer Evan Wright (future author of Generation Kill and Hella Nation, at the time very unhap­pily ensconced at Hustler), and myself: through­out the week­end, at the vari­ous parties and recep­tions that sur­roun­ded the awards, at least two of us (and I always had to be one of the two) would approach a porn star and begin chat­ting him or her up. We would drink in their com­plete indif­fer­ence and annoy­ance for a bit (for in addi­tion to being “civil­ians” and prob­able “mooks,” Dave and myself in par­tic­u­lar were pretty poorly dressed), and then at a stra­tegic point I would present the porn per­son with my busi­ness card, which of course had the Première logo very prom­in­ently placed therein, and have a good interi­or chortle as the indi­vidu­al’s demean­or and approach changed. “Oh, you really should inter­view me,” I recall Jill Kelly say­ing rather breath­lessly, “because this is a very import­ant week­end for me, it’s the week­end I’m going to decide if I’m going to stay in the adult industry or not.” Indeed.

Now I myself had a little bit of a “thing” for none oth­er than Ms. Swift—considered her “my type,” or what you will—so it was a pecu­li­ar moment for me when Dave and I chanced to encounter her, along with the afore­men­tioned Ms. Melissa Hill, on the steps of Caesar’s after the cere­mony had wrapped. How pecu­li­ar? Allow me to quote again from the essay: “Because porn films’ worlds are so sexu­al­ized, with every­body tee­ter­ing right on the edge of coit­us all the time and it tak­ing only the slight­est nudge or excuse—a stalled elev­at­or, an unlocked door, a cocked eye­brow, a firm handshake—to send every­one tum­bling into a tangled mass of limbs and ori­fices, there’s a bizarre uncon­scious expectation/dread/hope that this is what might hap­pen right here in Max Hardcore’s hotel room. Here your cor­res­pond­ents find it impossible to over­es­tim­ate that this is a delu­sion.” I remem­ber after the piece came out that some clod or oth­er argued that the whole “expectation/dread/hope” trope was an indic­a­tion of imma­tur­ity on Dave’s part. Must be nice to be so advanced; it almost goes without say­ing, though, that the “grow up, it’s just a fantasy” stance tends to ignore the reas­on the fantasy exists in the first place. In any event. When we spied the object of my whatever the hell it was, Dave and I were say­ing our good nights; he  was suf­fer­ing from a flu, and really needed to get back to his room and rest; in the mean­time, Evan, Nat and I would work recon­nais­sance by crash­ing a party thrown by porn star Vince Voyeur. For some reas­on we had got­ten on the sub­ject of music, and he was ask­ing me to out­line the dif­fer­ences between Pink Floyd, Syd Barrett edi­tion and Pink Floyd, post-Syd Barrrett edi­tion. And then we saw Swift and Hill—like Swift, Hill was known for being a porn star that did­n’t look quite like a porn star, and no doubt at least par­tially due to this affin­ity, the two, aside from per­form­ing with each oth­er on occa­sion, were known to be per­son­ally tight—and Dave was all like, well, here’s your big chance. Dryly, that is. He did­n’t really MEAN it, in case the per­son who scol­ded the “expectation/dread/hope” thing is read­ing this.

So we made our approach, and rather than play any games I had my busi­ness card at the ready. For all of their not-looking-like-conventional-porn-stars, the male escorts of Hill and Swift were pretty, well, con­ven­tion­ally mooky—brightly colored sat­in shirts over tanned and buff physiques, overly moussed post-New-Wave pom­pa­dours, the works. One of them grabbed my busi­ness card out of my hand as I trem­blingly offered it to Ms. Swift, gave it a thor­ough going over, and announced, “I think this guy’s legit. His card is embossed.”

No, really. 

And that was pretty much that. Swift went on to work as a “con­tract girl” for the adult enter­tain­ment con­cern Wicked, which put out far milder products than Gangbang Angels; when that agree­ment ran out in 2004, she spent a couple of years at a dis­tance from the industry, but made a comeback a few years back doing mater­i­al that ten­ded to cap­it­al­ize on the “Cougar” or “MILF” vogue that was some­times cred­ited with keep­ing the “legit” adult video busi­ness afloat. 

“In June of 2009,” Swift recounts in a video that was recently pos­ted on the XXX Church web­site, “I was dia­gnosed with breast can­cer. And I really feel that can­cer saved my life.” And, yes, as you might have inferred, Swift is now not only a can­cer sur­viv­or, but a born-again Christian. The story she tells in the brief video will not neces­sar­ily be an unfa­mil­i­ar one; there was, it hap­pens, sexu­al abuse in her child­hood. She is very calm and clear as she dis­cusses how she felt dur­ing the cre­ation of what she terms “over 300 movies:” “There was this always…not really nag­ging, but just like a…uncomfortableness in my stom­ach.” “I always wondered the real reas­on why I was in the busi­ness, and why did I win the awards, and why did I get the recognition…because in the industry…it’s not a real accom­plish­ment, I mean it’s just a false sense of accom­plish­ment, it just cov­ers up…” And so on. 

It is odd, remem­ber­ing all that, and read­ing Dave’s words, and then watch­ing Swift’s largely calm but entirely…rueful recount­ing of what was her career. I post all this not to be, well, a prig, nor to get all hypo­crit­ic­ally “You see! Porn is bad!” buzz-killish, or what have you. I do, on the oth­er hand, believe Swift’s words are worth a listen, and that while it is a coin­cid­ence that this news is com­ing out at around the same time as a rather squirm-inducingly-large por­tion of the pop-culture-consuming popu­lace is hav­ing a not-so-good laugh over Charlie Sheen’s porn-star “god­desses,” it is per­haps a poten­tially not unin­struct­ive coin­cid­ence. If you know what I’m say­ing. And of course I do, as is often the case, have to won­der what Dave might have made of this.