Interview by Leo McGovern.

One of my early interviews for ANTIGRAVITY was with Susannah Breslin. I’d heard she’d recently moved to New Orleans from Los Angeles, and was anxious to interview her and help promote the New Orleans Bookfair, which she had a scheduled reading at in late-October 2004. We sat in the back courtyard at the old Z’otz in the French Quarter. Her short story collection, You’re A Bad Man, Aren’t You, had recently been released.

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ANTIGRAVITY: When did you move to New Orleans?

Susannah Breslin: September 2003. My intention was to stay here for a year, but now my guess is I’ll stay for two years. The weather here is unbearable. I can’t live here permanently, but it’ll be longer than a year.

AG: What made you decide to move to New Orleans?

SB: I was tired of being in Los Angeles. I’d never been to the south before. I knew it was warm and cheap. It had a seedy reputation. When I figured out the abbreviation was “No L.A.” it seemed like it was divine. [Laughs] It was a way to get away from the competitiveness that was L.A. and just try and focus on writing the book instead, rather than keeping my head above water as a freelancer.

AG: You’ve said that instead of “feel good” movies, you prefer “feel bad” ones. What exactly are “feel bad” movies?

SB: Requiem For a Dream comes to mind as a “feel bad” movie. There’s a stained glass artist named Judith Schecter who does these weird, violent-themed stained glass pieces that look like paintings. She said, “I don’t want my work to make happy people feel bad, but I want my work to make unhappy people feel comfortable,” or something like that. “Feel good” movies seem fake in comparison with reality, which has a lot of “feel bad” aspects to it. I guess “feel bad” movies that are about loneliness or people who don’t fit in, or secret terrible compulsions that humans harbor towards one another are more true. They’re uglier but more honest.

AG: You spent time in Porn Valley, covering the scene for magazines and such. What was that like?

SB: Porn Valley itself is pretty insular, so in terms of the industry you’re going to have talent, directors, screenwriters, PAs, things like that. As far as people coming in and hanging around the edges, there aren’t many people. It seemed like once a year a mainstream journalist, male, usually over the age of forty, would go hang around Porn Valley. Some people are interested in it as a case study of human sexuality. There are guys, especially in Hollywood, who are interested in hanging around it as a groupie type of thing.

AG: what’s the difference between watching porn and wanting to participate in it?

SB: That line is blurrier than I might like to believe. You’re on to something which is interesting to me, which is how a lot of mainstream media wants to view porn or sex or gender is very black and white. Men are like this, women are like this. Men like porn for this reason, and women like porn for this other reason.

The reality is when you spend time around the porn industry you see how gray it all is. For example, the PA who’s helping set up the lights is also the guy who steps forward after a pop shot with a roll of paper towels. Or there’s the former female porn star who’s now the head of the health clinic which tests for HIV.

Any journalist or groupie who’s just hanging around the periphery has something inside themself that resonates in that world. A perfect example for me is being on the set of a bukkake movie where there are a hundred guys, naked except for their shoes, standing around masturbating on the face of this one girl. And there’s a movie being filmed at the same time. This is the kind of set I hung out on several times. There’s a PA on the set who has one hand, right? I would stand around, whether writing an article for a mainstream magazine or taking photographs, and two-thirds of the way through the PA with one hand would turn around and beckon me over to the middle of it, because obviously there are all these guys, so I’m more around the periphery. I’d make my way towards the middle, where the girl is. The director’s there shooting and the PA is negotiating the speed at which the guys are stepping up to the girl. So I can say, well, I’m a mainstream reporter and I was just there to see what these people were like, and I wrote about it and never worked for a porn magazine. At the same time, in that situation I might get down on my knees to get the right shot and there’s a guy masturbating literally twelve inches from my ear, and I’m like “Shit, I almost put my knee in this puddle of cum on the floor.” And it’s like, “Why am I here in the first place?” And in my viewfinder is the girl who’s in front of me. But there’s some identification with the men there, too. It gets real blurry, and that’s interesting to me. The line’s real hazy. The way people talk about porn is black and white. Feminists think porn is bad. Even the idea that men like porn only because they want to jack off to it. It’s all more complicated than that. That’s why I spent time around the industry, to explore those gray areas.

AG: How do you think the Porn Valley community compares to the S&M community in New Orleans?

SB: I don’t really know the S&M community here. Most people in the S&M scene are interested in having safe, consensual sex in which they’re playing with roles, but it’s like their hobby. Porn Valley is a business. Most of them are interested in making money, getting famous, and crossing over into the mainstream.

AG: How often does that happen, somebody starting in porn and making that jump to mainstream movies?

SB: Rarely. They are not going from being porn actors to mainstream actors, but they are moving from being porn stars to porn starts the mainstream is aware of, like Jenna Jameson and Tera Patrick.

AG: Before I ask you about the book…I sent an e-mail to Warren Ellis and asked him if he could ask you one question what it would be. He actually sent me two.

SB: [Laughs] I bet they’re bad.

AG: Here’s the first one. Is pornography compelling because there’s no love in the room or despite it?

SB: Good question, Warren. I think pornography is compelling because it takes love out of the equation. That’s my answer.

AG: Here’s the other one. When’s the last time you saw a dead body?

SB: [Laughs] I’ll plead the fifth.

AG: [Laughs] Now to your book, Porn Happy. What’s up with it? Semi-autobiographical, right? How far along are you?

SB: Well, I got here last September and started writing pretty quickly after that. In May I reached about 400 pages of the first draft, thinking it’d be a 500-page first draft. Then I realized where I was going and, because the draft was messy, I’ve been rewriting the first fifty pages. I’ve had some interest from agents, so I’ll be sending that out shortly.

AG: How did the process of putting the book together come about? Did you compile your experiences from California? Are you careful about how you intertwine your own experiences with fiction, or do you just lay out your experiences and say, “How can I make these better fit a story?”

SB: The process of writing a novel is intuitive and primarily geared towards being a great novel that happened to use the experiences I went though, albeit fictionalized. I spent time in and out of the porn industry for five years. There’s no story arc there. I didn’t know why I was there. I would go to one set and might not go to another one for months. I had a lot of information but didn’t know how to plug it in to a story format. I don’t know, for some reason I thought it would be appropriate to parallel it to Dante’s Inferno and his decent into Hell, aka Porn Valley. One of the first sets I was on was the World’s Biggest Gang Bang 3. Supposedly it was 625, but really about 125 guys had sex with a porn star. That’s the big scene in the book. I was there for eleven hours—it totally fucked with my head. There were some weird-ass people…

AG: Was there a lunch break?

SB: There was, but every piece was disgusting. One of the first things is they bring in these ringers, which are male porn stars. Because they’re making a movie, they want guys who can perform. Those guys come in and performed with all the amateurs off to the side. Then I went and saw the ringers over by the buffet table, and they were washing their dicks off with the water tank that people were going to be drinking out of for the next twelve hours.

AG: [Laughs]

SB: And they were serving hot dogs. It was just so gross. Talking about that scene…I’m more interested in my character’s experience in what happened, so I don’t have to remain particularly faithful to fact. Because I only care what it was like for him to be there as an outsider but still as someone drawn to be there.

Originally, the main character was female. But it drove me nuts. I don’t know if I couldn’t be objective, or if I don’t like women, but it was when I turned the character into a male character that it was easier for me to give him parts of my personality and invent others for him. Its structure is really simple. A guy named Xavier grows up in Berkeley, the son of two intellectuals, and his father dies suddenly of a heart attack, which happened to me in ’96, and he decides to go down to L.A. to write a novel. He’s got writer’s block and winds up meeting a porn star named Cathy Darling. She invites him to a set and he realizes that he’s sort of dead but can feel again when he exposes himself to these increasingly extreme things. At the same time the porn industry is becoming increasingly extreme, which is what was going on in ’99 and ’00 because they were facing competition with the Internet. Then he meet a girl from outside the industry and he has to make a choice of whether he’s going to continue to engage in this self-destructive downward spiral or choose this girl, find true love and leave and have a happy ending. [Laughs] The characters in the industry are fun. They’re like combinations of people that I met.

AG: Is there comic relief in the book? Is that how you play these characters or it that too much like a “feel good” thing?

SB: It’s a “feel bad” novel. [Laughs] There is comedy in it, because the industry is just rife with comedy. The climax of that gangbang day is this guy who looked like somebody’s dad climbing on Houston doggy style, and where’s he looking? At all the guys looking at him. And he’s doing it like a lion fucking a tiger or something. It’s just like, who are you fucking, the girl or your buddies? Not in a gay way, but what are you doing? To me that’s always interesting. What’s going though the midget porn star’s head? What’s going through that guy’s head? “Yeah, I’m the man, now?” Well, not really because a hundred guys fucked her already. It was very animal-like. That was one of the cool things about being around the porn industry, being able to see what people will do when they’re allowed to do anything.

Like, you are probably not going to rip your clothes off and masturbate on the middle of the table. Out there some guys, as a joke, might stand up at lunch, drop his pants and rub his cock all over your sandwich.

AG: Aren’t some of the stories in You’re a Bad Man, Aren’t You based on real people?

SB: Sure. The midget in the story was inspired by Bridget the Midget.

AG: She didn’t really kill her mother with a toy car, did she?

SB: [Laughs] No, that was invented by me. She did grow up, at least part of the time, in a car with her mother. Hard enough being a midget, but then you become a porn star. And you’ve got to grow up in a car!

I worked for Playboy TV, which is how I met Bridget. They made me dress up like Dorothy and she and I wrestled over a twelve-foot dildo, which was in a basket like Toto would have been. I’m sure my children will be entertained by these stories.

AG: Do you think it’s easier to convey your personal experiences through a fictional character, like you’re not putting yourself at risk?

SB: There are stories in my book that are a blend of fact and fiction. My personal life in that realm is not terribly interesting. I think most of the stories are emotionally truthful, but for some reason they’re compelled to articulate that through some extreme persona. The distance between my life and the lives of most of those characters are far, far away. Even the main character of the novel is much more extreme than I am. He’s a drunk, and he’s a pervert. I say very little, especially in recent years, about my personal life. Primarily because I’d be much too embarrassed to talk about it. Put me in the middle of a hundred naked men? Sure, because it’s entertainment. Try to get me to tell you what I’m doing at home late at night? Never going to happen. Not because it’s like, “Oh. My privacy!” Occasionally I’ll get an e-mail from someone asking for personal sex advice and it’s like, “No! It’s so gross! I don’t want to hear about it!” Bit of a contradiction there. That’s another thing about the adult film industry to me, is how depersonalized it is. There could be two people there having sex, but they might as well be lifting weights. In addition to an absence of love, there’s an appearance of deep intimacy and total lack of intimacy at all.

This interview first appeared in ANTIGRAVITY Vol.1 #5 (October 2004). Find out more about Susannah Breslin at her blog, The Reverse Cowgirl.