The Blowfish Blog

[The Pro Circuit] The Adult Entertainment Expo

This coming week, Las Vegas will once again host the Adult Entertainment Expo, the largest and by far the most important adult industry tradeshow. I’ll be sitting this one out, which is both a good and a bad thing. For years I’ve had a love-hate relationship with the AEE, an event vaguely like a giant farm-equipment sales show crossed with a science fiction convention crossed with an orgy. Sound weird? It is.

For certain people working in the porn industry, the Adult Entertainment Expo is very important. For anyone getting started as a porn performer, for a production company struggling to get started in the biz, or for many other business-to-business concerns, the AEE is simply not to be missed. And for a porn historian, the AEE is a gold-mine of content, providing unparalleled access to unheard-of starlets, top-tier current stars, and — maybe most importantly given my own proclivities — a breathtaking wealth of old-school talent, including people who have been in the biz for thirty years. Even the barely-legal ingénues fresh off the bus, which in the porn industry means three or five or twenty porn flicks under their belt, usually have plenty of wacky stories, and the more cogent among them can regale you for long minutes with catty tales of coke-sniffing skanks in whatever redneck strip club or suburban punk scene they sashayed out of to join the ranks of Porn Valley’s faithful. Play your cards right, and it’s like a oral-history gangbang.

During the three years when I needed to crank out forty articles a month, I could bag enough interviews during the four-ish days of the Adult Entertainment Expo to keep me in content for eight or nine months, just by wandering the convention floor looking for people I recognized from the porn movies I’d watched recently. I’d introduce myself to Carla Cumshot and next thing you know this person I’d never met would be tucked between the fire truck and the hot dog stand, jawing at me about ass-to-mouth and Viagra. Once upon a time I spent half an hour on a couch while Randy Spears regaling regaled me with stories of getting rousted by the cops on early-80s porn sets. And I’m telling you, as an inveterate sleazehound I simply had not lived until a jovially-chainsmoking Otto Bauer opened up with both barrels with his opinions on Viagra and the industry.

Porn people really are bigger than life, and for every dim-bulb stunt cock there’s a dozen amiable lunatics with enormous hearts and terrifyingly unpredictable minds living by their wits and happy to share their wisdom and/or complete insanity.

If this sounds like fun, it was — sort of. Strangely, my biggest kink is producing copy — that’s “writing” to you civilians — so I used to look forward to the Adult Entertainment Expo all year. Then I’d hate every minute of it, because the mile-a-minute pace would leave me overstimulated, antisocial, and bitchy. I would find myself declining invitations to porn-star parties to sit in my trashy motel room and transcribe audio interviews, which I guess is kind of like declining a date to stay home and masturbate — a perfectly respectable choice, but in many ways counter-intuitive. On the occasions when I did accept the invitation of a well-meaning mainstream publicist to go to an industry party, I found myself inveigled into a clusterfuck, packed in to a stinky nightclub with people I’d never met and didn’t particularly want to. I developed a strict rule never to go to parties hosted by people or companies I wasn’t very personally familiar with — and even those often felt like I’d wandered in to a stranger’s living room where I was not particularly wanted.

Don’t get me wrong, I do have some fond memories of socializing at AEE — but even those people from other cities that I love seeing and look forward to meeting up with usually are too busy to see for very long. A quick $12 sandwich and soda at the concession stand hardly seems like optimal socializing with someone you’ve known for years. Outside of the on-the-fly interviews, most of my “connecting” with out of town friends at AEE consisted of air kisses traded while running from one location to the other. I’ve gotten much more friend mileage out of my few trips to Los Angeles, when it’s possible to see my favorite industry performers, producers and writers in their natural environment — in a back-alley punk bar, having a Pabst, not so different than the way I like to see San Francisco’s sex industry luminaries.

I’m not attending this year because nowadays my writing about porn is decidedly more tightly focused, and I don’t have the requirement of producing half a book’s worth of nonfiction text every month. AEE would be a largely superfluous exercise for me, so the cost doesn’t make sense.

But I gotta tell you — part of me is going to miss it. There’s a hell of a lot of copy in Vegas this week, just walking the sales floor in stiletto heels and/or an embroidered bowling shirt, waiting to be — er — tapped.

Thomas Roche blogs about sex, drugs, and cryptozoology at Thomasroche.com.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, 6 January 2009 at 11:14 am and is filed under Industry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.