AltPorn.net interviewer Beda Hoydenish writes:

“Everyone knows Amelia G runs the Blue Blood empire and also does some of the photography and writing for it. Here on APN, we’ve featured photographs she has shot for Blue Blood many times and we’ve mentioned her writing once or twice. (You can also see the interview we did with Amelia G five years ago — Ed.) I write for APN and I have all the old Blue Blood print magazines from the 90’s in plastic bags with cardboard backing, so I thought I was pretty aware and I still found a lot on Amelia G’s new AmeliaG.com site to both inform and entertain me. In addition to running the business end of Blue Blood and working as an editor for many projects, Amelia G has had hundreds of photo sets published and thousands of articles. Amelia G has done writing and/or photography for all the major adult publishing houses including Playboy, Penthouse, Flynt, Crescent, Magna, and AVN, plus niche magazines including Marquis, On Our Backs, Skin Two, Tattoo Teasers, Fetish, Extreme Fetish, $pread, and of course Blue Blood. Her fiction has appeared in Best American Erotica, Best S/M Erotica, and Best Women’s Erotica and dozens more books. But she still took time out of her busy schedule to give APN this exclusive interview.

APN: Blue Blood magazine in print was really ground zero for jump-starting the whole altporn genre and you’ve managed to maintain a top ranking for Blue Blood for more than sixteen years. To what do you credit your remarkable success and longevity?

AG: Thanks. I always hope the universe will smile on me for hard work and doing the right thing, and sometimes it does. A big advantage Blue Blood had in coming to the web is that the magazine was always subscription-driven and we had free sites for the community for years before we launched our first membership site. We actually had paid members before we had even actually launched the first pay site because we tested out a banner rotation for a few minutes and people saw it. I really appreciate the support we’ve gotten over the years and try to really put a lot back into the scene and into having . . .

Cool promo pic of yours truly by Forrest Black. Read the whole interview by Beda Hoydenish on AltPorn.net.

So I registered the domain for my name a while back, when the internet still had a bit of that new web smell. I’d been doing work more and more in the digital space for a few years then and I would end up having to pay off a cybersquatter for the BlueBlood.com domain, so it seemed sensible to register everything near and dear to me. Then nine more years went by. Some of my favorite sites have grown out of Forrest Black registering domains while drinking beer and then me feeling that, once it was registered, the domain had to have a site on it. For a long time, I just had a link to a hosted journal on AmeliaG.com, but now seemed like the time to actually put a proper site on there. Today it officially goes live.

The site has the Amelia G bio with just the broad strokes. There is a more detailed sidebar with just 2009 news about press appearances and where my writing and photography has appeared this year. I considered including a page with a gigantic lists of places I’ve been published, but, after doing thousands of pages of editorial, not to mention radio and television stuff, it just seemed like it would be a bit of a laundry list. Plus, oddly enough, when I was doing research for the site, I discovered that some of my work had been reprinted without me even knowing it. I’ve moved less as an adult than I did as a kid, but sometimes it is still possible to lose track of compatriots with moves and all on everyone’s part.

I hope people enjoy the Photography Portfolio section of Forrest Black’s and my work. People always ask to see my online portfolio and I always was reluctant to put one together before. When I say “reluctant”, I mean that the notion of editing together only forty of my favorite images, out of everything we’ve ever shot, made me effing hyperventilate. I forced my brain through its discomfort and editing a selection of images from over such a long time period turned out to be really fun, once I got into kind of the right headspace, because I got to look at all sorts of contact sheets with positive associations and beautiful unseen images. Because of the ephemeral nature of human life, there is always something intrinsically bittersweet about any good photograph, I think, but it still felt mostly good to go through everything.

Given the fiscal realities of shooting on film, there are all sorts of awesome images Forrest Black and I shot which nobody has ever seen because it cost so much to make prints, so we tended to just print whatever a magazine wanted to publish for a lot of shoots. So the photo portfolio I edited together on AmeliaG.com has quite a few exclusive images the world has never seen, along with some favorites you will probably recognize.

It was also really fun putting together the section with the Amelia G Personal Pics because I got to dig through hard drives of tons of random uncategorized galleries of digital nightlife snapshots and recall all sorts of enjoyable adventures. My mom looked at the pics and said it looked like I must go out every night. Really I’m a workaholic, so I just like to only venture out for really cool stuff and I try to make a night out count. I hope you all also enjoy my goofy snapshots of going to parties, conventions, and gallery shows, clubbing, travel, and just hanging out with pals.

The background photo is a promo shot Forrest Black was kind enough to do for me last week. I really like how it turned out. If you are interested in hairstyle matters, my haircut is by Thierry, blowout is by Youne Lee, and color is old skool punk rock style where my bathroom is purple now too.

Putting the Amelia G site together made me nervous as anything, but I’m really happy it is complete and I think it turned out good. I hope you all like it too.

In this original Blue Blood interview, Combichrist frontman Andy LaPlegua and I are drinking beer in, err, Mexico. I interview Andy LaPlegua about his Frost EP Sent to Destroy. We talk about horror movies, fetish, and what a dead hand smells like. How cute we look can be credited to Forrest Black who directed the video.

As you all have no doubt noticed, we’ve been working on some video stuff on BlueBlood.net here. It is still in beta, but we are making it live for your viewing pleasure. Feel free to point out anything which is not working perfectly yet, because we know Blue Blood TV is in beta.

We’ve been really enjoying putting together our first segments and I’m really excited to share them with you all. For the most part, Forrest Black has been directing and I’ve been producing. We’ve mostly been taking turns shooting, kinda the same as we do for still photography. We’ve gotten some behind-the-camera assists from the always enjoyable Michelle Aston as well. We are fortunate enough to have the incredibly talented Tim Skold on board for the project to do the Blue Blood theme music. As this is Blue Blood, you probably all know who Tim Skold is, but I’ll give you a quick overview, just in case. I first came across his work when he was in a band called Shotgun Messiah, which I thought was a great name for a band. Other bands he has been in include Kingpin, KMFDM, Marilyn Manson, and Skold. His eponymously titled Skold album is one of my favorite CDs of all time, one of those rare records I can play all the way through, enjoying every single song over and over again. Anyway, I’m really thrilled about doing this video series thang, and the way it is all coming together, and feeling very creatively inspired.

Our video section is just starting out, so, when it becomes a fabulous gigantic internet phenomenon, you can say you were in-the-know when. We’ll be both highlighting videos we think are interesting and bringing you original programming. I just posted our Deathrace Jason Statham interview and Deathrace director Paul W. S. Anderson interview. Coming up this weekend, I interview musician Andy LaPlegua of Combichrist. Forrest Black interviews writer/editor Rachel Kramer Bussel about her Cupcakes Take the Cake blog (and sex.) Forrest Black and I (and a lot of our unsavory pals) attend the Coilhouse magazine launch party and I interview editor Nadya Lev. And there is tons more to come. Feel free to message me or Forrest Black directly or in public (or sidle up to one of us in a nightclub and whisper) about what you’d most like to see us do because we are just getting started.

I know, I know, some of you were probably assuming I was about to announce the launch of a giant adult video section, probably in the members area over on sister site BlueBlood.com. Over the years, just about every major mainstream adult video company, both in Porn Valley and beyond, has pitched yours truly and Forrest Black to do the pr0nz vidz for them. I’m not saying that nobody could ever make me an attractive offer on that front, if we really were on the same page with a company which wanted to make something great. But it has been my experience that these huge multimillion dollar companies will come at us saying how much they want something gothic or punk or alt or tattooed, and then turn around and say that they figure the budget can be small because they can underpay talent with tattoos or black lipstick.

One of my personal rules is that I will work for free or cheap for someone who does not have an office, if I like them and I believe in their project. If someone has a big ol’ office, I expect a pro rate and I expect the same for those I work with. If someone owns one or more buildings, I expect them not to start being cheap when it comes to my subculture and my friends and my collaborators.

But, honestly, it really boils down to art. The thing about artists is that they do not always do what is the commercially perfect thing to do. Artists do what they feel like doing. What I really felt like doing was discussing the meaning of alternative culture with Nadya Lev and what appalling horror movies are fun to sample with Andy LaPlegua.

I hope you guys like what we’ve been making because I enjoyed the creative process and I’d like to make you more videos soon.

I don’t usually share shoot stories from BlueBlood.com on the front page of BlueBlood.net, but this one is just too good not to share. You’ll have to be a member of the free forums to see sample shots though and only paid up members of BlueBlood.com get to see the whole set in all its naughty glory.

It was one of those beautiful wet Portland days when Voltaire, Forrest Black, and I drove all around town looking for a good spot to shoot. Voltaire guided us to this railroad crossing underpass, but it turned out to be under construction. Never ones to be daunted by such a minor inconvenience as heavy machinery and tons of people around, Voltaire and I made a beeline for the bulldozers while Forrest stayed in the rental car as lookout.

Voltaire had just handed me her underwear and lifted her neon green skirt, when a construction worker waved me over. I was bummed because we were not going to have good light to shoot by the time we found a new location. But I came when he beckoned because I’m a nice girl like that. I think he was the construction foreman and he told me it was cool if we wanted to shoot pictures to our hearts’ content, but please do not actually climb up in the seats on the trucks because the city’s insurance won’t cover that. The guys working construction didn’t even roll up on us to ogle. The foreman and everyone was so nice that I actually asked Voltaire not to get in the seats.

I think that, even with our good behavior, she looks most excellent in the big gravel shovel and in the danger zone and I’m really pleased with how these shots came out. I hope you all enjoy them too. It was quite an adventure and, yes, I did just give yours truly and Voltaire good girl points for shooting erotic nudes in public but only near the seats of trucks and not actually in them. Full series available on BlueBlood.com. This is Voltaire’s 17th appearance on BlueBlood.com and it definitely won’t be her last!

Sean Abley is working on a series of interviews for a possible book project entitled People Who Are Cool. The theme is, as you might suspect, people Sean Abley knows who are cool. You can read the two part interview he did with yours truly online now here and here. It is a two parter because, as Sean says, we are a couple of chatty bitches. Seriously, it is very in-depth and his questions were really interesting and unusual and I answered a lot of stuff I don’t usually talk about in interviews. This is going to post to Dark Blue Films in approx six weeks, but you all get the inside-skinny on where to read it pre-publication.

Socket writer/director Sean Abley writes:

“Somehow Amelia G and I became blog friends about 8 years ago. I’m not really sure how that happened, and when we’ve discussed it, neither is she. But somehow one of us surfed into the other’s Live Journal account and friended same, and we’ve been reading each other’s stuff for years now.

When I first started reading her blog, I was immediately struck by the photographs she’d post, taken either by her or her collaborator, Forrest Black. These were semi- (or not so semi-) naked shots of Goth chicks with beautiful lighting, styling and makeup. As I say further down in my interview with her, “[She] took two things I have no interest in – Goth culture and naked girls – and photographed them so I can’t turn away.”

Soon I realized Amelia had a mini media empire based on this subject matter, the hub of which is (are) http://www.blueblood.com and http://www.blueblood.net. Start there and you’ll find yourself winding down internet corridors full of fetish photos, films, music and art. And none of it feels exclusionary. Less “Butt out, square!” and more “Hey, we’re awesome! Check us out!” I would encourage anyone reading this to do just that. Amelia and Forrest’s work is pro and punk at the same time, and never boring.

When I decided to interview Amelia, I did some research and found out she has a crazy interesting past, from living in a punk/goth group house in D.C. to moving in the industrial music scene, to founding a magazine . She is also the kind of feminist that I love, e.g. one that doesn’t think a naked girl is being suppressed just because she’s having her picture taken. She’s also a workaholic, as evidenced by the sheer number of projects, websites, and events she has to attend to in any one week.

Although we live mere blocks from each other in Hollywood, I conducted this interview via email, which probably lead to us be much more verbose that we would in person. (I hate transcribing, so I tend to keep it short in person).

How did the daughter of a diplomat and an attorney become the reigning Queen of Goth Erotica?

Please give a warm welcome to Amelia G!”

The interview kicks off with:

Sean Abley: I read that you’ve lived all over the world and the States. Army brat? What’s the scoop on your childhood?

Amelia G: When I got to college, it was my twelfth school in twelve years. My mother’s a diplomat. My father’s an attorney. Two of the schools I went to when I was fourteen to sixteen had a lot of army brats, so some of the experience is similar.

Funny, I moved around quite a bit as a kid, although it was mainly within the same town, Helena, MT, with one two-year chunk in Carbondale, IL. But even within the same town for a little kid it means changing schools and friends, so even now I hate moving.

I get wanderlust really easily, but, if I travel enough, then I don’t itch to move as much.

What subject were you awful at in school?

Even though I rode a purple three-speed bike everywhere in ninth and tenth grade and was very fit, I never got into gym. I especially loathed dodgeball. Only I would get picked pretty early. I think because I was great to have on a team because I hated getting hit by the ball so much that I would never get tagged out. This might seem like a good trait, except that I practiced the Golden Rule and did not wish to do unto others as I would not have them do unto me. So a dodgeball game could be this endless purgatory because I wouldn’t tag the other team out either.

I actually loved dodgeball because it was the one of two sports I was actually good at as a kid (the other being volleyball). I was very agile, and I think the opportunity to nail the popular jocks with those big, red, rubber balls imbued me with an unfailing eye and super human strength.

Those are good superpowers to have for playing dodgeball.

It seems like you really made your mark first in D.C. What were you doing in D.C.?

Living in a punk rock group house, throwing legendary parties, trying to be a writer, doing as many peculiar day jobs as possible, tying up unsuitable suitors in the back seat of a car which was a parting gift from my unsuitable college suitor, discovering ramen cuisine. I still think of ramen as the flavor of poverty.

I actually bought dollar’s worth of ramen . . .

( Read more )

Forrest Black and I are going to be on Night Calls for our third or fourth appearance Friday, April 25, 2008. The show runs from 4pm to 7pm and is broadcast live, so you can phone in and ask impertinent (sexy) questions if you dial toll free 1-877-205-9796.

Our hosts for the day are going to be Christy Canyon and Vanessa Blue. This will be my first time meeting Vanessa Blue, but last time adult legend Christy Canyon gave me some interesting insights. Among other things, we were chatting about what it was like being . . . unusual in the Washington, DC area. At the time Blue Blood was founded, a person (okay, one of my unsavory pals generally) could be thrown out of Springfield Mall for having a nose ring. Christy Canyon told me that it was much more progressive in Los Angeles and somewhat surprising to Angelenos that being able to express yourself even by wearing a painted leather jacket is definitely not always easy elsewhere. And that went double in the early 90’s.

Forrest Black and I are in the second guest time slot and will be going on around 5pm. Forrest Black and I will be chatting with Christy Canyon and Vanessa Blue about BlueBlood.com in general, about our photography in specific, and, if experience is something to go on, we will definitely be talking about sex. Our friend Darklady from Portland will, through an odd bit of synchronicity, be on in the 4pm slot, and it is a good show, so I recommend tuning in from the start. Darklady will be promoting her upcoming Masturbate-a-thon (yes, you read that correctly) and I bet I have a lot more to tell everyone about it after tomorrow, so watch this space for more on that.

Darklady was just in town and she and Forrest Black and rainmaker Brian Gross and I went to eat sushi and talk about life, the universe, and everything. Humorously, although I have known Brian via snail mail, telephone, and email for around fifteen years, and he now lives in the Valley maybe half an hour to forty minutes north of me in Hollywood, it took a mutual pal from out of town to get us together in person.

BlueBlood.com hottie Halcyon’s Cocky Bastard Vision from the Pink Broadcasting Company did two entertaining videos on the 2007 SXSW experience. Halcyon has been going to SXSW basically forever, has MC’ed more of the SXSW Web Awards than he hasn’t, and introduced me to the Interactive portion of the show when we did our “Turning Pink Into Green” panel back in 2005. We got to work and play together again at this year’s event and he is always a pleasure.

In the first interview video, Halcyon says his goal was to ask “a bunch of web visionaries what they loved most about the web.” My favorite answers were from web book author Derek Powazek who enthused about the internet’s ability to connect all different sorts of freaks and of course Forrest Black’s answer about how much he loves the creative exchange where he gets to directly connect with people when he makes media. Stay tuned after the credits for a little fellatio joke with yours truly. Halcyon’s pink microphone was just so darn alluring. He cut the part where I said something smart because (a) it was sorta similar to Forrest’s sentiments and (b) let’s face it, blowjobs are always more interesting than most other things.

After watching Halcyon’s slightly downbeat most recent video about his experience of the SXSW show this year, I feel kinda bad for not being a sketchy and lazy crack addict. In all seriousness, it is sort of odd for any internet professional to go into a high tech environment where a lot of people just take things like venture capital for granted. I would absolutely accept VC if I had a project which (a) would really benefit from it and (b) which I was really sure would benefit the angels investing in it. But one of the other things I love about the internet is the freedom it can offer the individual. I don’t really have to answer to much of anyone and that warms my punk heart. At any rate, both videos are funny and I am absolutely certain that Halcyon is going to do just fine.

So it has been crazy busy in the Blue Blood compound this week as we ready ourselves for the 2007 SXSW extravaganza in Austin, Texas. Gotta paint my nails and make sure my purple hair dye is fresh and, oh yeah, make sure BlueBlood.com and its associated sites will be updating in our absence. Blue Blood hottie Halcyon will be moderating the panel I am speaking on. Halcyon and I are returning speakers and I’m looking forward to meeting long-time camgirl Seska, who will be joining us this year. Forrest Black will, of course, once again be doing press photography of the whole shebang and some editorial afterwards.

If I remember to bring them in all the hullaballoo of modern air travel, I will also be giving out some free SpookyCash T-shirts. They are 100% cotton black T-shirts with kickass original artwork by the incomparable Ed Mironiuk.

Here are the details of my panel for those who wish to stop by, reap the fabulous benefits of my wisdom, and say howdy:

Panel Title: Pay Up! Should Publishers Choose the Porn Path?
Panel Location: Room 9AB, Panel Date: Saturday, March 10th, Panel Time: 5pm-6pm
SXSW Panel Description: “As the public becomes more comfortable paying for premium content and services, what can we learn from the pornographic trailblazers? What billing models and payment systems are working online in porn that would successfully crossover to mainstream? What types of content and services are ready for the Porn Path of Pay to Peruse? The panel will include veterans in the online adult industry discussing relevant trends and lessons learned.”

Despite the lurid title, the main topic is essentially a discussion of the pay-for-content business model (which allows Blue Blood to give back to the community with all the free goodies you all get to enjoy.) I’ll have more to say on the SXSW panel and I’ll probably post more here later, but, in brief, SpookyCash is the Business2Business affiliate system by which people with high traffic websites can make some beer money by linking to some of the membership sites we support. I’ll explain more later, but that is the core of it.

I’d also like to state for the record that Halcyon totally came up with the name for our panel. I don’t make porn and I tend to be suspicious of people who really segregate their sexuality from who they are as human beings. For example, if you like light bondage and you also like Nine Inch Nails (Thanks for advertising again, Trent.) then you would ideally seek a partner who enjoys both. I think porn porn tends to isolate the act from the personality and I find that really lame. But “Pay Up! Should Publishers Choose the Porn Path?” is a catchy title. Last time we spoke, our panel got one of the highest ratings of any panel at SXSW and I’m hoping Halcyon’s inflammatory title will incite even more interested souls to attend. Hopefully, despite the raunchy title, our audience this year will be as interesting and friendly as last time.