It is no secret that I love the vampire genre. I received Honors at Wesleyan University for my thesis on vampire legends as a paradigm for aggressive human sexuality. And I would like the record to show that I will be speaking on exactly that topic this weekend at Vampire Con in Hollywood. I’ll be taking part in the panel programming Sunday afternoon, after the movie nights, and before Vampirella’s Ball (more on this in a moment.) I’m excited that Wendi Mirabella and Lotti Pharriss Knowles have put Vampire-Con together.

The panel I am on is called Hot-Blooded: Vampires & Sexuality and is at 1pm at the Henry Fonda Theater on Hollywood Blvd. It will be moderated by David J. Skal, Author of Hollywood Gothic and V Is For Vampire: The A-Z Guide Of Everything Undead. I’m especially excited that Pam Keesey, who I’m looking forward to catching up with will be on the panel. She is the editor of multiple anthologies of lesbian vampire tales, Women Who Run with the Werewolves: Tales of Blood, Lust, and Metamorphosis, and Vamps: An Illustrated History of the Femme Fatale. Pam Keesey has a very engaging personality, has published yours truly, and once gave me a tour of Forrest Ackerman’s memorabilia collection. Other panelists are Hal Bodner, author of Bite Club: A West Hollywood Vampire Tale, filmmaker Fred Olen Ray from The Lair, actress Celeste Yarnall, best known at a vamp convention for her role in The Velvet Vampire, but who has appeared in everything from Melrose Place to Star Trek, and best-selling author, comic book writer, and filmmaker Donald F. Glut who recently directed the Elizabeth Bathory-inspired movie Blood Scarab. And we’ll be talking about vampire sex.

That evening, at the same venue, from 8:30pm to 1am, there will be Vampirella’s Ball. The music will be provided by DJ Xian and DJ Gary Calamar, music supervisor of HBO’s True Blood and KCRW radio DJ. Vampire Con describes the appropriate attire saying, “Costumes are thoroughly encouraged – Vampires, Victorian, Edwardian, Steampunk, Bohemian, Tribal, Gypsy.”

Forrest Black and I will have a location studio set up to photograph people involved in the event, revelers who most exemplify the themes of the event, and our close personal friends (i.e. not everyone, but photographic subjects best for doing press coverage on Vampire Con.) If we know you from online, please come find us on the roof Sunday night (or at my panel during the day) and say hello and where we know you from. I’m looking forward to running into tons of cool people at this event. Our favorite photos from the evening will of course appear here on BlueBlood.net.

Mike Judge’s Office Space is a hysterically brilliant piece on the soul-sucking nature of certain sorts of employment. The scene where they smash the fax machine is one of the most inspiring moments in American cinema ever. Viewpoint character Peter Gibbons, played with perfect comic timing by Ron Livingston, decides that, rather than quitting his job, he will simply stop going. He and his next door neighbor Lawrence, played with deadpan humor by Diedrich Bader, discuss what they would do if they had mad money. Lawrence’s only unrealized ambition is to have a threesome with two chicks.

Peter Gibbons: What would you do if you had a million dollars?
Lawrence: I’ll tell you what I’d do, man: two chicks at the same time, man.
Peter Gibbons: That’s it? If you had a million dollars, you’d do two chicks at the same time?
Lawrence: Damn straight. I always wanted to do that, man. And I think if I were a millionaire I could hook that up, too; ’cause chicks dig dudes with money.
Peter Gibbons: Well, not all chicks.
Lawrence: Well, the type of chicks that’d double up on a dude like me do.
Peter Gibbons: Good point.

Mainstream porn overflows with girl/girl sex, but it is all of the sort where the women are supposed to be into it because they are just soooooooo overheated and no man is handy, not because they like women. The male consumer can fantasize that all he has to do is show up with a taste of the real thing (i.e. cock) and that would just make those ladies’ day.

I find the whole issue difficult. On the one hand, I know that site members often enjoy girl/girl pairings, even if the women pictured would not normally have sex with one another in the natural course of events. So there is certainly money in shooting lesbian sex, but I suffer from the punk rock problem of not being particularly fiscally motivated. Something which puts even more social pressure on me to shoot faux lesbian interactions is that many altmodels believe that their ticket to fame and fortune is being photographed fondling the breasts of a model more internet famous than they are. You might be shocked at how much static I have received from mostly straight models for declaring a moratorium on fake lesbian shoots for BlueBlood.com. If two people want me to photograph them having sex, as an artist, I am only really inspired to shoot them if I believe they are truly into each other and would be making love whether or not there was a camera in the room.

When I was fourteen and had a youthful fixation on heterosexual couplings, I was troubled by the mainstream porn my friends were able to get ahold of in Israel where I went to ninth grade, because there was always some sort of lesbian scene in every flick. I have the vague notion that porn movies may have been illegal in Israel, so this probably limited what my underage unsavory pals were able to get their hands on, but I still viscerally recall my discomfitted response to the chick in Flesh Gordon being forced to eat hairy muff. Yes, I played Dungeons & Dragons and watched science fiction porn. (Probably no surprise there.)

As an adult, my take on sexual orientation is . . . let’s just say different from what it was as a teen. I really don’t care about whether someone’s genitalia are innie or outie; I just want something real, something genuinely passionate, something with a true human connection.

Back in the early 90’s, when I would be interviewed about Blue Blood magazine in print, I would always say it was erotica and not porn and point out that I was a woman and women can only produce erotica. I thought I was kidding. But there is a certain oddness to the approach mainstream porn has to human sexuality.

Every year, AVN or Adult Video News, has an awards show for porn videos and porn performances from the preceding year. The first time I ever came across this particular awards show was some time after fantabulous writer-cum-video-director David Aaron Clark had written the first issue of Blue Blood in print up for the late lamented Scew newspaper. Forrest Black and I went to meet him and Mistress Shane after they finished up at the AVN awards show in Vegas. DAC and Shane were mostly being entertainingly curmudgeonly about the enormous breasts in teen prom dresses wandering around the casino, but I was un-jaded and wide-eyed at the time. I’ve still never actually attended an AVN award show. Admittedly, I don’t particularly care for that variety of video media, so much of it would really go over my head. But I’m still fascinated by the culture which surrounds it.

Yesterday sexpert blogger Violet Blue covered Syd Blakovich and Madison Young’s red carpet walk at the AVN awards. Now a good-looking pornstar can generally get work if she is willing to have sex with other females on camera, even if she will not have boy/girl sex that way. There is almost the sense that a pornstar who only does women is somehow more of a nice girl than one who does men in films. Offhand, I can’t think of any major video porn star who has sex exclusively with men on camera.

So you’d think that people would just find it hot if Madison Young brought Syd Blakovich as her date to the AVN Awards. The talented Julie Simone shot some stuff of Madison Young which will be appearing on BlueBlood.com soon and I already covered extremely sexy badass Syd Blakovich’s Ultimate Surrender triumphs on here. So you can pretty much take it as a given that I think Syd Blakovich and Madison Young dating would be hot.

Violet Blue reports that AVN apparently didn’t want Syd Blakovich, in her cool steampunk outfit, to walk the porn red carpet with Madison Young. WTF? Someone would have to check with Summer Cummings and Skye Blue to see if this is actually the first time a girl/girl couple has attempted to take that red carpet stroll together, but, whether this is the first or the zillionth time a woman has brought another woman as her genuine date, it is messed up that an industry which insists on girl/girl sex would balk lest anyone think it was genuine girl/girl sex.

I mean, is it really excessively feminist to request that Porn Valley not whine if the women, they want to fuck each other, actually enjoy fucking each other?

PS I’ve seen a bunch of sex blogs, Violet Blue’s Tiny Nibbles included, posting pics of Gianna Lynn and her AVN awards dates. With how much some folks yammer on about porn crossing over to the mainstream, as though sex were somehow totally separate from all other areas of life, you’d think somebody in smutville would have noted that Gianna Lynn’s dates were UFC contract winner Ryan Bader and former Arizona State University
 classmate and fellow MMA fighter CB Dollaway.

Corporate Goth is a familiar expression in East Coast cities where people tend to separate their playtime from their workdays. I was living and working mostly in Washington, DC and Baltimore when I founded Blue Blood in print. I did primarily contract design work and most of the companies I worked for were conservative federal contractors, management consultancies, and lobbyists. My hairstyle at the time consisted of only natural colors, albeit definitely not colors which would appear striped together in nature. On my own time, I believed that shirt was spelled L-I-N-G-E-R-I-E. Heck, one of my neighbors harangued me from across the street, telling me I belonged in a whorehouse for what I wore just to clean my car. (I called the cops on her.) But, when I was seated at a computer in someone else’s place of business, I might not have looked like the most standard employee (or contractor). My clothes might have tended towards a darker palette and my hair was not really a businessperson’s cut, but it was usually businesslike enough. (When I worked at EDS, my manager did complain to my agency about my sexy stockings.)

This might go without saying, but I’m going to state the obvious here: I read a lot of cyberpunk at the time. I loved William Gibson and John Shirley and Richard Kadrey and Norman Spinrad and Pat Cadigan and Walter Jon Williams and George Alec Effinger and of course Bruce Sterling’s Mirrorshades anthology was seminal. The list goes on, but one of the salient points of the emerging cyberpunk genre at the time was that it acknowledged both street culture and corporate culture. Cyberpunk was, in many ways, first and foremost a sociological study of how the human need for tribalism might manifest itself in a future with new technology.

So there were the heavily modded post-human gothic and punk tribes with writhing tattoos and tusks and animal muscle grafts and music implants in their ear drums. But there were also the sleek corporate melds of gangsterism and business core values. I don’t know how it was where you lived, but, where I was, both styles had a real appeal to counterculture people striving to achieve their personal goals and power, despite preferences for rebellion and individuality and flamboyance. This is where Corporate Goth comes from. The whole steampunk fashion thing sort of built on and evolved from some of this scene as some of the cyberpunk authors started writing steampunk and Neal Stephenson burst onto the scene. But the evolution of steampunk is another article.

In Los Angeles, many of the sleek black business stylings of corporate goth are just dressed for a certain sort of meeting. This is aesthetically pleasing to me, but it removes some of the tribal appeal.

Xian (pronounced “zigh-ahn” despite my stupid left hand always trying to add a letter t) Vox is not your typical Los Angeles promoter and DJ. She is interested in varied philosophies and works tech industry day jobs. So it sort of makes sense that she would like a corporate goth theme. A much smaller percentage of Los Angeles denizens who like spooky nightclubs have ever worked a corporate job . . . at least a much smaller percentage than it cities where it is common to be at least as interested in books as in movies, at least as interested in the heart and mind as the body.

So, anyway, Xian did a Hex VIP event as a run-up to a larger ball and Blue Blood were media sponsors of the event. I did not ask Xian what her reasons or inspirations or motivations were, but one of the possible themes for the event was Corporate Goth. So here are the gothic photos Forrest Black and I shot at the event. If you might have otherwise wondered at quite what the theme was, now you know. Unless, of course, you didn’t read this and just went straight to the pics. I think everybody looks really great, so enjoy.