Tag: post-porn life

Please Don’t Quit, Mark Suben!

Here in the northeast (and maybe elsewhere), a lot has been made of Cortland County (NY) prosecutor Mark Suben coming clean about his porn past. Suben, under the nom de porn, Guy Thomas, made 10 or so movies from 1972 to 1974.

According to nj.com, a YouTube video made the rounds during Suben’s re-election, in what I assume was an attempt to smear him.  The video is snarky and, at 15 minutes, overly long to make their point.

But, he has since admitted that Mark Suben = Guy Thomas.  His spokesperson said:

“This was nearly 40 years ago. It was not illegal. Mark Suben was not yet married. He was not practicing law and he was not a law student . . . it has nothing to do with his law practice or his current position as the district attorney of Cortland County.”

(I’m no lawyer, but I’m pretty sure it technically would have been illegal at the time he was shooting porn in New York.  Porn production wasn’t really legalized until Hal Freeman fought his way to the California Supreme Court and even then, it merely legalized shooting porn in California.  But I think that hunting down that witch  is more akin to protesting that someone took a drink during prohibition…)

Semantics aside, Suben didn’t do anything wrong by modern standards, and his acts a lifetime ago shouldn’t have any bearing on his acts in his current life.

Politically, we understand you can’t embrace your porn past, and your statements make it clear you’re very embarrassed by them:

“I used bad judgment myself in my youth. . . I was an actor in adult films in the early 1970s. I also acted in other venues, off-Broadway, soap operas. . . A few weeks ago, when asked, I denied this to members of the press. I regret that and I apologize. I was shocked to be confronted by this so many years later.  .  . I was embarrassed for my family and friends who have stood by me. I also denied my actions to my family, my friends and my staff. After that brief period of my life, I found my calling in the law, particularly in prosecution, and have dedicated my life and my career to doing what I’ve been elected to do – protecting my home community.  I will continue to do that. I cannot defend my bad judgment, both my involvement years ago and my denial of it recently.”

I agree with half of his last statement.  Lying about it recently did no good.  But having done it years ago — was it bad judgement at the time, or in hindsight now that you carry an elected position and now that such a thing might not get you elected again?

I say, perhaps the lying is what you should be held accountable for and embarrassed by; not the fact that you fucked some girls on film back in the days when you were footloose and fancy free and not a public servant.

So, Mark, please don’t quit.  Don’t cave into pressure.  Keep putting away the bad guys.  Blaze a trail for so many others who have been ostracized for legal choices they made years ago and are still paying the price… and own the fact that you got to bang Georgina Spelvin and Darby Lloyd Rains and 80’s disco sensation Andrea True!

Why Aren’t We Allowed to Move On?

The Huffington Post (among other outlets) have reported that for the second time in her post-porn life, porn star Rikki Anderson has lost a teaching job due to the fact that she had sex on video over 15 years ago.

Her story is not all that special, at least if Wikipedia is to be believed — she did a handful of movies back around 1997 in a period of her life between stints in the Army.  Seems like a common enough story — woman transitions out of the Army, finds it hard to adjust and  make ends meet, so she shakes her moneymaker as a dancer to pay some bills and takes the next step into appearing in some videos  (all 100% legal activities), then determines that this is not the life for her either, and re-enlists.  After her second tour with the Army, she uses the GI Bill to go to college, graduates in the top of her class and becomes certified as a teacher and finds gainful employment.

To me, it sounds a bit like a success story.

Porn helped her out when she needed it — not everyone knows what they want to be when they grow up, or perhaps they just can’t be what they want to be at the time they want to be it — so you do what you need to do to survive.  She didn’t cross the law, she went to where legal money could be made in a short period of time, then she moved on with her life, becoming a productive member of society.

So, I guess my question is why is this lady being tarred and feathered?

She did nothing illegal.

But I suppose that is different than saying she did nothing wrong.

Here at the IAFD, we get our fair share of emails from people who have moved on with their lives and aren’t excited about the prospect of their past choices appearing on the site, and we’re sensitive to that.  We struggle with it quite a bit, but we won’t remove the filmographies.

My favorite line in Airplane is  “They bought their tickets, they knew what they were getting into.  I say, let ’em crash!”

The cold, heartless logic of it (wrapped in absurdity) that makes me laugh, and I’ll quote  it often in real-life when someone needs to take responsibility for something they’ve done.  “I say, let ’em crash!”

It’s easy to say, but much harder to practice since it’s pretty heartless, and we’re just not that heartless here.  At the end of the day, there are people on the other side of the screen with lives and families and futures and pasts and hopes and dreams — just as there are on the other side of our keyboards — and there seems that there needs to be some line drawn between a “career” porn performer and a “desperate for cash at a tough time in their life” porn performer for the purposes of running this site.

So, we don’t take the hard-line “whore knew this would happen” position — even tho we DO think that as soon as they take their clothes off people should expect this can and will happen and prepare themselves for it — we know that’s not always possible.  Life isn’t neat, and sometimes things must be done even if under other circumstances they wouldn’t be.

We have no hard and fast rules about it and we would really prefer not to be a revisionist historian.  It’s hard enough being a primary historian.  But, when someone appears in only a handful of out of print  movies 15-20 years ago and comes to us that far after the fact and asks us real nice to take their picture down, we usually do, because, in the end, there’s very little downside for us.  It depends on how many movies, how long ago, is the person of note, etc.

And I say this, knowing that with everything going on, we still have a vidcap of Rikki Anderson accompanying her biography / filmography.

But we’re dismayed that Rikki lost her job teaching — not once, but TWICE.

School officials were  quoted by the New York Daily News as saying: “We’re surprised, very surprised. At the same time we feel for her and her family. We do believe she has tried to move on with her life… Unfortunately, even though it happened 15 years ago, [the video] is still there.”

So, why the need to quit?  Can’t we turn this around as a lesson?  She’s a teacher, so can’t good come of it? “Hey kids, maybe posting pictures of you frenching that girl and then drinking shots off her boobs isn’t a good thing to post on Facebook…”

People have sex.  Every kid in that classroom’s parent — guaranteed! – had sex at least once.  But instead of quoting George Michael’s “Sex is natural, sex is fun…” we say, sex is bad, and if you’re caught doing it, we’ll run you out of town; or at least make you feel like you need to run yourself out of town.

So, whenever I see a story like this in the news, I get sad.  Someone’s getting a raw deal for legal things they did a long time ago.  I’m not saying that knowing your teacher did porn and you can watch her getting DP’d over at HotMovies wouldn’t have the potential to be a disruptive force in class — at least in the short term, but I bet people would get over it.

Why we, as a society, afford some people the chance to fuck on film and be forgiven or praised for it, while condemning others is one of life’s great, sad mysteries.

To me, its all about forgiveness, and I don’t like when its withheld without justification.

I hope she, and the others who will inevitably suffer the same fate down the line, find it easier to survive with each successive episode.