Scenes From the Porn Expo, Where the Women Shimmy and the Men Drool
This is a dispatch from the biggest porn event of the year: the three-day Adult Entertainment Expo and its crowning moment, the 2001 Adult Video News Awards.
Staged last weekend in a massive convention hall at the Venetian Hotel, it was by turns disgusting, disturbing, decadent, hilarious and sad. Here are a few scenes from this bizarre universe where scantily clad women parade themselves proudly and men drool shamelessly.
Scene I: The Expo
Over the multiple-door entrance to the expo hangs a banner bigger than a billboard. It shows five ravishing long-haired women--Alexa, Devinn, Temptress, Stephanie and Serenity--attired in sheer lingerie patterned after various wild cats--and bears this message: “As if you needed any more reason to be here.”
This is a guys’ weekend in Vegas. Besides the porn fest, there is another major convention in town--the Consumer Electronics Show. The city is seething with businessmen. Hordes of eager men wait in long lines at the expo to buy $15 “fan” passes. Inside, they will be able to get autographed posters, check out the latest porn gadgetry, and see some surgically enhanced women up close and personal. Marketers in the adult entertainment industry estimate that as many as 30% of their customers are women or couples--but few of either are in evidence.
As the line edges forward, one man is on his cell phone. “Hi, honey. I met your brother-in-law . . . things are going well. . . . I’m just having lunch.”
Scene II: The Men
Inside the cavernous hall, men of every age, race, ethnicity and social class gawk and wander like little boys in Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory. Mobs of men pile into messy lines to get autographs from their favorite porn stars. Fat men, ugly men, average men and even some handsome men leer and analyze the women and their bodies: That one is nasty. That one is sloppy. That one--in baby blue, with the bow in her blond hair like Alice in Wonderland, and a cute little pink heart on the cropped top that rises over her massive chest--is so innocent. (She’s done this for a year, the world-weary 20-year-old starlet said during a break between sexy poses. She is ready to give up this life and head home to Seattle.)
As chatty as they are while waiting, when most of the men get to the front of the line, they go mute. Or stammer.
Scene III: The Cameras
Men train every manner of photographic equipment on the women . . . video cameras, digital cameras, disposable cameras. Emboldened by their cameras, men motion women to turn around, bend over, lean back. Some men pose with their cheeks resting on a woman’s breasts like big babies, or hold her around the waist, as if she were their girl, their one and only.
A man in a wheelchair rolls up and down the aisles, calling every starlet in sight over to pose with him. And they oblige. And he looks very happy.
In one booth, a girl sells leather and bondage outfits. She is buckled into a leather dress with a studded collar. At the request of a fan, her middle-aged boss, who looks as if he’s just stepped off a suburban golf course, grabs her hair and yanks her head back.
“Ah . . . ,” she gasps, a perfect pose of sadistic pleasure. Her boss releases her and she goes right back into sales mode, stepping forward to help another customer.
Scene IV: The Women
A buxom young woman with a mane of tangled blond hair in a bra top and hot pants climbs off a dancing platform at her company’s booth, out of a cloud of smoke, and onto the shoulders of the crowd. She walks across them like a rock star, or a goddess. Like amber waves of flesh, hands reach from every direction straining to touch her. Outstretched arms with cameras and videos bob crazily. She shimmies out of her top and tosses it to the grasping crowd.
Security guards signal their disapproval. No nudity is allowed. The woman places oval company stickers on her nipples. The security guards shake their heads. She puts on larger stickers. The security guards close in.
Finally, slightly clothed, she teeters out of the crowd in impossibly high heels and throws her arms around a reporter, the only woman in sight.
“My stickers come off all the time when I’m dancing because I get sweaty,” she says. Then she squeezes the reporter’s breasts affectionately and wanders off with her entourage.
Scene V: Some Fans
Russell Hillman, 42, and his co-worker Cory Lyons, 26, work for a small online entertainment start-up in Los Angeles. They drove to Vegas for the consumer electronics show but spend an afternoon at the Expo.
Lyons is the real connoisseur. Quiet, self-effacing, polite, he can pick the big stars out of the crowd--even in plainclothes--and reels off the names of the industry legends.
“I’m so envious of them. I would love to do it just for a year,” says the clean-cut Michigan native who spent a year as a substitute teacher and part-time stripper. His grandmother sewed his costumes.
His mother panicked a couple of years ago when he told her he was moving to California. “Oh, my God, you’re going to go out there. You’re going to do porn,” she told him. “I know you’re going to do porn.”
Shortly before he set out for the Golden State, she gave him a birthday card filled with 10 pieces of motherly advice. “Be generous, Be kind . . .” it began. Number 10 was “Don’t do porn.”
He promised her he wouldn’t.
But the Expo is tickling those fantasies again.
“I could be an extra in porn,” he muses. “I could do that.”
Scene VI: The Big Night
At 7:45 p.m., the space under the chandelier nearest the hotel elevators is abuzz. The curvaceous, heavily made-up women swirl out in gowns--sleek and sheer--furs thrown around shoulders, escorts on arms, ready for grand entrances through a seemingly endless gantlet of men. Thousands of men.
Hungarian emigre Sasha Gabor, 55, who describes himself as a porn star, father, aeronautical engineer and former journalist, surveys the scene, like a gentleman, in his tuxedo. He has been featured in more than 500 films, he says, because of his uncanny resemblance (with the appropriate makeup) to Burt Reynolds and Sean Connery.
He speaks with a sophisticated vocabulary, peppered with sudden, surprising profanity and carries a black dop kit, with photos of his children.
When he hears Lyons is interested in entering the porn industry, Gabor seeks to dissuade him. “Not to be harsh, but the first time you have an erection problem, the word gets around,” he says. “It happened to me.”
Scene VII: The Awards
Like most awards ceremonies, the event is interminable. There are no film clips, no special performances, and certainly no great orators.
Presenters drone on, handing out more than 75 awards: best screenplay, best director, best actor and actress, best all-girl feature, best tease performance, best solo sex performance and best nonsexual performance.
It could be the Oscars--except for occasional live video feeds, projected on screens scattered around the room, featuring shots up women’s skirts, and one crazy moment when all the porn starlets swarm on stage and start dancing, including a girl in a short black dress who lies on her back and puts her feet behind her head like a contortionist.
Scene VIII: A Star
Sinamon, who won’t give her real name, sits in the front row, curled like a cat in her seat, wearing a close-fitting red silk dress with a mandarin collar.
Sinamon is good enough, and entrepreneurial enough, that she doesn’t lack for work and has started her own ethnic-themed porn company.
The daughter of a Methodist minister from Michigan, Sinamon, 26, got into porn by chance. At 19, she went through a divorce and moved to California with her two kids. Enrolled at Santa Monica College, she reached the point where she had to make money or leave school. So she answered an ad in the L.A. Weekly.
“I had never seen a porno, never been a dancer,” she says with an innocent smile. Now she’s been nominated for an award in a category that cannot even be mentioned here.