Between the cracks, a reflection
My experience of performing for Kink Men in five parts.
“Every porn scene is a record of people at work, and yet the work of porn is invisible.”1
The car pulls up to a formidable rusty gate.
“Is this it?” The ride-share driver looked over his shoulder at me and my partner Tom, questioning if this was indeed our destination. It is not every day that he drops visitors off in the middle of a deserted Las Vegas suburb. “Yes,” I checked the address, “this is it.” We lugged our suitcases onto the dusty gravel, I texted our contact person as we watched the car drive off, kicking up a cloud of sand in its wake.
There was no turning back now.
1/5 - From Castle to Oasis
We were met at the gate by B, and she led us into the Kink.com compound. From the relentless hundred-degree desert sun, we were teleported to a lush oasis. A meandering path weaves its way through a fortress of palm trees. Astroturf held the tropical illusion together. As with everything in Vegas, verisimilitude is what matters, just don’t look too closely at the seams. We reached an elaborate rock garden with a waterfall folly and a lazy river, then we made a sharp turn into a functionally fluorescent office.
I was here for my debut shoot with Kink Men. Having lived in San Francisco for a couple of years, the mysterious shadow of what happens in the legendary armory building on Mission and 14th Street looms over the gay kink community. The imagery associated with the company was one of medieval dungeons, torch-lit hallways and turrets, a stark contrast to the present desert oasis we find ourselves in. The cityscape of San Francisco, with its perpetual rolling fog and petulant microclimates, made for the perfect partner for the brooding charismatic personality of Kink.com, a sullen handmaiden to the unspeakable fantasies and muffled screams contained within these thick brick castle walls.
I arrived in San Francisco a few years after Kink.com moved out of the armory, but having been a connoisseur of their extensive catalog of Kink Men videos, an uncanny sense of familiarity courses through you as you recognise spaces in the city filtered through the prism of pornography. This was the rooftop with a view of the Church of 8 Wheels’ campanile where Wolf Hudson caught and bound a “secret agent”. That was the bay window overlooking Folsom Street where Noah Brooks was dominated while the gathered crowd cheered. That was the bar with the counter where the legendary human centipede-inspired chain rimming scene was staged, faces and butts bound together by rope. The fabric of the city was woven so tightly with the imagery associated with kink (the scene) and Kink (the company that shaped it), that the kink community was surprised when the company decided to relocate in 2017.2 How can we imagine a Kink.com beyond San Francisco?
In its new skin, this lazy river oasis is beginning to make sense to me. This was a room of requirements, a chameleon with the ability to adapt to whatever its beholder desires. This very moment, we needed an office, for we are about to discuss the terms of my engagement as a submissive for a Kink Men scene.
2/5 - The Royal Treatment
I am new to studio porn production, and this was the second studio that I have filmed with, so I regarded this as the royal treatment. The date of filming was set months before. “Talent testing”, as it is referred to in the industry, was paid for by the company. Flights in and out of the city were arranged on my behalf. When I arrived the night before, I found myself booked into a Vegas sized-hotel, with labyrinths of dazzling slot machines and a massive menacing alligator overlooking the proceedings. I had my own room with a bathtub to make the cleaning out and preparation process for the shoot a breeze.3 The cost of car rides to and from the airport and filming location were promptly reimbursed. But beyond monetary compensation and minor luxuries, what felt significant was a constant and attentive care that was provided, not just when the cameras were rolling, but before and after the shoot. I can see why Kink.com is one of the studios considered to be making “ethical porn”4 by some researchers5 of the field, and why their practices and list of performer rights and responsibilities have been recognised as an industry standard.
Under the fluorescent lights, B the booking coordinator ran through my performer rights and responsibilities, as we settled the 2257 record-keeping compliance and tax documents. The rights and responsibilities document6 include clauses that are fundamental and overarching like “I have the right to be treated with respect at all times” to the specific and detailed like having a robe and a decompression space that I could access during the shoot. B then went through a “BDSM Checklist for Submissive Males”, where we covered an extensive list of BDSM activities and my tolerance and sensitivity of various body parts to pain. After going through the paperwork, Tom and I were brought to the green room, where there was a mirror, sink, shower, snacks, drinks and most importantly in the scorching desert climate - chilly air conditioning.
When Micah the director and my scene partner Marco Napoli arrived, we greeted each other with hugs. This was the first time I was meeting both of them in person. I corresponded with Micah over text messages for the past couple of months discussing the shoot, and the script was sent to me beforehand so I had an understanding of what to prepare. Tom had worked with Marco prior to this shoot, tying him up and photographing him when he was visiting New York City. I am thankful that Micah paired me up with Marco for this scene. He is an experienced performer, and incredibly sexy and tender. I knew I was in safe hands when he took time to connect before we started filming, and highlighted that we were going to create something memorable together. A scene partner for pornography is something really special, as your intimate coupling is publicly fossilized, pirated in perpetuity within the deep recesses of the internet.
Micah sat me and Marco down to go through the BDSM checklist again, and this was also recorded for liability purposes. Marco had a similar checklist for his role as a dominant in our scene, and it was an opportunity for us to negotiate before the scene what we would be comfortable doing on camera. This was a space where I felt comfortable sharing personal limits. Growing up in Singapore, where the rod was definitely not spared, I have a complicated relationship with the act of caning. It was quite common for parents to use the cane as a disciplinary tool as a child, and it was also wielded in school as an act of public shaming.7 This was a space where I could inform them of the reasons for these limits and ensure that they were respected. It was also a place for me to campaign for BDSM activities that I do enjoy, which includes ropes and restraints, and negotiate how we could choreograph some of these personally pleasurable activities into the scene we were filming.
The indoor spaces of the compound were a series of compartments. There was a living room area, a couple of bedrooms, a fully functional kitchen with an island that could double up as a fuck bench and a large open shower with anchor points and multiple shower heads to fulfill all your locker room bondage fantasies. If you have been following recent scenes on Kink.com, these will be familiar backdrops that you will recognise.
For the scene we were shooting, the crew was setting up in the dungeon set. Apparently, this dungeon is an exact replica of another space that exists elsewhere, down to the dimensions and decorative finishings. The only tell-tale sign that this room used to contain a workout studio was hidden in the cracks of the wood tiles that obscure the reflective mirror beneath.
Instead of grout between them, you see yourself staring back at you if you look hard enough.
The director of photography was another experienced and sexy adult performer Brian Bonds. Besides Brian, there was also Yinnie and Luke the production assistants that attended to our needs and assisted Brian with the set up, and Ravi the rope rigger who was in charge of tying me up safely for the scene.8 The premise was loosely inspired by the 1987 British horror film Hellraiser. I find this mysterious puzzle box, and when I open it, all hell breaks loose and I get sucked into this bondage fantasy where I live out a warped Aladdin fantasy of submitting to a sexy leather genie that fucks me senseless. His wishes are my command.
During the shoot, there was a ton of spit, lube, and tears caught on camera, but when the cameras were off, there were also moments of levity and laughter, where we were actively trying to seek respite from the intensity of the scene. I gave explicit permission for them to leave non-permanent marks, and Marco definitely bruised me up. As a performer, you do not necessarily see what is going on when you are bound by the wrists and facing forward. However, you sense that things are getting serious when a deafening silence follows the thud of a paddle as it lands, and you watch the crew respond to your pain viscerally, their faces wince as they imagine how it might have felt like, their aroused boners tenting around their loins. That is when you know you have performed the job you were hired for.
3/5 - Performance in Parentheses
When I was booked for this gig, I was certain that I wanted my husband and co-conspirator Tom to be there with me. As avid kinksters who have followed Kink.com’s work over the years, I knew that he would enjoy this peek behind the curtain. Most importantly, this was a memory I would like to share with him. I know this analogy is going to sound a little strange, but it is kind of like a proud dad at his kid’s first recital.
When I proposed this to Micah, fully cognisant of the sensitivities of a pornography shoot and the importance of keeping a closed set, there was no hesitation on Micah’s part in saying yes to my request as long as my scene partner Marco was fine with it. Micah was sensitive to the relationship I shared with Tom, as partners in life, but also in kink, and the art we have been creating together over the past five years. He was also made aware that Tom and Marco knew each other. In hindsight, having Tom there made a significant difference. Being my partner, Tom was able to provide intimate aftercare in a way that nobody on set could. Tom also provided the necessary emotional anchor for me to process the intense experience that I was going through. This was yet another testament to the studio and its staff not merely providing lip service to their commitment to foregrounding and respecting performer rights, but following through speech with action.9
The rest of the shoot proceeded smoothly, there is an economy to studio shoots that casual content creators will benefit from adopting, especially as the industry professionalizes. People question why I am interested in doing studio shoots at this juncture, when fan sites and content creation gives you much more ownership over the final product. I believe that there is still much that can be learnt about professionalism and efficiency that can be lacking in a rapidly shifting and new industry like content creation. We can all benefit from applying some of these tried and true methods of best practices, including scene negotiation, performer rights, scripting, shot planning, and intention-setting to some of our collaborations. On the other hand, there are also some deeply entrenched and exploitative industry norms that treat performers as commodities instead of humans, or perpetuate a toxic form of hypermasculinity and race as a fetish. Participation in studio shoots is one way of learning the source of these norms so we can choose to steer away from them in independent content creation.
One thing that sets Kink.com apart from other studios is the entry and exit interview at the beginning and end of every shoot and video. These are the cracks in the facade where you may see yourself reflected, the breaking of the illusion, the bracketing of a fantasy. For some performers it might appear to be perfunctory, but I found it really helpful. The entry interview encourages you to set an intention for what we are about to do, and it is a chance for everyone on set to hear your take on how you expect the scene to play out as a performer. I was holding Marco’s hand throughout the exit interview, which was surprisingly tender, even though everyone was exhausted from the shoot. It creates a space for you to take stock of what just happened. One common question is “what is your favorite part of the shoot.” I hesitated before answering Micah, careful with how words might reduce the complexity of my experience. “It was the focus,” I stated after a long pause, “when everyone in the room shares the intensity of the moment.” I felt that during the scene, when everyone in the room had a common desire of seeing the scene succeed, and you felt that solidarity as a performer.
In theater and performance, this bracketing device between on scene and off scene provides the possibility for “play-acting.” Not that the sting from a whip might feel less pain, but that your scream in reaction can be amplified because you are within the “scene” and are able to dissociate fiction from reality. This gives me the permission to explore my threshold, knowing that I am in a space where I have the capacity to tap out at any given moment.
4/5 - Number Eleven
After the shoot, I shared a couple of behind-the-scenes photos on X, and one of my followers asked about the number of AAPI performers who have worked with Kink Men. Most folks in Asia turn to Japanese porn for gay fetish content that features Asian performers, albeit frustratingly obscured by strategically placed mosaics. Within the North American studio system, the most prominent AAPI performer would be rope dominant Van Darkholme, who has since returned as a director with his recent Bondage Compound series with Kink Men. Van was one of the few visible AAPI folks that I looked up to for a long time until the recent popularization of fan sites that brought us a wider range of Asian submissives and fetish performers. Cagedjock, Yoshi Kawasaki, Eli Shaw are some names that immediately come to mind. However, despite this recent proliferation of performers, when you search the Kink Men models site and select the “Asian” tab under the ethnicity category, there are a mere ten names that return as results.10 This accounts for 0.68% of the 1468 performers in their database. Compare this to the national average of 5% of AAPI folks in the United States, the statistical discrepancy is clear.
My intent is not to claim that the studio is excluding AAPI performers, Van is a pillar of representation for Asian men in kink.11 Neither am I saying there needs to be a “diversity” initiative to work with more AAPI performers, as such initiatives are rarely sustainable in the long run unless there are significant structural shifts in power and desires. I am certain there are many complex reasons for this situation that cannot be attributed to any one individual or reason, and extend beyond the confines of one studio. Instead, I am interested in asking how this situation came to be.
If you have read my previous writing, you will know I hold the potential of pornography in high regard, with the possibility to make and shape worlds, and in turn desires and perceptions. The questions I would like to pose for collective consideration include:
Are casting choices a causal response to desires from the market, and does this scarcity of models reflect a lack of desire from consumers of fetish pornography for AAPI performers to perform in gay fetish content?
Or is the effect the cause, and there a lack of desire because AAPI performers are often excluded from these depicted gay fetish scenarios in studio pornography, and therefore linger on the periphery of our kinky imagination?
Or perhaps the model minority myth for Asian Americans is so pervasive that there is a reluctance for AAPI performers to appear in gay fetish content and / or explicitly submissive roles in studio productions?12
Is casting an AAPI performer in the role of a male submissive too risque given the fraught “straitjacketed” performance of Asian American masculinity, even if one might find pleasure in these restraints but too ashamed to admit it?13
What do you think?
I am also grappling with the fact that I will be added to the archive as the eleventh model in their database who identifies as Asian, and the burden of representation that entails.
I was wearing my own chastity cage throughout the scene and did not ejaculate (and adhering to the ethos of chastity play, was not expected or asked to do so). What does it mean to perform as a caged and locked submissive, even if I volunteered my own lock, chain, and cage? Am I reinforcing an emasculated trope of Asian-American masculinity? And what if, in spite of the fraught politics of representation, bottomhood and submission is what I (and many other Gaysians) find sexual pleasure in?14
5/5 - “All Look At Me”
By way of a conclusion to this reflection, I return to my primal (and favorite) scene with Kink Men.
Club Dragon was part of their Bound in Public series in the early 2010s, where they pushed the boundaries of public humiliation and exhibitionism in gay male pornography to new heights. The shoot date was on 26 August 2011, performer Shane Frost was brought to a “special club”15 and directed by Van Darkholme to service its patrons. There was a twinkle in Shane’s eyes in his exit interview as he proclaimed that he “love me some Asian people,” clearly fetishizing and finding pleasure in the ethnicity of the patrons of the club.
The venue for this episode was Gaysian night at Club 8 along Folsom Street, a special event that recurs every Friday.16 This scene was fraught with racial tropes that deserves a more detailed reading and unpacking. In brief, some of these tropes include Shane’s back tattoo in Mandarin characters that reads “rebel child” (逆儿) and commands everyone to “all look at me” (全看着我) - an interpellation of a specific audience who can read Mandarin (both at the club but also watching the video document), but also a hint that Shane might be what we commonly refer to as a “rice queen”17, one that he confirms in his interview.
Shane never quite relinquishes his control and power as a white male in the space despite being the submissive in this scene, playing up his bratty persona in wilful disobedience to Van’s commands. The dominants, some of whom were Asian, holding him down in the scene were in Shane’s own words in his exit interview, “very weak.”
Tristan Tran, one of the ten AAPI models that show up in the search on Kink Men, is dressed in grey semi-formal vest and pants in this scene. Tristan looks nervously into the camera when he is onscreen, either at director Van or us the audience, tentatively seeking approval as he gets rimmed by Shane or while degrading and penetrating him, reinforcing the trope of the meek or compliant Asian male even as a top. This will be the only scene that Tristan was credited for with the studio.
Despite all the fraught racial stereotypes, the 28 year-old me watching this scene when it was first released was still highly titillated by the possibilities that this scene promises and the world it may conjure. I was discovering my obsession with rope, bondage, and exhibitionism. This scene where a self-assured Caucasian guy was brought to his knees and made to serve a club full of predominantly Asian patrons somehow pushed all the right kinky power-play buttons. I jerked off to this scene repeatedly, returning to it again and again over the years, with different moments seared into my fantasy of what being gay, Asian, and living in San Francisco might offer. At times I identified with Shane the submissive, at other times with Van who was directing the scene, or Tristan and a variety of other patrons in the club who adopted a different disposition in relation to the camera and Shane. Club Dragon was a call, and ten years later, my scene with Kink Men is a response.
I am not sure if I have unlocked all the mysteries and pleasures contained within the puzzle box, and perhaps its opaque elusiveness is what makes it intriguing.
Curiosity is after all, what keeps us returning to a scene, again and again.
In a way, I hope my scene and this writing is a hail for a future performer, a younger self that encounters the scene surreptitiously surfing the interwebs, a wink and a nod to the possibilities that kink might promise.
A crack, from which they might recognize a reflection.18
Berg, Heather. Porn Work: Sex, Labor, and Late Capitalism. University of North Carolina Press, 2021.
Dineen, J.K. “Historic SF site says goodbye to its porn movies.” SFGate, 17 Jan. 2017.
Frost, Laura. “Kink.com Is Shuttering Its San Francisco Sex Dungeon.” VICE, 15 Mar. 2017.
I brought my own shower shot, hose and wrench to install attachments to aid with cleaning out. I have learnt that these are essentials for any filming session when you are preparing to bottom.
The definition of “ethical porn” varies according to different sources. This is VICE magazine’s definition of it.
Ethical porn can be divided, broadly, into three main areas. It’s content produced in an environment that is safe, where everyone is of age, consenting, and happy to participate. It also fairly compensates its creators for their time and work, like any other business. The final – perhaps the most hotly debated – aspect of ethical porn is the content itself.
“Ethical porn” is also often associated with feminist porn. For further reading: Berg, Heather. “Chapter 2 - I Was in Love! And Then It Was Over: Authenticity Work.” Porn Work: Sex, Labor, and Late Capitalism. University of North Carolina Press, 2021.
Shea, Alex. “Your Guide To Ethical Porn: What Makes It Different & Where To Find It.” MBG Relationships, Mindbodygreen.com, 23 Aug. 2023.
All of the consent documents mentioned can be accessed via the Kink.com Open Resources website.
The association of caning with the national imagination of Singapore has other fraught political complications, particularly in the 1990s with the sentencing of American Michael Fay to caning for vandalism and the caning of gay men entrapped by police in public cruising areas.
After the shoot, I received an email with a questionaire from the talent advocacy and compliance supervisor at Kink.com checking in with a list of questions soliciting feedback about my experience on set. The email, which follows every Kink.com shoot, is yet another gesture of arbitration from them that I appreciate, and allows for performers to highlight any issues we might have encountered.
This search was performed on 8 Sep. 2023. This model database includes other studios who are affiliated with Kink.com. This includes Alternadudes, Family Dick, Say Uncle, Wrestlingmale.com etc.
For example, Van Darkholme himself appears in more scenes (81) than most other performers in the database - given that he directed many of the Kink Men scenes.
I am thinking about C. Winter Han’s sociological mapping of the “contextual norms created for, and by, gay Asian American men which racial and sexual identities might develop” (7) and how these “social identities” are reinforced for us.
Han, C. Winter. Geisha of a Different Kind: Race and Sexuality in Gaysian America. NYU Press, 2015.
Shimizu, Celine Parreñas. Straitjacket Sexualities: Unbinding Asian American Manhood in the Movies. Stanford University Press, 2012.
From Shimizu: “We need to beware that the representation and criticism of Asian American men in the movies can also be straitjacketed into a narrowly circumscribed vision of masculinity, informed by a reactionary claim to male power and privilege. The solution to the problematic representation of Asian American men in the movies is not to add the phallus, which ultimately reproduces sexual heteronormativity and gender hierarchy, but to identify new criteria that dodge the crosshairs of victimization with an accounting of male power and privilege.” (2)
She goes on later in the chapter to formulate a notion of “ethical manhood” and talks about the “presence of vulnerability.” - “My formulation of ethical manhood attends to how the self holds the potentiality of becoming aware of one’s position in a network of power relations and of acting responsibly in wielding and enduring power.” (9)
To be fair, these are hypotheses based on results from one gay fetish site. For a more accurate assessment, more data points will need to be gathered. This includes comparing the data with straight fetish content, and with other gay fetish sites. From a brief search, there are a handful of AAPI performers who identify as male performing in submissive roles at Kink.com, the heterosexual section of the site. We will also need to compare this statistic to the percentage of POC performers to see if this is an exceptional case for Asian performers, or part of a larger trend.
This deserves a separate post in itself, but at this moment, I am interested in soldering Shimizu’s formulation of a performance of “ethics”, vulnerability, and the literacy of “intimacies” in her research of Asian American masculinity to Tan Hoang Nguyen’s agency through “bottomhood” in the study of pornography and the process of production as critical text.
Ngyuen,Tan Hoang. A View from the Bottom: Asian American Masculinity and Sexual Representation. Duke University Press, 2014.
This was how the club was introduced by Van Darkholme in the introduction interview.
In an earlier version of this essay, I misidentified it the club as Dragon Lounge in the Sunset district of San Fransisco.
For more about the performance of homoerotic orientalism, see Lim, Eng Beng. Brown Boys and Rice Queens: Spellbinding Performances in the Asias. NYU Press, 2013.
This focus on the crack as a infrapolitical strategy of disruption is not just a metaphor, but a methodological approach to porn work. Heather Berg discusses this in her book, referencing John Holloway’s use of the language of cracks as “asserting a different type of doing” (6) I am also thinking about this in relation to a Foucauldian ‘counter-conduct’ mentioned in my previous writing.
Berg, Heather. Porn Work: Sex, Labor, and Late Capitalism. University of North Carolina Press, 2021
Holloway, John. Crack Capitalism. Pluto Press, 2010.
Fantastic writing, reflection, and insight. Thank you for sharing your experiences with us (and for citing sources!)
loved reading this, very insightful yet highly readable. ty for letting us in on your experience!