Lights, Camera, Action

Anoint me, Annie Sprinkle, because while I've posed naked for lots of photographers by myself, I recently made my "real sex for the camera" debut. Alert readers will recall that I regretted missing the chance to be shot by writer/ photographer David Steinberg when he was here in December. Well, David wound up being my houseguest during the Seattle Erotic Art Festival a few weeks ago, and a weekend of looking at other people's sexy art seemed like the perfect segue to him shooting Max and me doing the wild thing.

Perfect until the moment of truth, that is. Max and I weren't nervous, exactly, but we didn't know quite what to expect from the whole experience. David told us he wasn't going to try to direct us, we should just let things happen naturally. It's a little tough to feel natural having sex when the lighting is more suggestive of an operating room than eroticism. However, the fact that we were in our own bed helped, and so I erased David from my consciousness as much as I could, and just focused on sexing Max.

I say "as much as I could" because when there's a camera going, there's a small but dedicated section of my brain continually tracking where it is and how I should orient myself in relationship to it. This ability may date back to my days as a stripper, when I found that even if you aren't onstage, if you're wearing a bra and a thong in a roomful of horny guys, there is always someone looking at you. So I learned: Hold your shoulders back, your stomach in, and your ass out at all times. And one simply doesn't unlearn that level of body consciousness. If there's a camera pointed at me, I can walk, I can talk, I can play, I can even, apparently, have an orgasm, without forgetting to lick my lips and make sure my hair isn't messed up. I'm not sure I'd call this trait exhibitionism. It's more like situational vanity.

And it may be more universal than I realized, because Max and I just got a few sample scans from David, and Max looks great in every one of them. I think he looks better than me in some of them, the son of a gun. Jesus, my first hardcore shoot and I get upstaged by the male talent. I wonder if this ever happened to Annie Sprinkle?

matisse@thestranger.com