We asked Shine Louise Houston, filmmaker and founder of queer porn company Pink + White Productions, about her work.
How did you first get into adult filmmaking?
It was 2004 and I was working at San Francisco sex toy retailer Good Vibrations and we had a lot of women and straight couples come in looking for lesbian porn. We didn’t have a whole lot of selection. There’s not a lot of queer-made, lesbian porn out there, it’s very limited.
I had a film degree (from the San Francisco Art Institute), I had about five years of ‘market research’ from working at GV, I was interested in making porn that was more reflective of queer people like me, and I was also interested in leaving retail and starting my own business.
So I quit my day job and started Pink & White Productions. Since then, we’ve made five feature-length films, over a dozen short films, and a handful of web projects, including CrashPadSeries.com (with over 250 episodes) and a curated site for fellow adult filmmakers that currently has over 700 unique indie adult films. We’re actually about to pick up a bunch of classic lesbian porn from the 90s and 00s that now have an online home, decades after VHS.
What are the biggest challenges in working in this particular field?
There’s still such a stigma about being in porn and doing porn. I always forget that I live in a small bubble. Within the community there’s a lot of support but there still is a lot of work to be done on a societal level about people changing attitudes about the sex industry. There are a lot of people who are very supportive about making porn and there are still a lot of people who think porn is the worst thing in the world.
If you’re talking about my position in the greater filmmaking world, I think people don’t take erotic films, or porn, or whatever you want to call it seriously. Even though we’ve been in Frameline and film festivals all over the country, many people’s reactions have kind of been a pat on the head, like ‘Oh cool, women making porn’… We’re actually trying to make movies with a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of what other filmmakers are creating projects with. For the money we have, what we do and what we produce on it, a lot of folks are doing amazing, beautiful work on nothing. And it’s something to consider. A lot of independent films are one million or four million. I made a feature-length on 40 thousand, and it looks good. We’re the shadow of the film industry… Nobody is really expecting too much from this genre. But I expect a lot from myself. Not everybody knows about us, but the people who do know about us love us.
What is it for you that makes your work queer and more specifically lesbian if/where that’s relevant?
We hire queer people, lesbian-identified and otherwise. We’re not looking for conventional sexiness, though it sometimes overlaps. The bodies and desires reflected in our work come from our own networks, whether they’re people of color, people of size, trans folks, people with disabilities, older queers, many are the kinds of folks not often seen represented in commercial porn. Our work creates empowerment by saying Yes, we are beautiful, we’re an art form, we’re not all gym bunnies, and that’s OK. We’re not all super high femme and all this kind of stuff. It’s like, hey, let’s normalize this. These are queer bodies. And hey, we can be just as hot as the models in Penthouse. It is empowering when you can see yourself reflected in an image. If it’s powerful and sexy you might think, Wow, I really always wanted to identify with that but I can’t because my body doesn’t look like X. But maybe that person is brown, they’re heavy, they’re butch, and thought that was totally hot and know that they too can be totally hot. We shouldn’t be ashamed of our bodies and we shouldn’t be ashamed of our sexualities.
Shine Louise Houston’s film The Wild Search screens on Friday 7 December, 9.30pm at CCA. For tickets, click here.