How Do You Go from Porn to Indie Literature?

Otherppl with Brad Listi is a weekly podcast featuring in-depth interviews with today’s leading writers. All episodes—hundreds of them—are available for free. Listen via iTunes, Stitcher, iHeart Radio, or right here on Lit Hub. You can also download the Otherppl with Brad Listi app, available for iPhone and Android.

This week, Brad Listi talks with Christopher Zeischegg, a writer, musician, and filmmaker who spent eight years working in the adult industry as performer Danny Wylde. They discuss underground metal, machismo, the rise of Pornhub, media literacy about porn and sex education, and how Zeischegg ended up telling his story in his memoir Body to Job.

From the episode:

Brad Listi: How did you start off working in porn?

Christopher Zeischegg: I was 19 and at school in San Francisco, looking for a job. Well, any job, really. So I went on Craigslist and started answering ads for art modeling, and a lot of the jobs I got involved posing for older gay photographers who wanted me to have an erection as I posed. And one day I found an ad from Kink.com—going into porn wasn’t an aspiration of mine, but I thought it would be a weird one-off experience. It turned out to be a very professional experience, and everyone was very nice to me, so when they offered me a second gig in Napa Valley, I accepted.

BL: People usually sort of fall into it, instead of entering it with intentionality, right?

CZ: Usually, yeah. I think that’s changing these days. Because of the influence of Pornhub and free porn on the internet, a lot of young people have grown up with porn and developed the idea that it’s something they might like to do. It certainly wasn’t like that when I was growing up. There might have been a few people who wanted to go into porn, but most had stories that were similar to mine—they came to it by accident or out of a desire to do something extreme as a young adult.

It makes me think of the military in a way, and how it’s not an accident that young men are conscripted into the military. That’s the age you become a warrior, when you’re impressionable and open and can be imprinted upon. You feel invincible.

When I was in middle school and high school I got very into underground metal—death metal, black metal, metalcore—and that was what I really wanted to do.

BL: Could you speak more about why metal appealed to you?

CZ: Well, to someone who doesn’t understand it at all, I’d suggest thinking about it in terms of sports and young men. I think it’s a very cathartic thing that has a lot to do with community. You spend a lot of time with a very close-knit community that’s mostly guys—not to be sexist, since there are definitely women in the scene, but honestly, it is mostly men. While I can’t say why people gravitate, aesthetically to these kinds of things, you do have a group of friends who you see several times a week to practice. It’s also super physical—there’s a lot of screaming and the like.

BL: To move on to the moral questions around working in porn—of course, it may be too early to tell, but do you think it has a significant impact on young people’s sexuality, since they grow up with it and it’s so easy to access? And is working in the adult industry corrosive to the soul—in your case, or in the cases of colleagues or friends of yours?

CZ: I do think there has to be a certain amount of media literacy surrounding porn. It shouldn’t be de facto sex ed. On the one hand, people might be thinking that porn is more of an issue for young people than it actually is, but on the other, it can’t help but have an influence on young people’s sexuality. It’s got to be more confusing to be a kid these days. You have access to almost anything immediately, and if there’s no information to balance that out, that’s got to be strange. I don’t know that there’s an easy answer to that.

As for corrosive aspects to the work, I don’t think those are inherent. I started having a negative reaction to sex work after it started falling apart financially, thanks to the corporatization of the industry and the rise of Pornhub and free internet porn.

BL: The disruptive young startup!

CZ: [laughing] Exactly. I really get down on Pornhub in Body to Job. It devastated the old financial model of the porn industry. Pornhub is starting to become this large Silicon Valley thing—they’ve worked with Kanye West, for instance. Culturally, I feel neutral about that, but it’s definitely a bad thing financially. At this point, I’m ambivalent towards porn. I don’t really know what to think, but I don’t want to do it anymore. I’m in a monogamous relationship with someone who’s not a porn star, and I’m very happy with that. I do work on set sometimes, as a production assistant or whatever, but the money is gone.

BL: And with the money gone, you’ve made the very wise move of turning your attention to literature as an answer to your conundrum!

CZ: [laughing] Yeah, exactly.

BL: I always think it’s admirable to take complex life situations and transform them into literature. The story you’re telling isn’t one that most people get to in their understanding of porn, which is usually very surface level. You might wonder about the people onscreen, but not for very long. The book you’ve written humanizes it, and I applaud you for putting the effort in to tell your story and coming on the show to discuss it with me.

CZ: Thank you so much for having me! I appreciate you saying that.

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