Gustavo Turner
Back in November 1993 — years before the internet became an almost universal utility like power and gas, and many years before the unstoppable rise of Twitter, Facebook and Instagram — Time magazine published what was seen at the time as a highly controversial cover.
Over the portrait of a beautiful, young brunette woman of an unclear ethnic background, text on the cover asked people passing the newsstands (remember those?) to “Take a good look at this woman. She was created by a computer from a mix of several races. What you see is a preview of … THE NEW FACE OF AMERICA.”
Twenty-four years later, walking around Echo Park with porn performers and real-life couple Honey Gold and Donny Sins, you'd be tempted to think that Time’s prediction had come true. Either Gold's or Sins' face could have been the one that riled up that slice of the conservative population that is still fascinated — and, perhaps, secretly turned on — by segregation and “race-mixing.”
“I’m half-Cantonese, [and also] black, Cherokee Indian, Mongolian and Irish,” says the affable Gold, with a rehearsed charm that does not hint at how annoying it must be to be asked “What are you?” on a regular basis. Gold is originally from San Francisco but she's spent half of her life in Los Angeles. She is 24 and has been in porn for only a few months.
Both Gold and Sins are largely considered “black” within the rigid categories of professional porn production. Back in his native New Jersey, 33-year-old Sins says he’s considered “Spanish.” But on the West Coast he often has to clarify. “I’m Dominican-Irish,” he explains.
While Gold and Sins are the very definition of multiracial, they’re both “not black enough” (and sometimes “not light enough”) for standard “Interracial” porn.
As anyone with a web browser can tell you, Interracial in the porn sense usually and almost exclusively means a black man having sex with a white (or, sometimes, an Asian) woman. Scenes with black women — a minority of female talent — are confusingly classified as “Ebony.”
Ebony scenes often also involve a white man but are not labeled Interracial to avoid upsetting viewers who are specifically looking for black men and white women. Things get really confusing when you have scenes with a black male and a black female performer, which are sometimes nonsensically labelled “Ebony/Interracial.” To avoid the confusion, some performers have started referring to those scenes as “black-on-black.”
The Interracial category, like all of professional porn (see our previous article on “stepbrother porn”), is affected by a disconnect between the actual lives of performers and the scripts they are asked to perform.
Many adult performers, especially women, are millennials who choose to live in progressive environments like the Los Angeles area. They are open-minded (though a large number of them had strict upbringings in the country's more conservative areas) and have personal relationships with people of different backgrounds and races. It's common to see current white starlets such as Lana Rhoades challenge prejudiced fans on social media for condemning or displaying a weird obsession with interracial sex.
Porn viewers are also a varied universe of people: men and women, gay and straight, black and white and Asian and Hispanic, etc., conservative and liberal, religious and non-religious, and also every possible combination of those categories, including bisexuals, trans people — and, of course, multiracial people. Not every person watches porn, but every type of person watches porn.
But not everyone pays for porn. A tiny minority of porn viewers are the “hardcore fans” (no pun intended), and with their $20-per-month subscriptions they dictate what they want to see. (If you’re reading this and you consider yourself “young, open-minded and liberal,” ask yourself, “Do I pay for the porn I watch?” Does anyone you know?)
The paying fans (who skew older and male, many living in red states) love Interracial porn. By which they mean, almost exclusively large, dark-skinned black men having sex with petite, young-looking white women.
Adult performers Honey Gold and Donny Sins; Credit: Gustavo Turner
“I never get to pick ‘what I am’ in a movie,” Gold says. “They [the production companies] pick whatever they want. Sometimes they use ‘Ebony,’ but then the fans get mad because they expect someone with a darker skin. And sometimes other Ebony performers get mad as well because you’re taking their parts!”
I first heard of Sins because a producer confided that she was told he had lost a role because he wasn’t considered “black enough” for Interracial. “They sometimes darken or lighten both of us with digital filters,” Gold says.
“It’s also tough to be like us in the industry,” Sins says. “Sometimes you feel other black performers want to know, ‘Are you with us or are you with them?’” Porn can be a very cliquey industry, with award shows and mixers that can resemble a high school cafeteria in a teen movie.
Still, Sins is considered by the industry as someone who “can bring it” (that essential combination of penis size, on-set endurance, appealing looks and professionalism that constitutes the “it” quality for male talent), so he gets steady work as a “black” performer. In her short time in the industry, and with Sins’ advice (they started dating before she came into porn), the ultra-focused and resilient Gold also has made a name for herself among performers of color.
Gold is one of the featured actresses in The Black Out, a Jules Jordan production featuring some of the top black talent in porn. “That was [black porn legend] Prince Yahshua trying to combat the whole ‘black-on-black porn doesn’t sell’ thing,” Sins says.
“It’s funny, many producers don’t want her to shoot with black guys,” Sins says with a laugh. “But she comes home to me. It’s weird with fans sometimes.”
“You know how the fans are” is a phrase that everyone in porn has heard over and over. When a producer or director rolls his eyes on set about an overtly ludicrous direction — for example, having a female performer mechanically repeat something like, “You’re fucking me with that big black cock” — what the producer or director is communicating is, “Yeah, it's ridiculous, but this is what the people who still pay for porn and for your paycheck want.”
“Very rarely someone would have total creative control in porn,” Sins says. “It’s like a movie by Tyler Perry, who has creative control, versus what’s more common, who’d be someone you don’t know, who can do what they want here and there, but 70 percent is given to them [by the production companies]. That’s what a lot of porn directors are.”
This would be the part where I would have liked to tell you that I spoke to some of the producers who make Interracial content to get their point of view, but no one I contacted would go on record. “Anything, and I mean anything, I would tell you would get me tarred and feathered,” I was told by a figure high in the industry’s pecking order. “I wouldn’t do anything to hurt my brands.” I explained to him that I simply wanted to understand how someone as progressive as he is felt while catering to these racial fantasies.
“I really can’t,” he replied. “You know how these fans are.”
The issues surrounding Interracial porn in 2017 are endlessly complex, even putting aside the fraught racial environment we’ve entered as a nation in the post-Obama era.
It is absolutely true that the success of the category has been profitable for a number of black performers, some of whom are among the top male talent in the industry. One of the industry’s top brands is mega-successful porn entrepreneur Greg Lansky’s Blacked, which is shot with the highest production values and pays some of the top rates in the industry. It’s clear from the final product that Lansky takes pains to avoid some of the more problematic pitfalls of less-polished films in the same category.
At the other end of the spectrum from Blacked’s slickness are endless examples of scripts asking for “the black guy” to be unusually violent or menacing to “the girl.” One often gets the impression that this would not be asked of a non-black performer.
Producers also claim to have heard of many black porn fans who enjoy Interracial porn as it is presented, and demand more of it. And many of the top female talents in the industry actively ask to do Interracial scenes, as opposed to the stereotype a few years ago that claimed that some girls didn’t want to “go black.”
“Are you serious?” Gold laughs. “Everyone knows that most girls who do Interracial get paid a higher rate. And Blacked pays really well — every girl who gets in the industry right now has them as a goal. And an interracial gang bang? Forget it. First IR Gang Bang? Those girls are gonna get paiiiiiiiid!” she screams. “You can take off a couple of months after that,” she adds.
Gold and Sins have been engaged for two years. She has to remove the ring for scenes because “the fans don’t like it.” Like every young couple in Los Angeles, they are worried about qualifying to rent a larger apartment or to get a good bank loan. They are sweet and clearly in love.
“We were told that [real-life] couples are discouraged by the industry,” Sins says. “But now we're respected as a couple.”
“Sandra [McCarthy, their manager at OC Modeling] says we can be ‘a new power couple,'” Gold laughs.
That 1993 Time magazine cover might have been right after all — the love of these two “mixed” people is indeed, a quarter-century later, “the New Face of America.”
And yet, as of now, Sins and Gold haven’t been hired to do scenes together. What current category in professional porn would fit who they really are?
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