Sunday, 20 February 2011
You may not have heard of Sparky Sin Claire. If you have, maybe I won't ask how. She's a 22 year old porn star from Los Angeles.
Sparky lives quite a full life. A couple of years ago, she was invited by a man and his two bisexual girlfriends to move to Montreal and be in a relationship with them and to learn how to teach other couples how to pick up threesomes. Apparently she was okay with this at first, whilst there was a lot of partying involved. But after about a year and a half, as might be expected, this unusual arrangement went awry. And Sparky discovered that the man, who she now describes as "batshit insane" was a adherent of a mysterious organisation called ideaGasms. I'm not exactly sure how (and besides, it's really none of my business) but Sparky eventually found herself having an affair with this group's leader.
Whilst ostensibly the group seemed to combine troilism with the preaching of spirituality, unconditional love and meditation, it seemed to Sparky to have a darker side too and she found she'd become a virtual prisoner of something she now believes was a cult. It might come as no great surprise to learn that drugs were involved in all this too.
Sparky escaped one day when her boyfriend and the rest of the group were all asleep. Finding herself alone, in a foreign country, in -25 degrees, in the middle of winter, in order to earn money simply to live, she became a stripper.
She also says now that she took the job as a stripper in order to "to learn how move and to be sexy."
I guess this must have worked out well because she was quickly talent spotted by Joanna Angel's alt porn 'Burning Angel' film company.
So Sparky moved back to LA and she now combines being a porn star with being a student and also working as the paid PA to the transvestite actress Holly Woodlawn (the one time Andy Warhol starlet who was immortalised in Lou Reed's 'Walk On The Wild Side').
This whole story seems very complicated but there are probably hundreds of young women, in the greater Los Angeles area, who have similarly convoluted stories about how they got involved with the adult industry.
Not all of these stories seem to end well.
I'm obviously not an expert but I think Sparky's story will be different. She may not always have made the best choices, so far, but she seems ferociously bright and her blog, when she was doing it, was funny, colourful and wonderfully written. Across her chest she has a huge tattoo which simply says 'we the people.' She told a recent interviewer "Besides the porn, I also enjoy constitutional law and early American history."
As I write this, Sparky's currently in San Francisco undergoing a month long 'slave training' at somewhere called the Armory. It seems to me that she's doing a fair bit of walking on the wild side herself. So perhaps we should all watch this space?
*I'm indebted to my good friend Toby Dammit for the introduction and also for access to his interview with Sparky.