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from www.sfweekly.com – I met Courtney Trouble in Las Vegas during the Adult Video News Awards.
She was on a sex-positive panel discussing a number of queer-porn related topics. I knew she was up for some awards and I was curious about this young pornographer. Courtney Trouble runs QueerPornTV.com, a small company that is making some big noise. I began to follow her after the AVNs and discovered that one of her films won at a kinky film festival called Cinekink in New York. This is no small feat so I wanted to know where all this began for Trouble.
Trouble does not have the body type usually associated with porn. She is a bigger girl and proud to display all of it on film. Body image is a huge issue in this country.
Women are continually given images of what the perfect woman should look like: Barbie dolls, fashion models and pin-up girls. You must be tall, thin, blond and have big boobs. If you deviate from this image, then you are inferior as a female.
This is how women are made to feel with the images we are given, and it is problematic in our society. Young women have it hard enough without having to try to live up to what people consider attractive. Trouble decided to make a site where women of all sizes and colors were given a platform.
Trouble started making porn 10 years ago when she was 19. At that time her main source of income was being a phone-sex worker, helping people explore their fantasies. Fantasy fulfillment is an interesting profession and the more you play with it, the more your own desires start to poke through. After a while she began to wonder what her fantasies would look like in pornographic form.
“I wanted to be a porn star so bad I started my own site with the images that I was taking, and very soon afterward, the pictures I was taking of my friends became erotic porn images. I wasn’t intending to start a company,” Trouble said.
Trouble submitted pictures of herself at one porn website but then realized a girl of her size probably didn’t have a good chance of being chosen. So she started her own website, nofauxx.com, and a queer porn company was born.
“I work 40 hours a week, and it has sort of grown into a production company. I think that my image is perceived as someone who has this huge company. I actually have one employee, who is basically my assistant who comes once a week. I just recently got an intern who is helping me with editing,” Trouble says.
I asked whether she believes queer porn was getting popular because it showed more of a variety in gender, body types, and sexual acts.
“I think queer porn is getting popular because the people who make it are really putting themselves out there. The Internet is a very new thing in the long history of sexual imagery. Queer porn has been made one way or another by queer people,” Trouble says.
Trouble’s main goal is to change the world, and she identifies as a visionary. She maintains more than five websites. She does all her own marketing, advertising, and networking. She doesn’t have a financial backer, and she is living the “do it yourself” kind of a dream.
“I put my heart into every day of work that I have. It’s not something where I turn off the computer at 5 pm. I can’t wait for the next day of work to start,” Trouble says.
For such a small company, QueerPornTV.com has been nominated for a fourth year at the AVN Awards. The AVNs are to porn what the Oscars are to film. The fact that she is on the radar speaks volumes. Trouble’s website QueerPornTV.com was up for best adult alternative website. She did not win there but she did win at Cinekink, which happens every year in New York.
The film that caught the attention of Cinekink was Live Sex Show. Trouble won the “Bring It” award at Cinekink for a scene in that film. The scene featured Nina Hartley and Jiz Lee. Hartley was fisting Lee, which is a particularly rare thing to see in pornography. While not illegal, fisting is usually not shown because some people could classify it as obscenity. Obscenity is illegal and could land you in prison as a pornographer.
Fisting is also misinterpreted as a lesbian sex act only. It has a reputation of being violent, painful, and degrading. It has been pretty much self-censored out of the American porn industry in general, although it’s more common in European films. If you are not familiar with fisting, Trouble will define it for you.
“Fisting is when you’re finger banging somebody and all five fingers go inside. It’s not violent, and it’s not painful. It’s an intimate act, and there is a lot of stigma around it. I have actually on set had to say when funded by other companies to make a project, ‘You can’t do that,’ even though fisting is something I do every day in my personal sex life,” Trouble says.
Trouble got notified on Twitter that she had won the “Bring It” award at Cinekink. She has yet to attend Cinekink because she is self-funded. Making a living in the sex-industry is no small feat. With her limited resources, she is able to produce porn that is socially important and thought provoking.
Trouble has made a career out of porn, and I wondered whether she considers it a viable career choice for others.
“When I say that I have made a career out of porn, I am in no way insinuating that I live up to other peoples ideals of financial success. There are weeks where after my business needs and my expenses are paid I am living on $50. To a lot of people that would not be seen as financial success, but none of my life goals had to do with financial success,” Trouble says.
Trouble is the director of 13 films, the owner of the porn site NoFauxxx.Com, which turns 10 this year. Trouble also runs the porn sites QueerPorn.TV and QueerPornTube.Com. Her website CourtneyTrouble.Com blogs about current projects, and has some super sexy galleries of her modeling and porn performances. Check this young queer pornographer out.