Supernova Suicide - by Starla Knight

Depression and suicide are often fatal lovers. Self-slaughter isn’t new, and there are new studies that show an increasing trend in people taking their own lives. Recently, we’ve been in a bit of seppuku shock as celebrity after celebrity takes their final bow, and exits stage left… forever.
 
It seems so foreign to most of us.  We look at our own lives and assume that the daily struggles of trying to get from one week to another, the financial burdens of maintaining housing, vehicles, healthcare, insurance, which for too many, leaves little to nothing to spend on rest and relaxation, vacations, nothing to help relieve the stresses, and assume that once our financial burdens were lifted our depression would disappear. And for many it would.

Most people will suffer from depression at one time or another in their life.  Most people endure what the medical community refer to as “situational depression,” a short-term form of depression that can occur in the aftermath of a variety of traumatic or stressful changes in ones life, including divorce, loss of a job, death of a close friend or family member, retirement.  So it makes sense that once the stresses of those situations are lessened, the depression lessons.

But its not just celebrities who are self-immolating. Suicide rates in the US are at a 30 year high, according to several recent studies. Considering that most Americans have been affected by the loss of the middle class, or at least its steady decline for the last twenty years, it’s not surprising that more and more people are giving up on the possibility of their situation changing.  If your situational depression is caused by the stress of magically making your paycheck last until the next paycheck and pray to the old gods and the new that the vehicle with more than 100,000 miles continues to operate issue free or there goes that thin line that separated you from eviction, and you’ve been bogged down by this situational depression for nearly twenty years, I think we can understand why more and more Americans are feeling, exhausted by it all.

Yet there is aspecific demographic that experiences a higher rate of supernova that often gets ignored or marginalized.  Those who work in the sex industry.  The reason this demographic has high rates of mélange can be just as complex and difficult to understand as the several components of depression itself. 

Last December adult film star August Ames took her own life after finding herself in the middle of a controversy over cyberbullying and homophobia.

Alyssa Funke, an amateur adult actress, ended her time on her college campus after a former high schoolmate taunted her.

Shauna Grant, Savannah, Bradford Wagner, Pauline Chan, Alicia Tyler, Jon Dough, Saya Miskai, Megan Leigh, Arpad Miklos, Johnny Rahm, Angela Devi, Lance Haywood, Pippa O’Sullivan are just a few of the adult film stars that exited stage left.  We haven’t even touched the lists of other sex workers, where the rates of suicide increase further, as the perceived worth of work and pay decreases.

There are several reasons that sex workers experience high rates of suicide. 
It could be PTSD, as many sex workers deal with abuse and threats, are often physically assaulted and verbally assaulted, via social media or in person.  From adult film stars to those who work the streets, physical threats are a normal part of everyday life.  Social media has opened up another avenue for abuse and threats as now every sanctimonious twit feels it’s their duty to harass those they don’t happen to agree with morally.

Many of those who work in the sex industry suffer from depression.This would befall the industry into the realm of being plagued by mental health sufferers. Something that most people working in the industry don’t feel comfortable with admitting. No one wants to add another facet to a complicated workplace like the sex industry.No one wants to be further shunned by the only community they feel still accepts them.There are so many people looking to get into the industry, everyone feels replaceable, disposable. So very few come forward, so few open up and talk to others about the stresses of life. No one wants to be labeled as “crazy,” or “difficult to work with.” Sofew have access to the help they need, as club owners rarely offer benefit packages that includes healthcare. So, it goes unspoken, goes untreated.

This depression can often be situational, as cultural shunning and ostracization by family and friends leaves the person feeling more alone or dealing with shame, so when the sex industry turns its back on them it can be devastating.  We often see this in workers who reach ages above those that directors, producers and club owners are looking for. Being shunned/attacked by one’s peers when you already feel isolated and alone is overwhelming. And because it’s such a culturally shunned industry, many of those who exit the sex industry have a very hard time transitioning into other employment.

August Ames went supernova after finding herself in the middle of a social media public controversy.

In her four years performing in the adult film industry, the 23-year-old had performed in over 270 scenes for major studios, amassing over 600,000 Twitter followers. In 2015, Ames (real name Mercedes Grabowski)  was nominated for Best New Starlet at the Adult Video News awards – known as the Oscars of porn – and had been nominated for Female Performer of the year for the upcoming 2018 AVNs. According to the Ventura County Medical Examiner’s office, the Nova Scotia native was found in her California home. Ventura County authorities confirmed that Ames died from asphyxia due to hanging.
“She meant the world to me,”Ames’ husband, Evil Angel producer Kevin Moore, 43. Hundreds of colleagues and fans expressed their grief via Twitter and other social media, calling her “the most kind-hearted person ever” and “a beautiful light.”

It has caused for Ames’ friends to publicly accuse fellow porn stars of driving her to suicide, and many of us are still left scratching our heads a few months later.

A couple of days before her death, Ames tweeted the following:

“Whichever (lady) performer is replacing me tomorrow for @EroticaXNews, you’re shooting with a guy who has shot gay porn, just to let cha know. BS is all I can say… Do agents really not care about who they’re representing?... I do my homework for my body”

The apprehension Ames expressed in this tweet refers to what is known in the adult industry as “crossover performers,” i.e. cisgender males who perform on camera with both cis women and other cis men, or with trans women.(Trans men are mostly left out of the crossover classification, as are cis women who perform with other cis women). Some performers and agencies share the view expressed in Ames’ tweet, that crossover talent is “higher risk” for STIs than straight male talent. Others see this standard as homophobic, as well as a flawed rubric for measuring safety.

Ames quickly became a lightning rod for people in and outside of the industry to express their views on this ongoing controversy, with a variety of tactics.

The following day, Wicked Pictures contract star Jessica Drake tweeted: “performers, by all means, fuck who you want to fuck...but if you’re eliminating folks based on the fact they may have done gay or crossover work, your logic is seriously flawed.” Drake went on to point out that discriminating against someone based on their identity or history is not a more reliable form of protection than testing, barriers or PreP, but it does contribute to harmful stigmas.

As we see, the multi-faceted complexity of what makes up the sex industry causes for a myriad of difficult issues, which more often than not, are based on cultural stigmas that propel the industry itself.

According to the Free Speech Coalition – the national trade association for the adult entertainment industry – every company shooting “straight” content requires all models to update their STI tests through Performer Availability Screening Services (PASS) in order to be considered “available” for work. Performers in the straight genre (defined by heterosexual sex as well as, counterintuitively, girl-on-girl sex) must follow PASS protocol every 14 days. Some companies allow models to choose on a scene-by-scene basis whether they would like to also use condoms, while others, like Wicked Pictures, require condoms for every shoot in addition to testing. Some companies shooting male-on-male content do not require PASS testing, but they do require condoms.

After initial persecution against those taking Truvada to prevent HIV infection, there’s been a positive shift in attitude toward the drug.

“I have worked with crossover performers, gay performers, and trans performers,” Jessica Drake added. “If this puts me on your ‘no’ list, i didn’t want to do scenes with you to begin with.”

Drake, who has been in the industry since the late 1990s, has long been known for her support of the LGBTQ community. She is also one of the 19 women to accuse Donald Trump of sexual misconduct on the record. Drake pointed out later in a statement that she did not mention August by name, that she has expressed similar opinions on crossover discrimination before, and that she still holds those views.

At the other end of the civility spectrum, porn star Jaxton Wheeler, a cis man who identifies as pansexual, tweeted at Ames on December 5th: “The world is awaiting your apology or for you to swallow a cyanide pill. Either or we’ll take it.”

Ames doubled down on her opinion on safety as well as her right to work with and have sex with whomever she choses. Her final tweet on December 4th was “fuck y’all.” Her body was found on December 5th.

“I don’t believe that August was homophobic. I believe that she was made to fear due to a spread of misinformation,”  Michael Vegas told Rolling Stones magazine, a bisexual cis male star who performed on camera with Ames. Vegas says he has experienced “attacks” and been sent home last minute from straight shoots when agents or models find out he has previously performed in gay scenes. He suspects that some agents foster this “fear mongering” to redirect business to the male models they represent.

While “bullying drove her to suicide” makes for a tidy story, Ames’ mental health struggles did not come out of nowhere. Earlier this year, Ames was a guest on Holly Randall Unfiltered, a podcast by and about porn stars. Ames opened up to Randall about her history of depression and bipolar disorder, as well as the struggles she’d faced attempting to find a sex-work conscious therapist.

“As sex workers, we present a fantasy version of ourselves for public consumption,” says Tori Lux, a porn star and professional dominatrix. “We often don’t discuss our mental health issues, as doing so can potentially harm our livelihood by disrupting the element of fantasy we work so hard to cultivate.”

Cis-male performer Will Havoc, who is considered crossover because he shoots with both cis and trans women, says that he was offended by Ames’ statement and others like it. “There are so many untold off-camera encounters that many porn performers have with untested civilians, gay, straight or otherwise. So, there is a huge amount of hypocrisy involved when someone ‘won’t shoot with crossover performers,’ whether or not they realize it.”

So, what can we do to protect sex workers?  The complete answer isn’t going to be provided here, as no one has the answer yet, but there are things that everyone can do.

Be kind.  I know, right. Kindness; seems so simple, but so often forgotten.  Sex workers are people too.  People with family, friends and feelings.  They want the same things out of life that you do.  They want their health, their right to make a living, their freedom and their happiness.  They deserve to be treated like every other class of worker, with respect and general dignity.

Be a receptive ear. Anyone suffering from depression, sex workers included, can often feel better if they had someone to talk to.  Someone to reveal their pent-up worries and anxieties to free from judgment or scrutiny. Talking out a current problem or woe can do wonders for a stressed mind which has to compartmentalize their feelings in order to be able to accurately describe them to another.
Include sex workers in typical social settings.  Don’t shun the adult film actor, the dancer, the escort.  They need those social gatherings just as all humans do. The shunning is a cultural development, not a law of physics, so we can choose to no longer shun sex workers.

As always, I would love to know what you think.  Email me at Starla.friction@gmail.com.  Until next time, play safe, play nice.