Chloé Yelena Miller Accidental

THE ACCIDENTAL PORN PROFESSIONAL

Chloé Yelena Miller

It was an accident that my first job out of college involved gaypent a year and a half calling local gay magazines and asking which ad title ran, “Hot and Horny” or “Wet and Horny?”
        In college, I was a mostly do-gooder, the kind who only ate red meat if she didn't think anyone was watching. My senior year, I conducted my job search thinking of what John Cusack as Lloyd Webber said in the movie Say Anything: "I don't want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don't want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed. You know, as a career, I don't want to do that."
        But after graduation I would need work. I constructed my resume. I had babysat young boys taller than I was, answered phones during summer shutdown at an aerospace company, worked in our college cafeteria, volunteered in a dermatology ward in an Italian hospital, and done other odd jobs. I decided it was time to get some business experience.
        Good, solid business experience to round out my liberal arts education and a for-profit salary to start paying off those hefty college loans.
        The interview took place at an antique dining room table downstairs from the home office. The owner, smartly dressed in faded jeans and a designer button down shirt, said that my work would help keep the gay and lesbian publications alive through the advertisements we would place. My future boss said that everyone dressed casually, without shoes, so that the carpets stayed clean. I was never one to dress up in heels and makeup, so I thought it sounded comfortable, wholesome and even profitable. I left with a fancy title: Account Executive.
        Lloyd Webber would surely approve of helping the community, as the owner called it.
        I have an undergraduate degree in Italian language and literature from Smith College. My new boss loved the shininess of my credentials, but since I had no relevant skills, I was given the clients who place their ads in the back of the magazines. That's where the “Hot” ads were.
        I would assist with the larger clients by flipping through the magazines and tearing out the pages with our ads. Part of my job was to check that the ad ran correctly and that the magazines didn't have any surprise pictures or editorials. As a result, I was on a sort of “penis-control” for the more prestigious pharmaceutical companies. Those companies would only place their ads in magazines that could prove that they weren't porn magazines. The proof was in the lack of naked men.
        This was difficult in the case of one magazine that targeted African-American gay men. The publisher expressed how much he depended on the national, four color ads to support his magazine. My boss made him promise that he wouldn't run any pictures of naked men in the magazine when the pharmaceutical ads ran. (No one thought that the executives would notice the other issues and they were right.) Inevitably, this low budget magazine would not only run a picture of a naked man, but he would be the centerfold and the image would be oddly stretched to fit the page. The end result often resembled a fun house mirror instead of a sexy pin-up.
        Once my Dad realized what I was doing, he pointed out that this would hurt me if I ever ran for President. President? I was hoping to write poetry and better yet, publish.
        Meanwhile, I lived with my parents and tried to save money to return to Italy. I'd studied abroad and fallen in love with Florence. It was an expensive habit and my new job paid for a month-long trip that included a writing workshop in Tuscany. All along, I tried to write and edit as many poems as possible. I wasn't particularly challenged in the job and in fact, made only a little bit less than I make now as a full-time professor. It seemed like a lot then and it gave my brain some time to think about poetry.
        I didn't mind the work. I didn't mind consciously folding the recycling so that the naked men were hidden from the pedestrians on the street. I didn't mind hiding the details of my job from my then ninety-year-old great aunt. I particularly didn't mind the stories I could share at dinner parties or sneak into my poems.
        I finished work promptly at 5 pm and could return home with some time to not only do laundry and eat dinner, but also write and read poems. After a year and a half, I decided to leave the world of gay porn and work on a collection and study for the GREs in order to apply to MFA programs. My last day was in the fall and I kept my fingers crossed after I mailed the applications a few months later. But even if accepted, it would be many months before I could be a student again.
        Over the holidays, the reality of being unemployed hit me. My parents went on vacation to the Caribbean, my friends went out for expensive dinners and I did what I could afford: I visited my great aunt for tea. She told me to look for part-time work. She encouraged me by finding an ad in the local paper for a high school substitute teacher position. I applied, loosely calling the publications I had worked with “alternative.” Surprisingly, they hired me and we all agreed that I would only work through the end of the semester, since I was so convincing about going to graduate school in the fall.
        In March, I received slender envelopes kindly telling me I wasn't accepted. I was devastated and wanted to know why. One school told me that I “needed more life experience.” I promptly took a job working for New York University in Florence, Italy running their freshmen dorms. My Italian was shaky and I described my quest for life experience to a new friend. Apparently, my wording, “fare la vita,” which means exactly, “make life,” was a euphemism for prostituting myself. I blushed thinking about my first job; I didn't exactly want to be found out in this more conservative society that I'd just entered.
        I didn't give up on my hopes of attending graduate school. Before my GRE scores expired, I reapplied and was happily accepted by Sarah Lawrence College. Sure, they originally thought I was an international student since I was applying from Italy, but we eventually sorted that out and I spent the best two years of my life there.
        I was purposeful when I took my first job in gay porn, but the actual job description felt like an accident. It was one accident that led me in the right direction.

CHLOÉ YELENA MILLER has poems published or forthcoming in Alimentum Journal, Lumina, Privatephotoreview.com, South Mountain Poets Chapbook, Spiralbridge.org, and Sink Review. Her manuscript, Permission to Stay, was a finalist for the Philip Levine Prize in Poetry. She received an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and a BA from Smith College. You are welcome to visit her website: www.chloeyelenamiller.com .