When one thinks of the golden age of porn, New York City, not Los Angeles, is the city mostly associated with the birth of the modern adult entertainment industry. Nowadays the city barely measures a blip on the porn radar. One group of dedicated Brooklyn-based artists are hoping to bring some of the porn heyday back to the city by presenting the first annual New York City Porn Film Festival.
Taking place in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn from February 27 to March 1, the New York City Porn Film Festival is the brainchild of Simon Leahy (pictured above). Along with a group of young artistic entrepreneurs, Leahy has been working hard to make the vision of porn returning to the city become a reality. If all goes as planned the festival could be the beginning of a porn rebirth in New York, which has seen a sharp decline in the number of business related to adult entertainment since the mid 1990s. With the more liberal Mayor Bill de Blasio now occupying city hall, the timing for such a festival couldn’t be better, according to Leahy.
“I feel in New York now it’s cool to have this festival especially after [Rudy] Giuliani and the super conservative cleansing of 42nd Street, shutting down all the porn theaters and the bathhouses when the AIDs crisis hit,” said Leahy. “I think it’s changing attitudes culturally and socially. Hanging around this young hip area, I feel like the idea of sexuality is changing a lot too, and people are more liberated and not ashamed to experiment. I feel like it doesn’t come with that baggage.”
At the time of this interview Leahy and his associates were in the process of getting sponsorship for the festival. According to Leahy, they’ve contacted some of the larger adult studios and hope to have “all different voices” represented, sponsorship wise. It’s also been a learning experience but “definitely an interesting one” for the group of artists, none of whom have any ties to the adult industry. “We want this to be as big as possible and create something like Cannes ... but in New York City.”
The organizers say they are close to obtaining sponsorship but admit that it would take someone daring enough to sponsor the festival because it’s still in its experimental stage, reaching a crowd of trendy 21- to 35-year-olds in New York City. “We have gotten responses from some of the bigger studios such as, ‘We’re not sure, we’ll see after the first year,’” according to Leahy. “Also, what we’re doing is quite new and quite edgy because it’s like an art space ... people may think, ‘Oh, it’s a bunch of artists trying to do a porn festival.’ But we do want to embrace the industry and bring porn back to New York City. Maybe we can make a campaign to let New York film porn again. We’d love to spearhead something like that.”
Despite the festival’s artistic environment and vibe surrounding it, Leahy wants all to know this is not an art or feminist porn film festival. “I feel that these festivals are great but they don’t include mainstream porn, which I feel is what people consume, therefore we want to give them an equal platform to show their work,” Leahy said.
Screenings of XXX adult content will be the centerpiece of the festival as well as screenings of DIY amateur films. “We’re open to including anyone,” Leahy explained. “We have a section on porn in China, Japanese anime (yaoi); we have a BDSM section. It’s going to be a good mix, but at the moment we have a lot of niche stuff. We have sci-fi porn; we also have a horror porn section. … It’s equally important to show these independent filmmakers and the artists with the more mainstream stuff. As the first festival comes around we want it to be as experimental as possible and then see how things fit.
“We’re definitely going to show weird and queer independent feminist art porn,” Leahy continued. “It’s also equally important to have the bigger studios on board and promote them too because that’s the porn that people watch. We want to totally mix everything together. For the first year we’re having very loose categories, and the scheduling is forming at the moment. We have for example a feminist schedule. We also want to slip in a little triple anal stuff in there. [Laughs] We want to push people out of their normal boundaries. I think it’s good to throw stuff in there where people go, ‘Whoa! I didn’t pay to see this but I’m glad I came.’ [Laughs] So it’s very experimental but our goal is to take it into bigger arenas.”
With some setbacks, such as a few Christian groups vowing to pray for the organizers’ souls and a recent headline in the New York Daily News suggesting a porn film festival is the last thing New York City needs, Leahy still plans to develop this concept and make it totally accessible to the public and hope independent filmmakers and established studios will embrace this idea. “We want to give credit to the adult industry for making something that is culturally and socially an art form,” he said. “The porn industry, I feel, everyone pretty much partakes in whether they want to admit it or not. And it’s one of the biggest industries in the world that isn’t really discussed or applauded and that’s what we want to do. We want to celebrate porn and normalize it and make it OK to be accepted into society and being liberal about it.”
Ultimately, the goal of the festival is for the public to have a better understanding and a better attitude toward the adult industry. To not just be bigger consumers of porn but also feel freer and more liberated and feel OK about doing stuff with their bodies. As Leahy puts it, “We’re definitely interested in elevating porn and the porn industry to that of art and give it credit where credit is due.”
For more information, visit NYCPornFilmFestival.com or follow on Twitter (@nycpornfilmfest) and Facebook. Photo of Leahy (above) by Christina Ascani.
