Confessions of a Pornographer!

It's time for another article with "porn" in the title that can join "Interview with a Former Porn Star" and "Weird Searches from PornMD's Live Feed" as one of the site's 10 most-read stories every day forevermore! In this interview feature, the SA Goons ASK director/producer Kevin Moore about his 15 years in the adult-film industry, and he TELLS them pretty much everything they want to know!

Kevin Moore with his girlfriend (stage name August Ames) at the Adult Video News Awards.

Kevin Moore registered for the SA Forums back in December 2000, choosing the name "darkpriest."

"I hit my 15 year mark in the industry this year and been some of my most successful years lately. It has been a strange journey that I still enjoy greatly.

What exactly do I do?
I am a producer/director, distributed by Evil Angel. I also perform on camera, though this year I've scaled that back. Last year I performed a great deal.

Prior to becoming a producer at Evil Angel, I was a freelance camera operator/photographer for nearly every major company in the Adult Industry.

What is your background?
I am 40 years old and did not make the plunge full time into doing this until 2000.

How exactly did you get into this?
I can partially thank Mitt Romney. I used to work an adult shop when I was 18 and always had an interest in porn and sex. That began my first insight into the industry from a video stores perspective. I learned a little bit about the business, however it wasn't until the mid '90s that I began really pursing it. I was very lucky to be at a major college (UMASS) right when the Internet was really starting to blossom. I jumped head first into it and when a company called iBill began allowing third party processing for credit card payments, I tried to start an amateur adult site around my girlfriend at the time. I did this out of my dorm room.

I eventually moved into a full time career at UMASS working as a junior SysAdmin, but on the side still ran my amateur sites. I also began attending CES and would slip away to the adult section and try to make inroads to people there from all the various companies that produce adult movies. I also began shooting female adult performers while they were on tour at strip clubs in the New England area. I would shoot photos of them at the club for various little magazines like Club or Xcitement or whomever would buy them.

Mitt Romney became the Governor of Massachusetts and he gutted funding to public education. Since UMASS was a state school, it had major budget cuts. In order to save people from layoffs, the union worked out a deal where employees could take a voluntary layoff. I knew that my life was at a crossroads. I could stay at Umass and weather the storm or I could take a huge risk and take the voluntary layoff. I chose the layoff and moved to LA to pursue working in the adult industry full time.

My initial time in LA was at first very rough. Luckily I had made some good contacts by this point, but it is an expensive city to live in. I had gotten a gig at the trade publication for the adult industry (AVN) doing photos of events, tradeshows and performers on tour. I had a chance meeting with Joey Silvera, who is somewhat an icon in the industry. He was a long time performer in the 70's and 80's. He was now a producer/director at Evil Angel. Joey and I kind of hit it off. His assistant at the time quit and he needed another assistant. He asked me if I wanted to do it and I started working for him. That really began the day-to-day shooting and working in the trenches. I learned so much from Joey and I spent many years working for him.

From Joey I met John Leslie and Rocco Siffredi and John Stagliano and began working at times for all of them. Eventually, after many years of working under them, I began to branch out on my own. I started shooting stills and movies for a wide variety of companies and the rest as they say is history. Eventually I was offered by John Stagliano the chance to direct at Evil Angel.

Why do you do this?
That is a complicated question and if I were to get insightful I am sure it has to do somewhat with my upbringing and also my outlook. I was raised in a very serious Irish catholic household. For a long time I couldn't come to terms with the way I was raised versus how I felt. It caused me incredible internal conflict and as Alec Baldwin once put it, being irish catholic is guilt upon crushing guilt.

What I know now is that I feel very strongly that adults should be allowed to express themselves sexually with other consenting adults. Repression is a terrible thing. Porn to me is escapism entertainment. It is like people watching "professional" wrestling. Everyone knows it's fake, yet people still love it Just like horror movies and other forms of entertainment, porn allows people to escape the stress of their life and for 15 minutes live out some sexual fantasy they probably will never experience. Sex isn't always rainbows and butterflies. Sometimes we use it to explore our own turmoil and conflict. I fully understand that it is not for everyone and not everyone views it the same way that I do."

Questions from the SA Goons start on the next page!