When Audacia Ray’s directorial debut film The Bi Apple was released in 2007, it created a buzz in the porn industry. The film stars Simone Valentino as a sex researcher investigating the sex lives of a small group of adults at ‘The Fuck House’ in New York. We follow as Simone observes and participates in a variety of bisexual scenarios that, especially when combined in a feature film, are still underrepresented in commercial porn. Hailed as a milestone in the growing alt porn movement, The Bi Apple was honored at the Feminist Porn Awards with Best Bisexual Scene and earned nomination recognition at the GAYVN Awards. It received a celebrated reception at the Frameline LGBTQ+ San Francisco International Film Festival and even got a nod in O Magazine .
The Bi Apple
What are you most proud of about The Bi Apple ? Can you share any fond memories from the set or meaningful feedback from its reception?
There are a lot of things I’m proud of about The Bi Apple – shooting on location in a walk-up apartment in New York City in July (AC off for sound recording purposes), prioritizing budget to pay for STI testing for performers and also requiring condoms, the racial diversity of the film, a mostly amateur and local cast, and just plain ole figuring out how to work within the parameters of mainstream porn to make a feature film that was bisexual and queer and had a script with tongue-in-cheek jokes.
I became friends with a marketing pro at the production company through our blogs in maybe 2004, and when she asked me what kind of porn I’d make if I could, I immediately knew I’d direct a bi film. She helped me figure out how to pitch the movie to get it funded and produced. It’s interesting that you put it in the category of alt porn, which I 100% agree is the meaningful category of the time that it should be in – but the production company really resisted that label and did not sell it that way. They didn’t think a movie that was both bisexual and alt porn would be marketable, so officially it is just bi. I chose to work within their constraints – they didn’t want tattooed performers in the film because that would make it too “alt,” and they also did not employ trans performers at the time. The joke is on them though, because at least two of the performers have come out as trans since the film. Today, I would have said a flat out no to those restrictions. I will never forget that in one of my meetings with the marketing team, with a totally straight face one of them told me that they were a “traditional and conservative” company – so they couldn’t combine genres like bi, alt, and trans. Pick one.
One of the things that happened with The Bi Apple was that it sold really well – but the production company had been making bi movies kind of quietly. There was a big demand for bi content in their customer base; biphobia meant that they were happy to make that money but didn’t promote the films much. They were not that thrilled with the film being kind of high profile, I don’t think it was aligned with their conservative values.
Audacia Ray
New York Girls Like Boys Doing Boys Who Like To Do Girls
The Bi Apple follows Simone Valentino as a sex researcher investigating the complicated sex lives of a small group of sexually diverse people who meet in ‘The Fuck House’ in New York.
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If you were to remake the film today, or perhaps a sequel, what are some ways that it might differ from the original film?
For me personally, the identity bisexual is important to me in both my personal history and the history of the LGBTQIAA+ movements. In 2007 I uncritically accepted the working definition of bisexual as “attracted to both men and women,” which is not how I understand it now, as a nonbinary bisexual and queer person. Though in my early career I definitely railed against limiting monosexual categories, my language for gender and sexuality was still pretty binary. There were many genders and sexualities represented in the film, but the content is a more rigid and binary version of bisexuality than was my actual reality. I guess the production company got their “conservative and traditional” vibe. And I was eager to have the film released by a mainstream production company, because I thought it would be accessed more widely.
Without question, a Bi Apple reboot would be trans inclusive, and it would feature more body size and shape diversity, less formulaic performer combinations, and probably more explicit dialogue about consent and desires. The “bisexual” porn category the film is in is a marketing category that just meant ‘there’s a scene where cis men touch each other,’ because girl/girl sex in straight porn is not bisexual. The combinations of performers in scenes were formulaic: there was an unwritten rule that the scenes had to include boy/girl, girl/girl, boy/boy, and boy/boy/girl, and you could throw in an extra girl/girl or girl/boy scene (The Bi Apple has a girl/boy strap on scene and strap on sex in the boy/boy/girl scene as well) but not tip the scales toward too much gay male sex.
The Bi Apple Naked on the Internet . Both incredible debuts. What was that like?
I remember that year as being a series of decisive moments about being out as a sex worker and starting to erode the division I had created between sex work and other parts of my life. I also remember very distinctly feeling this ticking clock – I was 27 that year and I just felt like I had to do this book and movie before I was 30 and too old. Which now at 45 feels laughable. I am proud that now I am producing activist and creative projects that were unimaginable to me at 27, and that all these things are part of who I am. Recently in one of my communities there was some gossip about my “secret life” in porn and my response was basically – it’s not a secret, it’s just that it was 20 years ago, it’s not the most significant thing about me, and I’m not ashamed. These days if people compliment my name and ask where it came from, if I deadpan “it was my porn name,” they absolutely think I’m joking.
You hosted the Red Umbrella Diaries, a monthly sex worker storytelling series, for years and later became the Executive Producer of a documentary of the same name. Did your experience with The Bi Apple help prepare you for documentary filmmaking? And as a prolific editor, you worked on $PREAD Magazine and its ‘best of’ anthology, among many other projects. And now, you have become an accomplished fiction writer with several published short stories and other writing projects. What do you love most about literature, or storytelling in general?
I think my experiences producing ambitious projects on a very limited budget and wrangling queers and sex workers to do advocacy and culture making has prepared me for all kinds of things. I tried a lot of different storytelling and media forms for different projects, which was a real learning experience but also affirmed for me that writing and storytelling are the best vehicles for my particular brain output. For me, stories – whether they are fiction or memoir, realist or speculative – are sites of processing life and historical events through narrative. I joke that my main area of reading interest is sad stories by and about sad queers – and I really appreciate experiencing how writers and other artist metabolize trauma into art. In my twenties and thirties I was really dedicated to “visibility” and “awareness” for underrepresented queer and sex worker identities – and now that feels a bit contrite and embarrassing. I love that culturally we’re somewhere else now, and I love that there is enough work being produced that I can dislike or just know that a story is not for me, even when its representing some part of my lived experience.
What do you find fulfilling about your work right now and what keeps you motivated?
For the past seven years I’ve worked at the New York City Anti-Violence Project directing the policy and organizing program, and last fall I became the interim executive director of the org during a moment of rough transition. For almost a decade before that I was running a variety of sex worker organizing and storytelling projects, including Red Umbrella Project and $pread magazine. I have been diligently moving with and supporting my queer, survivor, and creative communities in these times of late capitalist and fascist turbulence and there’s really too much grief and uncertainty for it to be called fulfilling. That said, I do experience joy, wonder, and pleasure on a regular basis and I have come to believe that all three are vital for a sustainable life, especially as companions to the violence, rage, and discrimination I witness in my communities daily. I’m not known for my optimism, but I’m dedicated to looking squarely at what is and fighting for what could be. I remain motivated by the conviction that the struggle is what there is and there isn’t an option to disengage.
I blogged multiple times a day for more than a decade and was a prolific early adopter of social media platforms but these days I’m pretty quiet on the internet. I’m probably most active on GoodReads – I read more than 100 books a year – and I mostly lurk and doomscroll on Instagram. I’m very findable, just not much of an online content producer. My content production these days is my writing work on a novel and I’m developing my painting and drawing skills through nature journaling. Where once I was fast and constantly publishing, now I’m slow as hell and very grateful for the shift.
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