How San Francisco underground dyke porn ate Hollywood [] THE MURMUR OF gossip and opinion in my living room just barely drowns out the gurgles, moans, and cries of "yeah ... fuck me!!!!" that stream from the collagen-plump lips of porn stars cavorting on my TV screen. I don't normally entertain guests with videos rented from Tenderloin smut shops, but then, my guests normally aren't award-winning pornographers like Shar Rednour and Jackie Strano. Through their two-person video production team, S.I.R. (Sex, Indulgence, and Rock 'n' roll), respected Bay Area sex educators Rednour and Strano have created fierce, realistic, playful, and downright glamorous sex-education and erotica videos for the past several years. A classic is Bend Over Boyfriend, featuring Dr. Carol Queen a postmodern Dr. Ruth teaching women how to penetrate their male partners safely and sensitively. Strano, with her all-dyke rock band the Hail Marys, is also a much loved performer in the queer community. Known more for their pro-feminist, pro-sex politics than for pornography, Rednour and Strano are possibly the first members of San Francisco's dyke underground to bring real lesbian sex into the porn mainstream. Last year S.I.R. released the most luscious bit of dyke pornography ever to wet a girl's panties: the double feature Hard Love/How to Fuck in High Heels. And out of the 11,000-plus adult videos released each year videos produced in enormous, wealthy complexes in the San Fernando Valley, with budgets to rival 20th Century Fox's Hard Love/High Heels was selected by the respected Adult Video News (porn's version of Variety) as a nominee in the categories Best All-Girl Feature and Best All-Girl Scene. Rednour and Strano would be honored guests at the porn industry's gala event, the AVN Awards, held annually in where else? Las Vegas. In the days leading up to the awards ceremony, we still couldn't believe what was happening. Dykes account for less than 1 percent of the more than 700 million porn movies rented in the past year, and the percentage of dykes actually making porn is doubtless smaller. We huddled around my VCR, trying to figure it out. The blue movies flickering across my TV screen were some of the films the pair was up against, and watching them fueled my amazement: how did a couple of freaky, sex-radical dykes capture the respect of an industry whose business is manufacturing exaggerated clichés of female sexuality? Real dykes
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