The porn supremacy

The women’s sex shop Early to Bed has everything today’s lesbian could possibly want. There are brightly colored dildos and vibrators artfully positioned around the store, one wall features a formidable collection of harnesses that, in sheer number, could rival Dick Cheney’s rifle collection, and, of course, there’s a library of porn.

But if you look closer, you’ll notice these videos feature the kind of big-breasted Barbie-doll women who get straight men off. Early to Bed doesn’t carry much dyke porn because the category doesn’t exist.

“In terms of dyke [videos] made for dykes or queer-made videos, I’d say there’s probably not even a dozen out there on the market,” says Carolyn Caizzi, an Early to Bed employee and emerging filmmaker who hopes to rectify the problem with the just-released erotic DVD Coming Home, which features four scenarios of lesbians engaging in pure, unadulterated sex.

“Basically, I went to [store owner] Searah [Deysach] last year and said, ‘I want to make a porn video and I want Early to Bed to produce it,’?” Caizzi says. “She produced it, she funded it and she made decisions with me.”

Caizzi is an East Coast native who came to Chicago to earn an M.F.A. in visual arts at the University of Illinois. Her interest in filmmaking began as an undergrad at Brown, where she first picked up the camera and began experimenting with issues of women’s sexuality.

“All of my work has been dealing with gender and sexuality. This is not the first, what I would call erotic film, that I’ve made. I have one other out that’s distributed by a company called Fatale Media. They distribute lesbian-made films. Basically it was an amateur contest, and if you won they’d distribute it and give you money for it. So I submitted the movie and won.”

That doesn’t mean that making girl-on-girl porn has been hassle-free. Whereas gay-male porn has more titles than a guy can shoot his load to, making and marketing films for gay women is another story.

“It’s a niche market,” Caizzi says, “but I think they’re hard to make, too…It’s not like mainstream porn, where you have a budget to work with and you know you’re going to make tons of money.”

However, Caizzi argues against the notion that dyke porn doesn’t exist because women aren’t as visual as men. “I’ve spoken to hundreds of women and I think the stereotype is that women don’t want to watch porn, and I don’t find that to be the case at all.”

For Caizzi, who cast, shot and edited the entire project locally, creating a video that would arouse women meant finding the right chemistry between her performers. To do that, she cast a variety of real Chicago couples and play partners ranging from a middle-aged duo in the midst of marital bliss to a couple of horny twentysomethings engaging in a Peter Pan and Tinkerbell fantasy.

“I don’t want to ever put two people together who haven’t had sex before. I want to work with people who have chemistry. I can’t speak for all women, but I would say that chemistry is an important thing in porn.”

Otherwise, Caizzi insists that Coming Home doesn’t stray far from the standard porn format. “This is pretty much a sex video. There’s not much plot and things like that. Some people think that women-made porn necessarily implies that there’s more plot, that women like story lines and things like that. I don’t think that’s necessarily the case.”

Caizzi and Deysach will celebrate the release of Coming Home at a launch party at Jackhammer on Wednesday 29, when you can buy copies of the video, chat with the cast and crew, and see the film. Caizzi views all of this as another step in a filmmaking career that will alternate between erotic and nonerotic material.

“I’m sort of split because I do have this side that wants to make more narrative-based work, and I have this side that wants to make pornography for lesbians. I want [lesbians] to be able to have videos to choose from.”

Coming Home gets the crowd off Wednesday 29.