I’m in German! Article in L-Mag

I’m featured in the July – August 2010 issue of German Magazine L-Mag! Thank you Sarah. 🙂

Now to find a cute German-speaking friend to translate…

4 Comments

  • Sarah

    It was a pleasure to talk to you / it was a pain to translate your to-the-point statements into a language that is much more prudish than English. So much got lost in translation. hope to see you in Berlin!

  • Katharina

    As at least 1 out of 3 apply, here’s the translation (as carefully requested above), which hopefully comes close enough:

    “Mission possible – main subject sex

    Hardly anybody on the internet informs about sex and its industry as witty as her – Jiz Lee is the undisputed star of queer porn-heaven

    She got famous by her appearance in movies by Pink and White film productions, now nobody in mainstream adult entertainment gets around the Hawaian-born any longer: In January Jiz Lee got nominated for the most important American porn award. L-MAG author Sarah Schaschek met the star of queer porn in San Francisco.

    Anybody who invites Jiz Lee for coffee has probably seen her naked before: her flat tummy, her small pierced right breast. The hands deep in the vulva of a co-actor. Or better yet: around the shaft of a silky-smooth and shining strap-on dildo. Jiz Lee is a porn star.

    To meet her in person is more than fascinating. Everything about the slender woman in jeans and a man’s jacket seems familiar – from the high cheekbones to the mohawk. Her hands with the short fingernails play with a cappucino cup while she is explaining that “sex in front of the camera is like dancing”.

    And the award goes to…
    It is a rainy January evening in San Francisco. The 29-year old – web-designer in her “regular life” – comes directly from the biggest American porn awards ceremony, the Adult Video News Awards Ceremony 2010 in Las Vegas. As the first queer actress ever, she was nominated in the category best new web site. She did not win, just like the movie “Champion”, in which Lee plays the lover of a martial artist. But for her this huge heterosexual event is not about winning anyhow: “It is rad that a marginal group like us even gets that much attention”, she says.

    Strap-on against lesbian sex in hetero movies
    Last but not least queer porn owes its good reputation to Jiz Lee. With her spectacular orgasm in the movie “Crash Pad”, directed by Shine Louise Houston, she hit the sex industry like a real bombshell. Syd Blakovitch, her partner at that time, convinced her to do a scene that was about to completely redefine the term pornography. With strap-on dildos and dykes the genre has ever since held its ground against heteroflicks in which “all beds are still purple“, as Lee phrases it.
    At first this was exactly the reason why she hardly got any bookings. “Crash Pad” was followed by “Superfreak” – a whole year lies between the two movies. It is only since 2009 that Jiz Lee gets enough offers to theoretically live on this job.

    Geek/overachiever with a slutty image
    Her breakthrough came with her website jizlee.com – a mixture of erotic photography, intelligent porn analysis and her personal sex diary. Contrary to most of the other porn websites, her blog is intelligent, witty, political and offers insights into her current and past life. As a teenager she was for example not allowed to bring boys to her house, was competitive and – besides her sexual escapades – had a rather unusual hobby: she played the horn.

    “Geek with a slutty image” she says and laughs. While she was studying dance and theatre during the day at Mills College – the first women’s college at the American West Coast – she switched subjects at night: “Fisting, Ejaculating and so forth”. Somewhere in this process, pornography added itself almost naturally – with her lovers as co-actors. “To know that others are filming or watching draws us even closer”, she says. Before Lee took a job in online business, she toured the US as an interpretive dancer.
    In San Francisco she is still volunteering as the leader of a dance organisation. In between she stands in front of the camera and has learned early on that not everybody understands her approach to loving. She sleeps with men, prefers women and does not think a whole lot of monogamous relationships.

    Sex as political liberation
    Sounds reasonable. And how does her family react to all this? Lee hesitates for the first time. She does not like to talk about this. “My dad needed five years in order to accept that I was a lesbian. I wanted to spare him the porn”. But one can tell that she does not like to hide. When she was nominated for the feminist porn award in Toronto, she would have loved to call home. “I was so proud, but I could not tell anybody back home”.

    Some colleagues know about her involvement in the erotic sector. So do all of her friends. “For me, sex is some sort of political liberation”, she says. “Female lust is still censored way too often”.
    This is exactly where queer porn gets its grip, it neither denies menstruation nor female ejaculation and refrains from declaring orgasm as its highest purpose. Actresses are not paid for the most visible orgasm. “You cannot rehearse an orgasm anyway”, says Lee pragmatically.

    She has starred in 19 movies by now. The more movies she does, the less porn she watches, she says. “Somehow that’s just not my kind of thing.” How come? Something sounds wrong somehow. Might there be another, totally different Jiz Lee? A person that retreats into privacy the further, the more movies she does? As if she had heard this unspoken question she smirkingly explains: “My fantasies are too dangerous for porn”.

    She does not say anything else, but that’s not necessary anyway. Her look is so intense that your pen drops out of your hand.”

    [Even though the translation is fairly literal, the statements might sound different after being translated back and some passage might sound a bit stiff. The real article is smooth though, and flattering, I agree.] Best regards from Berlin!

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