All Alice’s parents really wanted was for her to win the Olympics. Her parents had both competed in the games, but neither had medaled—and “like most parents,” Alice explains, “they hoped their children would succeed where they had failed.” When she was growing up, Alice was allowed to play only sports that were in the Olympics; they even sent her to a camp that specialized in them. 

She did eventually medal, but probably not the way her parents imagined. Alice—otherwise known as Mistress Alice, or Alice in Bondageland—won trophies for her work in porn.

Alice’s story is one of 60 in the newly updated anthology Coming out Like a Porn Star, the largest published collection of essays by porn professionals ever. Each essay is by a different performer, who details their own experiences with the difficult and unending process of deciding when and whether to disclose their profession to their family, friends, and acquaintances. Their stories were collected and edited by the queer porn performer Jiz Lee, who has been performing in adult videos since 2004 but didn’t start to come out to their family for six years. 

“The first edition was born almost organically of my asking industry peers if they were out to their family members about working in porn,” Lee says. But that edition was published in 2015—before the prevalence of “AI, deepfakes, facial recognition, parenting in a digital age, censorship on social media.” It also predated a massive shift in the industry: the popularity of subscription platforms like OnlyFans, and the global pandemic that would boost the need for self-earned income, Lee explains. The second edition (out October 8 from the Feminist Press) is intended “to catch the collection up to the present day,” Lee says. Today, “anyone with an iPhone can be a porn star, and most are new to dealing with the potentially life-changing ramifications due to the stigma of this work.”

This stigma infects almost every aspect of a porn star’s existence, and involves endless different phases of “coming out.” Cindy Gallop, the founder of MakeLoveNotPorn, writes that she cannot find a bank anywhere in the world that will allow her company to own a business bank account. PayPal won’t work with them, Amazon won’t either, and no mainstream credit card processors will. Even finding a platform to send their membership emails proved to be a nightmare; six or seven rejected the company before Gallop found one that was willing to work with her.

Other essayists write of similar practical—and sometimes devastating—personal challenges. One performer was fired from a job they had for over 18 years when their side hustle was discovered. Adopting children can be nigh impossible and extremely anxiety-inducing, as performers worry that social services might take their children away at any time. The intellect of porn stars is rarely respected, even if they literally have a doctorate and years of experience writing cultural critiques of the mainstream porn industry. Performers are often unable to create social media accounts under the names they use to perform. Even if they do make it onto social media platforms, those platforms often become new avenues for harassment. One performer, Siri Dahl, was “taunted in a viral TikTok that got over 10 million views in one week—and resulted in a relentless” stream of hate from other TikTok users. TikTok has suspended her from its platform at least seven times, and on Reddit, she has received “an infinite number of downvotes” after encouraging people to pay for porn rather than pirate it.

Most central to the theme of the book, all porn performers must wrestle with the difficult decision of whether, when, and how to tell people in their lives what they do for work—and, if they do decide to tell them, they must do the hard work of actually coming out. “Coming out about porn sometimes isn’t too different than coming out as queer and/or trans,” Lee writes in the book, explaining: “Parents can have strong reactions out of fear. They are concerned for our safety; they accuse us of drug use or assume that something must have happened when we were younger to make us this way…The hardest part of loving someone is the fear of losing them.”

In other words, coming out means risking everything. But many porn stars also “find that coming out is a kind of rebellion, an extension of the insurgent attitudes that many sex workers already hold towards conservative sexual norms, expectations, and regulations,” as Dr. Mireille Miller-Young writes in a foreword to the book.

Lee has had to come out many times over, not just to different people, but in many different ways: as a nonbinary person who uses they/them pronouns, as someone who has undergone top surgery, and as a porn star. 

When it comes to their work, Lee struggled with coming out to their family, especially their younger siblings. At the time of the first edition, Lee had “yet to find the courage to talk to my little brother and sister,” who were then in their late teens. But Lee knew that if they waited too long to tell their younger brother and sister, their siblings might learn the truth on their own. In fact, that’s exactly what happened: when Lee finally told their little sister, she had already found out about Lee’s day job. That’s part of the challenge of coming out, too—especially if your secret is on the internet: If you wait to tell your family and friends, you might be outed whether or not you want to be.

Lee recounts that their sister was sympathetic, respectful, and interested in learning more about how to support Lee, and that’s all Lee really wants. Asked to imagine how an ideal person might respond to a porn star’s coming out, Lee said they would love to hear someone say: “Oh for real?! That’s so cool that you work in porn.” And even better: “I just learned about an ‘age verification’ bill that seems like it’s actually about stopping porn rather than effectively preventing minors from accessing adult materials. The bill is up for a vote in our state and I’m asking everyone I know to ask their representative to vote against it. I’d hate for you to be out of a job.” 

Just don’t ask Lee how to reconcile porn and feminism. “The misconception that we are victims incapable of sexual agency mirrors the response that many receive when coming out as nonnormative gender expression and sexual orientations,” they write in the book. “I’m so over it!” Lee says now.

“When Coming Out Like a Porn Star was first released,” Lee explains, “my best hope for the book was that it would be obsolete in five years.” That hope was not realized. Instead, Lee says, “performers’ security and well-being remain precarious,” and “society slams its doors in our faces wherever we go, even if we’ve long left the industry or only ever dipped a toe.” Lee says that they know the new edition “won’t instantly put an end [to] sex worker stigma,” but hopes “the stories will give strength to other adult creators, and maybe open a few minds in the process,” adding: “Being a sexually liberated woman, or queer or trans, or any underrepresented person is a radical but also completely normal thing.”