In a narrow bathroom, perched upon a toilet bowl where, minutes earlier, a porn star had spread her legs and awkwardly tried to shave herself amidst the clutter, I gaze up at Shar Rednour with all the awe and ardor of girl doting on her glamorous mommy at the makeup mirror. Snug in a fluffy bathrobe and faux-fur flip-flops, Shar is winding lock after lock of thick, platinum hair around spiky curlers and fastening them to her scalp. Twin racks of hot curlers boil away on a TV tray that makes the tight space unbearably hot, but I stick it out for the privilege of watching Shar's transformation from sleepy bohemian to award-winning porn impresario. And make no mistake, it is a privilege. Today is the final day of filming for Sugar High Glitter City, a fantastical, sugar-laden porn video by the independent dyke production company, S.I.R., based out of San Francisco. A do-it-yourself outfit operated by Shar and her wife/collaborator Jackie Strano, S.I.R. has been in high demand since winning the coveted "Best All-Girl Feature" at the 2001 Adult Video News awards (which is the porn equivalent of the Oscars). This unexpected triumph has

shoved these wicked queer heroines of the sex-radical underground into the porno mainstream, and the pair has so far turned down on-set visits from, among others, Playboy magazine. The capturing of the "Best All-Girl Feature" award by a gang of real live lesbians shouldn't be so unusual, but it is. As even a casual purveyor of porn could surmise, the industry's "lezzies" come in the same Malibu Barbie packaging as their hetero sistas, despite the fact that real dykes look . . . dykier, than your average female. S.I.R.'s cast reflects this reality, offering up real butch dykes, all short hair and manly swagger. It's a stunning victory for the gender underground, and one that the porn industry, hungry for hot new blood, has swarmed in to take a look at.
Being a local lezzie myself, and friends with most of the cast and crew, I was granted access that the big boys were denied, but even my familiar presence is making Shar a bit uncomfortable. The first outsider allowed on the set, she worries that — supportive as I am — I may interrupt the big, big love that has exploded among this tight-knit, all-dyke crew. Shar is maternally protective of the warm and safe arena S.I.R. has created for lesbian sex, and she's understandably worried about the corrupting gaze of Playboy — or snooping, critical sisters — breaking the spell these women have cast over their project.
Outside the tiny bathroom sprawls the rest of the S.I.R. empire — a live/work warehouse with a decadent history that includes countless drag queens, bacchanalian sex parties, speed-freak artists and the disco legend, Sylvester. It's important

and depressing that Sugar High's final scenes will be filmed here, because the entire building of sex-freaky artistes has been evicted, scheduled for renovation into new media office space. The kitchen is doing double-duty as makeup trailer, with glitter in every form imaginable scattered across the Formica tabletop.
Jackie Strano, amped for the impending shoot, paces the room in blue vinyl pants, her short, purple hair in jagged spikes, her eyes encrusted with chunky silver glitter. "I'm Blue, and I'm shaking down these sugar 'hos," she crows, getting into character as a corrupt cop who routinely indulges in both the sugar and the sugar-smacked hookers she's supposed to be cleaning up. Inspired by their own addiction to sweets, Shar and Jackie created a gritty fairyland where candy is the illicit drug of choice — an aphrodisiac as powerful as heroin, aggressive as speed and psychedelic as LSD. At the kitchen table, actress Josephine X offers her lips to the makeup artist, who paints them in fuschia, then glosses them up with iridescent glitter. In Glitter City, everything that can be glittered is. Aerosol sparkles get gusted onto hairdos, sparkly fairy-dust gets brushed lightly onto eyelids and thick sparkle gel is smeared over entire torsos. Many glitter dildos are scattered around the warehouse and piled in prop boxes which also contain packets of Fun-Dip, rolls of Bubble Tape, bouquets of Blow Pops, vials of sour cherry sugar powder, candy bracelets, Tootsie Pops, Bubbalicious, sugared gum drops, family-sized bags of licorice and, my favorite, pristine sugar cubes sealed into tiny Ziploc drug baggies, looking like something illegal you'd buy on the street. A crew member

clutching bottles of lube stumbles around the debris, poking through piles of feather-trimmed costumes in search of an elusive pack of Pixie Sticks needed for the next scene, in which the reformed, born-again street-preaching Honeydew (Shar), catches a whiff of sugar coming off Officer Blue and his sugar 'ho Cherry Glaze (Josephine X). Honeydew has what those in Narcotics Anonymous would call a "slip." Cut to a wild candy threesome to be filmed atop a satin-covered massage table in a room down the hall.
From the bathroom, Shar hollers to Jackie to find someone to Windex her pants. Jackie is taking a call from a sound assistant bedridden with heavy menstrual cramps. "One of the cons of an all-dyke crew," she shrugs good-naturedly. The boom operator who replaces her is a new mom whose infant is delivered to the set twice a day for breast-feeding. It's time to shoot a brief street scene on the sidewalk outside. Shar and Josephine wiggle into teeny, flashy outfits — metallic silver for the hooker, and army camouflage for crusading Shar, who hands me a Xeroxed pamphlet titled "Say No to the Sugar Life." "You are sweet on the inside," the brochure assures. "Join me in fighting the evil ways of sugar." Shar, a Christian preacher in her teens and present-day hedonist, personally knows both the holy wars and the drug wars her film lampoons.
Shar and Jackie occupy every position imaginable for S.I.R. — writer, director, actor and all the non-glamorous production work, too. Coaching the younger Josie X, Shar stresses, "Remember, when you see me on the street, you love me." Everyone clatters out the door but me and the makeup artist, a high-femme dyke who offers me a bag of gummy bears. Apparently, craft services is nothing but candy. "We're all a bit sugar-high," she whispers.

I poke through another box of candy and strain my ears to catch a bit of the action happening outside. "Save her soul now . . ." floats up the stairwell, then muffled sex noises, like someone is getting fucked while her mouth is stuffed with sweets. The scene ends with an eruption of claps and cheers from the crew. "That's beautiful!" someone shouts as they pile back into the kitchen. Makeup swiftly goes to work scrubbing lipstick smudges from Jackie's face. "You got to remember to glitter your pussy," she calls over her shoulder to Josie X, who is peeling off her costume.
    "Am I going to have any clothes on at any time?" she asks. Apparantly not — the pornlette stretches her slender, tattooed body, naked but for a pair of space-age silver platform go-go boots, toward the ceiling. Jackie approaches with a can of aerosol glitter and starts spraying her down like a New York City subway wall. Faces stay glitter-free, as they can give a girl quite a rash while she's getting fucked with her ass in the air — a glitch they learned the hard way on a previous shoot. "You got a little downy hair right there," the makeup artist says as Josie bends and spreads her glittered butt, sparking a small debate about razor vs. tweezer. A razor prevails — a pink glitter one, of course.
     In the room down the hall, a photographer's studio on loan for the day, the satin-draped massage table is now dotted with leopard throw pillows and bathed in rosy light. The crew has been busy duct-taping lengths of fabric to the studio's cold, cinderblock walls, and Shar looks over the effort critically. "This looks like a dorm room, " she says, and hops onto the table while girls get busy rearranging the gauzy white and velvet-flocked satin on the walls. "You're going to lose all that lipstick on my pussy," Shar warns Josie X, who is getting into position at the foot of the table. Then, "This is really directing from the bottom, isn't it?" And the crew chuckles, some circling the table, trying to balance the light and shadow on Shar's body, one sliding a crinkly pink gel into a light, and another delivering a wet cloth to Josie, already sweating hard beneath the bright dishes of light. "Have we tied anyone up with bubble gum tape?" asks the prop girl. "I really like that."
     Jackie is strutting around the room with a marbleized blue cock hanging out of her vinyl pants. It really is remarkable how utterly unfazed, sweet and playful the whole gang is about sex. Both focused and lighthearted, the feel is less business and more of an intensely choreographed sex party, which perhaps it is. In addition to their exhausting occupations as porno producers, Shar and Jackie also run a cottage industry of queer sex how-to workshops, most prominently "Lesbian Non-Monogamy" — that relationship

utopia that many a young dyke chase but few actually succeed in tackling. Shar and Jackie's very public relationship acts as a sort of beacon in the queer girl scene, proof that radical, creative couplings can last, birth art, and be both non-monogamous and healthy. Any cynical doubts that such a polyamorous state doesn't exist is dispelled by a glance at the couple in action, maneuvering and choreographing their threesome scene with a bit of businesslike determination, a bit of playful imagination and no sign of the jealousy that might plague another couple.
     "Is this scene called 'Threeway?'" asked a girl with a clipboard. Shar tests the sound by murmuring "Cherry Glaze, oh Cherry Glaze" while Jackie makes up a little ditty that goes something like, "She's got a real nice pussy and my dick is insiiiide." It's not, but it will be soon. Shar looks like a princess, her blonde curls arranged on fluffy pillows. "Does Josie need a bobby pin?" she wonders aloud, watching the starlet's brown ringlets bounce down her cheeks. Jackie plays a little drumbeat on Josie's ass, sending up tufts of glitter with each slap.
     "Thanks for your patience," the cinematographer says. They're ready to shoot. Shar arranges the entire room full of people so that no one is idle during the scene — she doesn't want to look up mid-fuck and get thrown by some unwanted eye contact. One girl with nothing to do is given the job of sitting up against the door on the odd chance that someone tries to enter the studio. Shar's pussy is now perfectly lit, perched on a pillow like a fine jewel. The crew gazes at it in the monitor, and coo at how pretty it looks. "There's a beautiful sparkle in the ring," someone comments. A hand reaches down to swipe a speck of errant glitter away from Shar's puss, and the cameras roll. I'm sitting back on a sofa, trying not to be a disrupting presence, stretching my neck for a glimpse of the fucking girls who are now blocked by the crew. Little flutters of sound fly out from Shar's mouth, and a stream of dirty talk. "Don't fuck her so hard," Shar directs Jackie, whose dildo has finally found its way into Josie, whose face is dipped between Shar's legs. "She has to concentrate on licking."
     We're in between takes, and I'm crunching noisily on someone else's tortilla chips. "We have to wipe her lipstick off, because I want her to start licking me harder." I marvel at what Shar has created — a tiny world where, for a moment, she is the ultimate sex queen, guiding her lovers into a flattering arrangement around her.
     Josie's hair is blocking the camera's view of her face; a crewmember rushes in with bobby pins and fastens one side of it back in a very '80s fashion. "You're going to the roller rink with that hairdo," Shar teases, and tenderly wipes some lipstick from the girl's face. Then it's back to action. "You're so pretty, Cherry Glaze," Honeydew coos. Any skin I can peek at is shaking with vigorous pumps and thrusts. Breathing is getting shallower, Blue is getting pimpier, snapping out lines like, "fucking lick that pussy" at an obedient Cherry Glaze. A clatter of something sharp-sounding rains onto the floor; nobody reacts, so I assume it's candy. "Did you miss my sugar pussy?" Honeydew purrs,

and the mess of fuck sounds blur into a cacophony punctuated by the queen bee's orgasm. The energy that has made S.I.R.'s production leap off the screen and win them awards is here in this scene — real people who truly have the hots for each other getting it on before a tiny circle of camera-toting friends. The affection is real, the knowing eye contact and glowing cheeks are real, and growling orgasms are real, too — the mark of difference between porn actresses and those who are called to sex as their vocation, such as performance-porn icon Annie Sprinkle's public breathing orgasms, or the frantic bursts of climax that have mesmerized those who have watched crossover-industry-star Chloe getting off.
The actors all disengage, and blot the sweat from their bodies with paper towels. "We need to hydrate, I'm starting to shake," says Shar, and glasses of water are rushed out, complete with straws as to not mess up any lipstick. It occurs to me that acting in a porn film is akin to spending a day at a outdoor rock show in the height of summer: all adrenaline, glamour and dehydration.
As the crew clusters around the table to plan the next shoot, I slip out the door, not wanting my exit to be any more of a distraction than my presence. Just being on the set for two hours has me dappled in glitter that I brush off as I trot down the street, home. I bump into the trio later that night, rosy from sex and wine and the joy of another completed piece of lezzie porn. Apparently, right after I left was the scene where Shar got fisted out of her brains. She was still dazzled by it, and scolded me for missing the best part, as if I'd walked out on a performance or wild party before it's climax. That is what this movie-making business is for this gang of girls — an honest love of the raw glamour of sex, a carnal party with a natural political punch. By simply being themselves, having their every-day private sex before a spread of cameras, they've managed to shake up the rather stale adult video industry, as well as revitalize the tinier world of queer porn, which was their ultimate goal. After all, these parties are just for the ladies — though all voyeurs are invited in for a peek.