‘Outpatient Surgery’ Magazine Cuts Into Performer Gauge

LOS ANGELES—Salon.com published an article yesterday about the post-porn travails of adult performers like Gauge, a female performer who quit the biz in 2005 to pursue a career as a surgical tech, only to find her career trajectory all but blocked after being recognized in school by a fellow student. The story has now been picked up by Outpatient Surgery in a piece titled “The Porn Star Who Wanted to be a Surgical Tech.” Recounting Gauge’s ultimately frustrating experience as it appears in Salon, Outpatient Surgery’s interest in the story is to … um, gauge its readership’s reaction to Gauge’s predicament, specifically asking, “How would you handle such a situation at your facility? Could you hire a qualified and competent person to work in your ORs who had a checkered past?” Needless to say, framing the question that way only works to emphasize the point of the Salon piece, which is that the inherent stigma that so many people—even fans—place on adult performers makes any efforts they engage in to create a life beyond porn fraught with peril. Gauge’s post-porn trajectory “is far from unusual,” wrote EJ Dickson for Salon. “The adult industry has, for lack of a better term, a particularly high recidivism rate, especially for performers who have achieved a certain level of name recognition. Whether they, like Gauge, continue to perform on the feature-dancing circuit, or are as financially shrewd as Jenna Jameson, who used her performance earnings to start her own multimillion-dollar production company, performers can stay in the industry for years, regardless of whether they’re still in front of the camera.” Jenna, of course, may also be attempting her own comeback, having just appeared on MyFreeCams.com. The “recidivism” mention was also referenced in the piece by Michael Fattorosi, an attorney who specializes in labor issues and represents several clients in the industry and is married to a former performer. When asked about protections afforded former porn stars, he replied bluntly, “I have a comment I like to make to people: Porn is like prison: Everybody likes [the idea of] prisons, but no one wants to live, or work, next door to one.” Now 33, Gauge has decided to return to performing in order to support her family, and has already notched a few scenes under her belt. The lessons she learned during the years she tried to forge another path seem to have left her more philosophical than angry, but also perplexed about the accepted double-standard in our society that penalizes someone like her while tacitly supporting a fellow student who obviously consumed porn—or he would have never recognized her—but still felt enabled enough to out her to fellow students. In no time at all everyone knew about her past, leading to a situation in which “no one at the hospital would sign off on her required hours.” The harassment that she endured at that school and subsequently at schools for criminal justice and makeup artistry only reinforced a pernicious sickness in the American soul. “As a whole our society is desensitized to sex,” she told Salon. “You can watch the MTV awards with Miley Cyrus and any Katy Perry video with that pillow between her legs and humping it … I don’t know why it’s such a big deal when you tell people you did porn. It’s really confusing to me.” For many people, however, it remains a big deal, and one they have no problem expressing in the starkest terms. As one commenter to the Salon piece so thoughtfully put it, “It doesn't surprise me that a former porn actor would, in pure narcissistic, sociopathic form, think they should be able to leave their porn life behind (Keeping the money, of course) and invade someone else's business with no conscience about what trouble they might cause. “It's all about them. “In each case sited in this worthless article, the porn people are portrayed as victims, taking ZERO responsibility for reaping what they have sown. “I say, if they want sympathy, they should look in the dictionary.”