Porn Star Interview: Jiz Lee
In an exclusive interview with Naked Truth, multifaceted performer and San Francisco treasure Jiz Lee tells us about porn as a lifestyle and where savvy viewers can watch Jiz getting butterflies. Jiz Lee, 32, is the very rare queer-identified performer who is familiar to the larger world of straight porn fans. In this way Lee is like Lorelei Lee (no relation), who was involved in San Francisco’s fetish porn scene before getting work in L.A.’s mainstream adult industry.
Both Lees maintain strong ties to San Francisco, where people just seem to fuck each other all the time. I’m happy to do porn with my friends, Jiz says. We have sex, and then we’re friends again. Jiz Lee is gently adamant about using gender non-specific pronouns to identify their self. I’ve never identified as a lesbian or even as a girl, they say. I’ve always had sex with people of different genders. I know the pronoun thing is an adjustment, but I don’t fit the script of the hetero mainstream scene. As non-traditional as this seems, Lee often reminds us of pioneering art-porn personalities like Jamie Gillis and Annie Sprinkle who, like Lee, come from a more theatrical tradition.
Lee graduated college with a dance degree and performed in the art duo Twincest for several years with Syd Blakovich. I was comfortable being naked in front of an audience, they say. Later, I found that I could make more in one porn scene than I could in a whole season worth of dance performances. Lee first came to prominence in Shine Louise Houston’s compelling and iconic Crash Pad series, about a San Francisco sex house constantly under voyeuristic surveillance. Since then Lee has bounced from the Bay Area to Porn Valley, filming for Evil Angel, Girlfriends Films, and Digital Playground as well as dozens of scenes for Pink & White Productions, Anna Devia, and Courtney Trouble.
Jiz Lee’s awareness of an audience creates performances that are alive and conscious. There’s people I had a crush on but had never kissed until I did a scene with them, Lee says. I fall in love on set. I just want to be physically glued to them for the next few hours. Citing psychologist Dorothy Tennov’s term limerence the state of romantic attraction and the feelings of nesting it entails Lee seeks a shorthand for chemistry on set. On a porn set we try to speed up the process of courtship, Lee says. And that’s where Jiz Lee’s buttocks come in. My biggest fear is walking onto a set and seeing someone who wants nothing at all to do with me, Lee says (fingers crossed, this has yet to happen). But when I’m attracted to someone, I can feel it in the outer flanks of my buttocks. There’s all this raised skin.
People say they can see it. That’s where I feel the butterflies. Lee’s most recent and likely to be most controversial work is in the Dana Vespoli movie Boy/Girl, in which Lee co-stars with Manuel Ferrara. Manuel is so alpha-male in this, it’s almost funny, Lee says. Meanwhile I’m all decked out in a nice suit. I could do the straightest shoot ever and it will still look the queerest.
