Clowns are neat-o, clowns are fun
Clowns are loved by everyone
--The Vandals
Okay, I know it was an unusual place to wonder about pornography, but there I was at the circus, pondering pornography. Perhaps this speaks volumes--I was also disappointed that the shooting range was closed on holidays: nothing makes me think about shooting guns like Thanksgiving with the folks. Anyways, there I was in this family establishment with these thoughts. Now, it wasn't about the contortionist, nor the acrobatic women in their skimpy outfits.
No, indeed, I was thinking about clown porn.
It seems that this wonderful Internet thing has, if nothing else, served to unify the world's pornography in one convenient location. It seems like one can't even search on something relatively benign like, say, kumquats, without finding some young hussy brazenly sticking them up her nether regions. The great benefit is that you can quickly find sites devoted to fetishes you didn't even know existed.
The reasons for this are twofold. Firstly, there are a lot of quick-buck porn hustlers who will string together a few images of women in overalls and call it the "Bronco Bustin' Fillies" site or some damned thing in order to get suckers into their primary site1.
Now, the other folks are just plain fetishists who are trying to share their personal collection. Over the years there's been every kind of niche market targeted by these same folks who are operating the aforementioned web sites now. These fetishists lovingly scan their (often poor quality) images up onto the web for other freak...er, fetishists to enjoy.
So, it occurred to me that:
Such blindingly fast logic comes only when one is under the influence of King Dogs and cotton candy. Perhaps this dark streak was fueled by seeing sneaker rockster Chino Morino of the Deftones with a gaggle of kids hanging off him (his own, it would seem). Anywho, so there I was, thinking about clown porn3.
My reverie was broken: "Whatcha thinking about?" my girlfriend asked. "Nothing," I replied absently. She, of course, would take it the wrong way. She'd told me about seeing a S&M-esque girl clown on Talk Soup about a week before we went to see this--perhaps this was fuel for the fire.
When I got home, not even my Michu (the world's biggest little midget) poster could not distract me from my quest to find clown porn. Now, I pride myself on being something of an Altavista hacker. If it's indexed there, chances are pretty good that I can dig it out from the mountain of crap that's stored there. So, first I tried the easy route, phrases like "naked clown" and "clown porn".
Curses! Those damned porn-49ers (as I like to think of the opportunists akin as they are to our own state's gold-rushers) had anticipated my move. Though, to be fair, they had also thought that I might be searching for porno and had inadvertently typed "state of the union address". A common typo to be sure--a good thing they were providing this sort of community service. The pages the search returned had, of course, nothing to do with clowns at all, and were simply repositories of words used to trick innocent people doing legitimate research, such as myself, to viewing their lurid pages.
I parried their attack, using some of their selfsame terms against them:
+clown +naked +porn +nude -teen -celeb* -free -young -asian
I was slicing and dicing through the layers of the onion as fast as I could think of new terms to throw into the soup. I kept coming up dry. A few dirty stories involving casual contact with a clown, a few sucker pages put up by the 49ers, but little else. I was about to give up hope when I came across my first hit. This was a dirty clown all right, but barring a few risqué illustrations of ms. dirty clown and a few pictures of her "out of uniform".
I was on the right track however, I kept at it for a goodly while with little more result. The best I could get was a guy-clown receiving oral sex from some bimbo with really bad implants. He wasn't even a very good clown, actually. He had sort of lecherous clown make up on his face and a really cheap looking costume. I mean, really, John Wayne Gacey had a better setup than this guy, and that's not saying much.
Since then, the occasional fringe concept has panned out: midget porn, gothic porn, even a bit of punk porn. However, this clown market seems untapped. All you enterprising pornsters take note! Not, of course, that I'd be interested in seeing the results. Amateur Hula dancers on the other hand...
In one of those odd discussions that you later can't quite recall how started, my co-worker DeeAnn and I were talking about the lack of good, high-quality clown porn on the internet. She and another co-worker of mine, the Archbishop Dave Smith then went on a similar pilgrimage to the internet that I had. This time, apparently, they'd found this particular treatise on HotBot.
Time passed. From out of the blue I get this email from this guy Jeff who sounds like he may all but be me, living a couple of miles from here who knows many of the same folks, talking about the infamous
| This is what I'd found on a recent fishing trip, censorship theirs: |
| Johnny Toxic - CLOWN FUCKERS $36.95 Description: This is an XXX clown rated sex documentary about Johnny Toxic's cousin, Putzo The Clown. This is the "true" story of his disgusting, nasty perverted life as a homeless hollywood clown walking the streets and f**king slutty street trash ho's wherever and whenever he can! Stuffing them with putzo choad and frosting them with funny goo! Join Putzo and his pals as they honk, bonk and toot the nastiest clown c*nts in Hollywood. |
Charlie Bill: upstanding member of the community, volunteer, clown porn guy. What sort of reputation was that fool Smith creating for me, anyways? This whole thing once again galvanized me to search anew, a year having gone by since my first search. Sure enough, I found another example of professional pornsters trying come up with a half-imaginative idea (the first sign something is wrong--we're not into pornos for the plot, man!) and corrupting the poor clown imagery.
Dammit, this was not what I was looking for. Okay, I know that average, everyday, people are into all sorts of freaky ass shit in their personal lives: I've got HBO and have maybe flipped by Real Sex from time to time--momentarily of course. People don't have to get paid to lather themselves up with chocolate syrup or perform foreplay with torches, and role-playing has been around since before time recalls?
I did manage to find one kindred spirit out there with almost an identical story to tell, though his hunting expeditions had about the same results as mine. Through his page, however, I did manage to find the singular site that came closest to what I had envisioned (note that this link will take you to a site with content unsuitable for minors).
I ran into the Archbishop at a No Kill I show recently. He'd left for the Bay Area a couple of months back so I hadn't seen him in a while. He came up to me and said "heyyyyyy, I've got something for you."
"I heard," I replied. "Some guy I hadn't even heard of before emailed me and asked if I was the clown porn guy, said he had a tape amongst your stuff".
"Welcome to my world," he laughed. "I keep trying to tell them, 'no, I think it's funny.'"
So there I was at the Fox and Goose celebrating another year passing by getting drunk off my ass and making a fool of myself. I was mentioning that I was going to be spending the next evening with the Archbishop Dave Smith and Ed and describing what kind of guys these were to a group of the old college gang. I was mid-way into the discussion when Cheryl's coworker and her roommate showed up. So then I had to backtrack and explain myself again to people who'd never met me before. And, of course, I was in the middle of discussing clown porn. Or maybe I was in the middle of the John Wayne Gacey joke and had to go back to discuss clown porn. Either way--nice first impression to make.
How does one become the Clown Porn Guy? The same way you make it to the top of Everest: one small step at a time.
So the next evening, true to form, the Archbishop shows up with clown porn in tow. He gives me a somewhat disappointing review: the porn in question is not so much clowns getting it on, but clown groupies getting it on with clowns, and there's little clown suit action. This video would, somewhat disturbingly, be my only actual birthday present that year. I couldn't simply go home and watch this movie all by myself. Well, I could, but not without people talking...okay, more than they do anyway...okay, maybe just in a different way. Point being, I needed an occasion to bust this out.
A few weeks later I had a lot of the people from the EffenGee over for dinner. At the end I thought, "hey, what better to cap this off than some Grand Mariner and some clown porn viewing?" The group included Cheryl, Roy, Young Dave. Molly, Hank, Jen Dawe and myself. After seeing a minute and a half of diatribe on the first amendment and how my constitutional right to watch porno is at risk I decided that we needed to fast forward to the clown lovin'. We stopped to watch the first scene a bit, but there was a whole lotta fluff and so back to fast forward we went. And on and on and on. Where the fuck were the clowns? Send in the clowns, damnit! The closest we would come (pardon the unintentional pun) would be some guy in a "confessional" scene backlit ostensibly to protect his identity but clearly wearing cheap party-supply-store clown costuming.
Frankly, I was disappointed. The quest, it seems, was still on.
* Not, of course, that I'd know any of this firsthand.
* Again, not like I have any experience with these sorts of things. I saw it in Newsweek, I think.
* In the abstract and not with any sort of purient interest.