Libby Lynn’s Ghost-Painted Self Portrait of Me

In this post on Rollertrain, Libby explains why she wanted to paint a portrait of me for her Ghost-Painted Portraits of My Internet Heroes series (which so far also includes Dan Carlin (Common Sense, Hardcore History) and Jad Abumrad (Radiolab).

You can see Libby’s full set of painting process photos here.

In the Rollertain post I link above, Libby says some awfully nice things about me and catalogs why she wanted to paint my portrait. I want to turn things around on her a little bit, because Libby is awesome and inspiring, in a rage-filled, messy, complicated, interesting way.

Libby, like the vast majority of the people I know and hold dear today, is someone I never would’ve met without the internet. She is a blog reader from way back – she discovered me after the first time I was Fleshbotted in May 2005. I had been reading her blog Rollertrain (old blogspot bloggy) too, on which she ranted a lot about porno copywriting and the fucked up world of marketing smut in America.

We met in person in December 2005 at the Museum of Sex, where we were both on a panel for the anthology Everything You Know About Sex is Wrong, which has my first piece of booky type published writing. My piece in the book is an essay called My First Fetish, or, How I Fought Mediocrity; Libby has a piece in the book called The Daily Schedule of a Porno Copywriter. It was a weird night – only the second time I’d set foot in the Museum of Sex since getting canned in 2003; the first time I introduced my boyfriend to my dad; my dad was there to hear me talk about my sex life, a first since I’d come out to him and my mom as a sex worker in October 2005 (fresh wounds, yikes!). Those are the circumstances under which Libby and I met. I think we complimented each other’s glasses, but otherwise the meeting wasn’t anything special. She gave me her card and said we should talk about the possibility of me making porno.

Over the following weeks, Libby and I started talking on the phone about this theoretical porno project. I wrote up some blurbs about the porno I imagined I could make, I puffed up my sex realm resume to make it look like I could indeed be capable of directing and producing a porno movie. These conversations turned into The Bi Apple the following summer.

In February 2006 Libby was back in NYC on a business trip, during which we met to hash out porno particulars and strategize about how best to pitch her bosses. I also took her, as she notes in the afore-linked post, to see a solo show of Molly Crabapple‘s work. Possibly the first solo show Molly had had – at a little sliver of a gallery in the east village. We walked, we talked, we ate, we talked about porn and relationships and the kingdom of messiness in the midst of those things. This is pretty much how Libby and I have spent every subsequent meeting.

In May 2006 I flew to North Carolina for The Pitch. (A few days before I got on that plane, I had gotten approached by an editor from Seal Press about the possibility of writing a book. I told her that I was too busy with grad school and making a porno, but that I’d shoot her some ideas anyway. I signed the contract for Naked on the Internet a week or so before we shot The Bi Apple, and I was sitting and writing the intro to the book while my editor worked on The Bi Apple. Busy times.) The Pitch was bizarre and disorganized, and not what I expected. While I stayed calm and quiet and tried to organize my thoughts in an even-keeled way, Libby went berserk and yelled at her co-workers like the nut she is. They argued back. I watched the fireworks. I left not sure what had happened, only that I’d made friends with Libby for real.

Libby made an appearance at the release party for The Bi Apple in March 2007, which was rather epic, held at the Pussycat Lounge, and may or may not have involved me getting spontaneously naked on stage. Ahem. The next time I saw her after that was when Eliyanna and I did a week long road trip/book tour down the eastern seaboard, and when we got to Durham, Libby and her fabulous boyfriend Matt grilled meat for us, and we stayed up til the wee hours sitting in their backyard, playing with their dogs, and talking about politics, art, sex, and madness. Libby has become a pretty significant person in my life – we don’t see each other all that much, and when we do hang out its often the product of some kind of spontaneity or bad planning, but there’s always food and booze and intense conversation, just the way I like it. Hanging out with Libby recalibrates my brain every time, and I crack up when I think about her asking pointed questions, signing credit receipts with phrases like “faggot head,” and wandering off to go look at something that she’s identified as art.

Although like lots of people I don’t know what the fuck Libby will do at the end of her art skool adventure and I know it was sort of insane for her to drop out of a successful and secure career in porno marketing to pursue art, I am of the opinion that more people should take the chance to drastically reroute their lives. This boldness is surely a sign of some insanity, but fuck it. Libby is doing what lots of people wish they were doing: fucking shit up, learning, making art. You should read her blog and visit her Flickr photostream to get a fuller picture of the madness she’s doing.