On Tuesday, as I was preparing to head out to a porn shoot with a lovely lesbian couple, I saw on Twitter that feminist porn pioneer Candida Royalle had died after a long fight with ovarian cancer. This post by Annie Sprinkle gives the details. It was a hugely sad start to the day and I found myself not really believing it. Now I’m back home and able to write, I want to pay tribute to Candice.
A quick bio: Candida Royalle was a musician and artist who became a porn actress in the mid 70s. Together with Annie Sprinkle, Veronica Vera, Gloria Leonard and Veronica Hart, she founded Club 90, a support group for female porn stars. In 1984 she made Femme, an adult film that specifically aimed itself at a female audience, and launched a directing career with Femme Productions, eventually creating 17 erotic films that focused on female pleasure.
She has been a source of inspiration and admiration for me for almost 20 years. She was the pioneer who proved that women were interested in porn and would happily buy it. She was my “porny godmother” – a trailblazer who paved the way for me and others like me to make our own brand of porn. I am forever grateful for her work, her intelligence, her belief in free speech and her compassion.
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Candida looms large in my porn history. I remember staying at a hotel in the 90s and I decided to watch my first dirty movie with my husband on the pay-per-view channel. The film we saw was Femme. I thought it was fantastic.
Fast forward to 2000 and I started making porn for women online, networking with other female webmasters who were keen to offer erotic content to women like ourselves. We were pretty much flying blind when it came to catering to our audience. Aside from our own tastes, we had one solid benchmark for what women wanted to see in porn: Candida Royalle’s films. They were consistent bestsellers and we knew that if we followed in Candida’s footsteps, we’d have at least some success. And we did. Her work meant that we were able to start from a solid base and then go exploring and slowly expand our ideas of what we could offer and what would work.
I’ve been a fan for years. I interviewed her via email for For The Girls in 2005 and in 2009 was thrilled to meet her briefly at the Berlin Porn Film Festival. She was giving a filmmaker in focus presentation (you’ll see snippets in my mini doco from that event):
A few years ago she also offered advice with getting my feature film The Fantasy Project produced. I had always hoped to meet her again and sit down for a proper chat, beyond the simple fangirling I offered in Berlin. I missed a couple of opportunities – she reunited with her Club 90 friends at Catalyst Con in 2014 and again at Cinekink in 2015. But timing and distance got in the way.
And now, alas, I will never get the chance. I’m so sad about that.
Candice was a big part of the porn, sex work, sex toy and sex ed community. Reading her Facebook page today I see so many friends posting their tributes to her. She had an impact on so many people’s lives and inspired so many other filmmakers, writers and performers.
Here’s Petra Joy’s tribute in The Telegraph.
A tribute piece from The Daily Dot
The Daily Mail has an obituary
