Blue Blood

An interview with Amelia G
by Scott Hefflon

I’m going to put Blue Blood on the cover instead of Gothic Sluts because I’m a pussy.
Blue Blood is kind of the umbrella, anyway… But I think it’s a matter of reclaiming terminology. In L.A. and San Francisco, the idea of reclaiming the word slut is so passé, but in other areas of the country, it’s probably pretty risqué.

It’s all in the tone and who’s saying it. Much easier to jokingly call yourself a slut when you’re being naughty than it is to be called a slut and run out of town. It comes down to control: A strong person doing whatever they want, regardless of the names they’re called by uptight and envious people is cool, but weak people who are abused and talked into degradation isn’t.
I don’t hang out with weak people. (laughs)

You’ve traded photo sets with Scott from Raver Porn (now EroticBPM), who I interviewed last issue, and I think he’s pretty much credited as the first altporn site, the first of the new “model respectful” community porn sites…
Well, you know I’ve been doing this for over a decade, so, to me, when we did Blue Blood (the magazine), it was a pretty new idea to say “pale girls with purple hair are beautiful and can be objects of erotic attraction.” That was pretty radical back then. While it’s still my personal aesthetic, I think that battle’s been won… I travel all over the country to photograph models, and sure, some places it’s less fun to be a weirdo, and sometimes you might not get the best service and get stared at a lot, but the notion that freaks can’t be attractive is gone. When I lived in Georgia, I may not’ve had the easiest time, but a lot of people sure wanted to have sex with me. (laughs)

I look for personal style more than body type or features… A big girl with style is hotter to me than a little girl with no style. It’s about star quality and personal passions and charisma… I’ve worked with plenty of models who’ve done mainstream porn, and they’re really cool girls… They have tattoos and they’re into cool stuff, but when they work for the mainstream sites, the photographers are jerks and make them cover up their tattoos and give up any sense of personal style they have.

Do you do most of your shoots in studios, or do you do shoots in the model’s natural environment?
When I travel, I like to do the shoots in their own personal space, because people are more comfortable in their own living rooms than if you give them directions to a studio in their city… At home, I have a studio set-up, so a lot of the models just come here… If I go to major cities, I just buy the backdrops there, because it’s easier than taking them on a plane, but there are some cities where you best bring everything with you. Some models want to have their stuff photographed – their stuffed Devil or whatever – and some people, they want to be immortalized, but they don’t necessarily want their space immortalized. So we just kinda roll with whatever the model is into. Cuz a happy model is a hot model. I always have trouble shooting in New Orleans because we always blow out the power. When we shot at Poppy Z. Bright’s place in New Orleans, we blew out her power three times. She was all running around her house naked trying to find the breakers… (laughs) Who’s your favorite model?

Scar, hands down. (Hands down where, I ain’t saying.) Her body shape, her eyebrows, the looks she gives the camera… She’s obviously a little crazy, and she really looks like she’s having fun…
She’s great, I hang out with her socially as well. She’s a perfect example, because she’s done some of the mainstream stuff, and they retouch out her scars, make her do normal make-up, and some won’t let her use the name Scar. But when we shoot her, it’s the way she looks when she goes out.

You also shoot pretty much anyone who’s anyone in the fetish/dom scene…
Pretty much, yeah. We really try to give the girls we shoot a name… We imprint their name on each image, so even if someone steals our photos and puts them somewhere else, it’s still her, with her name on the photo. The strength of personality is a lot of what makes these girls sexy. A lot of sites make up names and jobs for the girls – even some of the “alternative” porn sites – so it’s still just a fantasy, it’s just a more appealing one. But I know a lot of cool people – and I have since long before I became a photographer – so I just don’t think it’s hard to find a girl who really does something cool… If a girl is a dominatrix and she wants to promote that, I’ll promote it. If she’s in a band and wants to promote it, sure, go right ahead.

Many of your girls have links to their own sites, and that makes it much more real. The girls aren’t just sets on a website, they’re people who do all sorts of cool stuff, and if you find someone you like, you can follow links to see what else they do.
Totally. We try to also get our girls out there in the world, on magazine covers or whatever, to help them promote their thing. We trade sets with RaverPorn and Suicide Girls, we cover the U.S. fetish scene for Marquis, and we’ve done stuff for all the major mainstream publishing houses: Hustler, Playboy, Penthouse. The thing I like about the Internet is that we get to present the aesthetic I want to. I don’t take a cool friend of mine and say, “You’re going to have to wear a stripper wig over your mohawk.” I get to do what I want creatively online. I don’t do a lot for other sites, because they don’t always credit the girl and the photographer, or they make up a name for the girl, and I’m just not that motivated by, ya know, money. (laughs) I would’ve lived a completely different life if I were. Artistic freedom and credit for what I do are super-important to me.

Some of the first people we ever shot for were Skin Two and Tattoo Savage, and we now shoot all the covers for Gothic Beauty… We like to shoot really clean, so publishers can drop in whatever background fits thematically with the issue. To me, the most interesting thing in the picture is the girl, the person, it’s not about what chair she’s sitting in. So we like clean backgrounds, but also vibrant colors to reflect the vibrant personalities of the people we’re shooting.

Much of your shooting – especially for Gothic Beauty, which is full-clothed shots – is about the fashion as much as the model. Do you have a background in fashion?
Mostly, I’m just a weirdo and I like what I like. I have a lot of friends who are designers or run cool clothing stores, so we have good contacts for pulling clothes for shoots. We usually give the stuff back, but some of the stuff either I really want or the models want to keep, and the stores hook us up with good discounts. But, for instance, the shoot we did with the parasol from Retail Slut that Scar put in her ass, she got to keep the parasol.

I was just admiring that set…
It’s an excellent set, isn’t it? (laughs)

It makes you look at your belongings and space differently after it’s been used as a prop or a setting for a shoot…
I aspire to actually have a living space someday, but I’m such a workaholic, I’ll always fill my space with projects and use everything I have in shoots.

Are you all digital now?
Oh God, no. Magazines prefer film, and print publishing is still my first love. There are some things about the Internet, like you can go straight to the people who are into what you’re doing, and you can publish all 60 shots you like from a shoot and not have to pick favorites, because people can pick their own favorites from the set.

You have thumbnails and arrows you so can clit to see the next picture… I mean click…
Little Freudian Slip there? (laughs)

Heh… Suicide Girls has an actual slideshow option…
They also have an expensive San Francisco design firm that I can’t afford.

But it’s possible. Lollipop just has thumbnails that load into a side window, but it’s not like models in tee shirts is my living…
Honestly, it’s the same for me. Some people put everything into one project, in this case, one site, and that’s why many people get all worked up and competitive. It’s their whole identity. I’ve been cool for a lot longer than there’s been an Internet. (laughs)

What other projects do you do?
One of the cool things about living in L.A. is that it’s a very project-oriented city. You don’t get the people who say “I’m going to start a band someday…” For better or worse, they’re out there doing it. And the money and opportunities are just there, ya know? “Hey, do you wanna shoot a cover for so-and-so? Do you want to shoot x-and-so band? Do you wanna contribute to this erotic anthology?” So I schedule my time to do all those things. I find it all very gratifying.

Does that have to do with where you are, or just who you are and what you’re capable of?
Partly, there’s a lot of infrastructure for doing what I do in L.A. I have my own color darkroom here, and I do everything but the actual color processing, mostly because I drink a lot of coffee and my hands kinda shake. There’s really no comparison between digital and film from an artistic perspective, but if I lived in a different city, I’m sure it’d be a lot harder to do film. When I did Blue Blood in DC, I’d drop film off someplace and it’d come back blank and it’d have the code of a completely different kind of film, so they were handing me a fake roll of ruined film because mine had naked pictures on it. When you take your pictures to a drug store, they run it through a machine and give you negatives and prints. When you go to a professional lab, negatives and prints are two completely different things. Getting your film processed at a drug store really damages your negatives. I get my film developed to negative, then I take it home and make contact sheets, and then I hand-print the pictures I like from the contact sheet. Most people I know will print their own black & white because you can use that little red light, but they have a lab do their color prints because you have to do it completely in the dark. But I’m a little vampire, so I don’t mind the dark. Only thing is, color darkroom chemicals are horrendously poisonous and supposedly make you totally crazy if you’re exposed to them for too long…

Do you ever shoot separate from Forrest Black?
We usually alternate. When we look at the final pictures, we honestly can’t remember who took what shot. We’re actually each half a photographer…

How’d you two meet?
We met at a Goth/Industrial club in DC, and we’ve worked on projects together for the last dozen years or so. He’s one of the most talented people I know.

Have you ever done anything without him?
I do my writing without him, and I may’ve done a couple things without him – and him a couple things without me – but we like to work together. I’ve never shot with anyone else, and neither has he.

I’ve always wanted to ask you, is Amelia G your real name?
Yup, Amelia G, and there’s no goddamn period after the G.

Did you change it?
No, my whole family is named that, what do you think? (laughs) I graduated from college with honors, wrote my honor’s thesis on vampire legends as a paradigm for aggressive human sexuality, and I told my daddy “Hey, I think I’m going to write some sadoporn.” And he said, “Ya know, a while back you were talking about maybe changing your name…”

Did you do anything of this sort before you graduated college?
Well, when I was in fourth grade, a friend of mine and I cut up a bunch of magazines and glued a lot of naughty pictures to construction paper with the intent to sell them to boys in our class, but unfortunately, my parents intercepted our entrepreneurial efforts and put a stop to it.

So you’ve always been something of an entrepreneur…
Something like that. I was 16 when I went to college. I went to high school overseas, and wasn’t nuts about the high school I went to when I got to the States, so I made my Junior year my Senior year, and I was young for my class anyway…

Let’s go even further back. So you were born…
Yes, I was… In London. And then we moved around a lot. By the time I got to college, that was my twelfth school.

What did your family do that they moved so much?
My parents switched off, whether my mom or my dad worked. My mom was a diplomat, and my dad was an attorney. Both of their jobs required that they be in different places, so we moved a lot.

Do you have brothers and sisters?
I have a brother.

Does he do something interesting?
It’s hard to tell… I’m too close to him to really judge if it’s interesting or not. I talk with him three times a day every day, and he lives in L.A. too.

Were you really close growing up?
Very.

What’s the age difference?
I don’t think I can go there.

But you two are close and always have been.
When you move around as much as we did, if you like your family at all, you become very close because they’re the only people you’re familiar with, they’re the only people who know you. When you look a certain way, people make judgments about what you’re like. “Oh, you’re wearing a PVC corset, so these 18 things must be true about you.” But none of that’s real. You can change your shirt and that doesn’t change who you are, but it often changes how people perceive you. What sometimes made me the coolest girl in one school made me a total pariah in the next. That’s the sort of thing that gives you a strong core sense of self. And it also makes you very aware of how externals might matter to you, but at the end of the day, they’re still externals.

Where’d you go to college?
Wesleyan.

The one outside Boston?
No, Wesleyan in Middletown, CT, not Wellesley, the all-girls school outside Boston. Average SATs were much higher at Wesleyan, not that the school had a chip on their shoulder. (laughs) We actually had tee shirts that said “It’s Not An All-Girls School Outside of Boston.” I think I still have one…

When did you get into Goth and Goth culture?
My musical taste is a lot more eclectic than just straight-up Goth, but I like Sisters of Mercy as much as the next girl. It’s hard to pinpoint, because is it when did I get into The Cure, when did I start to get into obscure bands, when did I start getting to knowing the people in the bands, ya know?

Was there a moment when you were watching Michael Jackson and Madonna videos on MTV thinking that was what life was all about, and suddenly you discovered punk rock or Goth and realized there was an entire underground culture?
I lived in the Middle East when MTV first came out, so I didn’t get to see it until I got to college. And Madonna’s fuckin’ cool. Don’t fuck with Madonna. I think she’s a real role model for women. There’s a woman who can reclaim the word slut and do it right. There’s a woman who owns her sexuality and owns her power.

And trademarks it…
(laughs) That’s my kinda girl… Thing about American culture abroad – as I’m sure you’ve heard – is that it’s a few years behind…

I think the middle part of America – the red states in an election – are like that as well.
(laughs) Right… Where I went to high school, Rush and AC/DC and Led Zeppelin were big. When I got back to the States, that’s when I got exposed to The Cure, Madonna, and more obscure bands.

Did you stay in Connecticut after you graduated?
I stayed for about a year, doing academic video and freelance writing. Then I moved to DC and did a lot of rock journalism. That was kind of the heyday of Hit Parader and that sort of rock mag, late ’80s, early ’90s. The boys I was interviewing back then were beautiful, so the job had its perks. (laughs) I tend to like my boys and girls a little more depressed than that, but I have to say, those metal chicks have great breasts. (laughs)

I just saw Strapping Young Lad and Dark Tranquillity (and Napalm Death and Nile played too, I hear), and those metal chicks are fuckin’ hostile, even to a long-hair metal dood…
I always got great play with the metal chicks… (laughs) What do you look like these days?

Like The Rock in Scorpion King, with the bangs and sides pulled back but the rest spilling down to about the middle of my back… Uh, but I’m not that muscular…
Do you wear a loin cloth?

Not in public…
Well, I’m going to picture you in a loin cloth interviewing me…

Well, I have more of that scruffy Jesus, chain-smoking and pounding whisky shots look… And yeah, a decade ago I did a photoshoot stripped mostly naked, hanging on a cross… But the sign nailed above my head said “Blow Me,” which I’m pretty sure Jesus’ didn’t…
(laughs) So you see, religious and rock/alternative erotica is not new… That’s what I find so comical, when these people are like “I invented this,” like they’re the first people who ever thought of shooting a spooky girl… Blue Blood certainly had its contemporaries, though it was the most sexual of the publications of that time period, but we had inspirations as well… Skin Two and Susie Bright when she was with On Our Backs… There were others, but those two were significant inspirations to me.

What year did you start Blue Blood?
I started doing BLT in ’90, so I guess Blue Blood would’ve been ’92…

What was BLT?
It was my anti-social punk rock zine in DC.

1992 was about the boom of zines, when 9 out of 10 scenester fucks went to shows and sold/traded their crappy little zines.
(laughs) I definitely thought Blue Blood was going to take over the planet when we started growing massively, but I was young and I didn’t know how to manage the growth… We really attracted some sharks, and I had no idea how to deal with such people at that time. They thought we had potential, and they were professionals at screwing young people with potential. (laughs) Just that we kept the trademark is a testament to my growing ferociousness, because there were “newsstand professionals” who really wanted to get their hands on our name… The name has always been important to me, and to this day, it’s Blue Blood’s GothicSluts.com and Blue Blood’s BarelyEvil.com.

So Blue Blood is the umbrella, even if Blue Blood itself doesn’t really do anything anymore.
Well, Blue Blood’s site gets about seven million hits a month… We throw up something new every few weeks or so, but it’s definitely not a priority for me… I came to the Net kicking and screaming. My partner thought we had to do something on the Net, but I thought the Net was killing magazines, but at a certain point, I realized I could complain, or I could get my stuff out there, and someday the sites would pay for the publishing of Blue Blood. That’s my Master Plan…

Back in the day, Hustler wanted to buy Blue Blood, and they were the nice ones who had their eye on us. Maybe if I were more business-minded, I could’ve negotiated a deal with a good company like (Larry) Flynt Publications, unlike certain sucky companies that were trying to wrestle control away from us… We lost revue from whole issues because certain newsstand reps snarfed it, it was nightmarish… If you put together the newsstand sales of all Goth magazines of the time period, a single issue of Blue Blood was bigger. And that effected ad sales as well, because we were so much bigger, we had to charge more for ads…

I think we talked at the very end about me selling ads for you…
Right, I remember that… We were printing 15 to 20 times the number of other Goth mags, and that made it pretty hard to have a competitive price… We really should’ve gotten our circulation audited to show that we really did have the numbers, but hindsight is 20/20…

What year did Blue Blood stop publishing?
It hasn’t, really, because I do intend to do future issues…

Yeah, yeah, yeah, you’re just on hiatus… (Sorry, I’ve been fighting the good fight seven days a week for the five years they haven’t published, and I don’t take kindly to “Yeah, I think we’ll publish again someday” as if this job is fuckin’ easy)
I don’t think of it that way, when the finances are there, we’ll do it again. I don’t want to compromise for newsstand distributor requirements, and I don’t feel I have to. I’ll wait until the right time so I can do it right. I love print. Print has always been my first love. It’s great that you can reach thousands of people without having to go through some ancient distributor magazine distributor guy who hasn’t even cracked a magazine in the last 30 years, but I do like the physicality of magazines.

The last issue I have is Volume 3, number 1, from 1998.
Time flies when you’re having fun. (laughs)

When did you get into erotic photography, and how did you get into it?
I did a science fiction/adventure magazine when I was in college, and we joked that our editorial requirement was that if you put a gun in a sex scene, we’d publish it. (laughs) I’m only kidding: You’d have to put a cool gun in a good sex scene… That was called Catharsis…

\Was Blue Blood a small-scale shit newsprint fanzine when it started?
No, I’m all about production values, and I’m defective when it comes to money. Seriously. I’m not motivated by it and I don’t think “what would be the economically-viable thing to do,” I do the coolest thing I can think of. Blue Blood started out black & white, on beautiful paper stock, smooth mat, polished, but not actually glossy. We went full glossy on issue two or three, and then full color on issue five…

And what issue did you get up to?
Eight. (laughs)

I remember the story that you made the leap and printed a huge number of copies, and then got screwed out of the distro money so you couldn’t afford to print the next issue…
We printed a ton and then got our entire newsstand paycheck hijacked. And I don’t want to say anything more about it…

Did you have a website while running the print mag?
We did. We had a site hosted by some cool guys in L.A. before we lived in L.A. This was, like, ’95 or so… It had some teaser photos and articles, and info on how to order the magazine. And we had a lot of links to our contributors, because we had a lot of big-name contributors from the horror and S/F community. People used to steal our images and content like crazy, and it made me really nuts. One of the early motivations of GothicSluts.com was to see how many people were stealing our photos and selling them or putting them on their sites…

Was Gothic Sluts the first pay site of its kind?
Well, first we had the free BlueBlood.com site, then the BlueBlood.net site, and then the GothicSluts.com site… Raver Porn is the only niche membership site that predates Gothic Sluts. We met Scott after he launched Raver Porn and after we’d launched Gothic Sluts, but I’m pretty sure he was the only one. Everyone else came out a year or so later and claimed they invented it. (laughs wickedly)

While I was switching and rewinding tapes, you mentioned you were really into equipment and tools and stuff…
Ooooh yeah (she moans), I loooove tools. I love tools that do things I don’t even have an interest in… The sense of potential in a tool, the potential for human achievement, the potential to create something is really exciting to me. I mean… really… exciting… to me. (laughs) I like trade shows with electronic gadgets, cuz there are all these gadgets you can use to do stuff and make stuff. And even the tool isle in Home Depot, mmmm…

Staples gives me wood, too…
Mmmm, I love office supplies. And when I say I love office supplies, I mean I love office supplies… (laughs) It’s the sense of potential. It might just be a ream of paper or something, but it’s what you can do with it…

I really miss doing paste-up…
I miss the physicality of working with Exacto blades…

Me too… I used to paste up all the ads to Lollipop shitfaced at 3 am, fighting with the laserprinter, with the guy from press smoking, drinking coffee, waiting to take the issue to press…
I used to have a hand-waxer, and I was so looking forward to the day when I could get a tabletop waxer, and then the technology changed and I didn’t need one.

Yeah, now we print low-res proofs and use Flight-Check to collect the files we burn to CD… It’s just less physical and real. Cats love rubber bands and the smell of rubber cement, and I remember my cats jumping on the table while I’m drunkenly doing paste-up, knocking over thousands of dollars in ads – my only copy of the ads – and getting kittie fur on the boards… If you look closely at old issues of Lollipop, you can see kittie fur on the ad pages…
That’s great! (laughs) It’s like how it doesn’t feel as real to see the number of hits we get vs. when we used to go into Tower and see someone thumbing though a copy of one of our issues.

I like to stay hands-on, just to keep my sense of perspective… The 5,000-run mp3 CD we do, I stuff those (with a little help, of course) by hand. I know what 5,000 CDs looks and feels like. So then I have a better sense of what 5,000 hits a day means, and I’m sure you get exponentially that… I have a lot of guilt because I sit behind a computer all day, and I got into this to make something, so all those hours of drunken stuffing reminds me of the physicality and scale of what I’m doing…
We went to a bondage convention recently, and we had hundreds of people come up to us to say how much they loved what we do and get the girls’ autographs and stuff. Compared to the number of hits we get a day, that’s nothing, but shaking those hundreds of hands was much more meaningful to me, you know? It makes it much more real.

And film and prints are physical as well…
I like to be able to hold what I do in my hand, definitely.

Do you do gallery shows? I’ve been waiting for someone to legitimize altporn photography as art…
I don’t really like the expression altporn because I’m a girl and don’t really like the word porn, because there’s the sense that erotica is what I like, and porn is what they like, but they mean the same thing at the end of the day. When a lot of people say porn, they mean it in a negative way, so I’m not really nuts about the word. We fall very heavily on the artistic side of erotica, because we really pay attention to quality and production values. Our shoots are well-lit, the hair is done the way the model likes her hair on a good day, and she has the time to do her make-up the way she likes to do it… I’m looking to something real, ya know? Once in a while, someone else will do the make-up… Like we did this shoot with our spokesmodel for Blue Blood, Sara, and Jason Miller, the singer of Godhead. He had this thing he was doing with his eye make-up at the time, with black eyes that kinda came back along the side of his head, and I wanted both of them to have matching make-up, so I asked him to do her make-up, and he says, “I’m a rock guy, I don’t know how to do someone else’s make-up.” But he watched me try to duplicate what he’d done for, like, five seconds, and he said “Give me the sponge…” (laughs) He did a good job, too.
(www.blueblood.net, www.gothicsluts.com, www.barelyevil.com)