Fever Las Vegas! The Int'l Consumer Electronics Show

Text and photos by Phil Tarley:

Vivid Video, the subject of World of Wonder’s peep into the porn world, Vivid Valley, airing every Thursday on Playboy TV, headlined the Adult Video section at the annual International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas for four days last week, ending Sunday night. Over 200,000 conventioneers vied for Vegas hotel rooms, where price gouging set new records: A room at Motel 6 booked at the last minute went for an astronomical $176 a night. According to a recent New York Times survey, $12.6 billion was generated by the adult video industry in 2005. And money-making and money-chasing was the hot pursuit at this world’s largest adult-product convention. Marci Hirsch, Vivid's vice president in charge of production, described the event as “really hectic but great." Vivid has had a booth every year since the company started 21 years ago.

Out on the floor, it was a major show-and-tell-pornstar-uber-sexualized-louche- extravaganza, with sexed-up nearly naked girls and boys posing lewdly for scores of TV and digi cameras. Skin was in and flash was everywhere. The show was all about hooking up: distributors looking for retailers, porn stars hot to meet directors and agents, and producers pitching for production deals – it was all happening simultaneously amid a crowd of fawning fans. Club Jenna, Jenna Jameson’s booth, had a couple of hundred horny guys waiting for an autograph – the longest line at the show. Girls in bubble baths, girls having simulated sex, girls in pasties drooping from over-siliconed breasts and drooling pornophiles, helped fuel a frenzy of sales as order takers wrote big business from starstruck retailers.

Over at the gay part of the show, the mega studio, Titan Men, corralled a bevy of their star beefcake to pose and sign autographs for the fans. Buck Angel, the one-and-only female-to-male transgender to cross over into mainstream gay porn, waxed ecstatic about Titan and his starring role in their latest blockbuster, Cirque Noir. “Titan is an awesome company to work for. They treated me with a lot of respect and didn't try to make me into some kind of freak,” he said. Buck, who's married to a woman, is proud of his three orifices and his giant clitoris that's now a penis. “So many gay guys hit on me," he told me. "I have to swat them off like flies.”

– Written and photographed by Phil Tarley, the Vincente Minnelli of gay porn

(Photos, from top: jacuzzi girl, show girl, Marci Hirsch (inset), party peeps, Phil Tarley and friend, Buck Angel and Mrs Angel, Lanny Barby and Lexie Marie)

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