Page 39 - AVN December 2013

Farewell to a Feminist Photographer
Mireille Miller-Young, Ph.D., and associate professor of feminist studies at University of
California Santa Barbara, sent AVN this tribute to Carlos Batts:
I am heartbroken at this huge loss for the art world, the porn community, and especially
for the feminist, queer, and indie porn community. Carlos was extremely talented, a
visionary artist, and a kind and completely ethical person. He was respected by artists,
curators, performers, filmmakers, producers, and academics and I only hope that as a
result of his passing that those who were not familiar with his work come to discover it.
Carlos and April participated in two conferences that I organized or helped to organ-
ize around the publication of The Feminist Porn Book, which I co-edited with feminist
porn director and sex educator Tristan Taormino, and my academic colleagues at UCSB,
Constance Penley and Celine Parrenas Shimizu, and in which April Flores is a contribut-
ing author.
Carlos Batts importantly saw himself as a feminist pornographer, and he was con-
scious of what it means to be a man and a feminist. He spoke out about the need for
more porn that is made in a way that is ethically made as a kind of collaboration with
workers, that represents racial and body type diversity, and that pushes back against the
formulaic market for porn for men and straight couples to explore instead a range of
desires, identities, and pleasures for women, men, and trans people.
Carlos was part of the emerging feminist porn movement that we write about in the
Feminist Porn Book, as a filmmaker and artist, and as the key collaborator with his muse
April Flores. April writes in our book about the need to produce porn with what she
calls fat women, that isn’t just for a BBW market of men who like that particular fetish,
but is for voluptuous women to see themselves as gorgeous and compelling erotic beings.
Carlos made that possible. He made fat aesthetically beautiful, interesting, and layered,
and he had the vision to make April appear as the dynamic performer and model that
she is. If only other porn directors could learn from him!
Carlos was very important for the international academic community that works on
“porn studies.” His work so vitally links porn to its artistic roots in the Golden Age of
film, when directors really wanted to tell a story, to the radically political sexual art of
people like Robert Mapplethorpe, and to a tradition set out by John Waters of crossing
porn with high art, music, and fashion. Carlos was raised in Baltimore, and John Waters
actually shot Cry Baby with Traci Lords and Johnnie Depp at his middle school. He was
influenced by camp, horror, sexploitation, independent film, high art, sports photogra-
phy, graffiti, punk, rap, and industrial electronic music. He was attentive to all these
important cultural trends of the last 40 years, and to the political battles we endure for
the right to sexual speech and expression. In many ways he was an outsider in the busi-
ness but at the same time he represented the heart the business is searching to reconnect
to after years of overproduction of product and underproduction of creativity. He was
the future the business needed and he will be sorely sorely missed.
Also, I will say, as a professor of pornography and sex work studies who is writing
about the history of black women in the adult film business, Carlos is a great loss to the
black porn community. He was one of the few black men directing and the only one
who had training as a filmmaker. He presented women of color in a sexy, artistic, and
glamorous light, which is rare for them in this business. There are too few people of
color in positions of creative and economic power in the business and I hope that those
that are coming up look to Carlos’ work as a model for how to hone their craft and how
to treat others with respect.
Finally, I want to say that when he came and spoke at
UCSB for our mini-con in front of a packed room of
300 people, he rocked the house and really
inspired our students. Both he and April were
this power team that inspired and impressed
my students and colleagues here at UCSB.
They were shining examples of the kind of
thoughtful, creative, and generous people
there are in the porn world, which is
something that always surprises students
with all of their stereotypes about what
porn is and does. I was planning to
have them up again this year to talk
about their new book, Fat Girl.
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