Fans leave him comments like “World class again Maestro” and “Truly exceptional and very educational. Like those performers, Stefanos has a profile page on the Upper Floor website, listing his gender, hair color, body type, and cock length, and an index of each video shoot he’s appeared in. The distinction isn’t immediately evident to the viewer, who can’t tell which role-house manager of the pornography production business called the Upper Floor, or house performer acting out a sexually dominant fantasy-Stefanos is playing as he introduces, inspects, and stimulates the performers for the party guests and for the cameras. In addition to serving as the real-life host of the party, he told me, “I play a character who, I jokingly say, he’s a cross between Tony Stark and Hugh Hefner, a guy who just throws parties at this house owned by Mr. By contrast, Stefanos and Kink’s full-time off-camera staff are employees.īut Stefanos is also a performer.
Like most adult industry performers, they are regarded as independent contractors, paid by the shoot. They employ production assistants who double as set photographers, and whom you can watch moving furniture and props on the Upper Floor live webcams when there are no performers around.ĭuring Upper Floor parties, in addition to Kink’s staff, there are contract caterers and bartenders on set, along with the contract actors hired to perform sex and S&M scenes with one another. Kink employs directors, editors, IT staff, and a talent department. He apologized to me for the background noise employees were rushing around him to get to the catered meal Kink offers its staff four days each week. On the day I called Stefanos, producer of the live shows Kink puts on in the castle’s gothic penthouse called the Upper Floor, it was around lunchtime.
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It’s a rare accomplishment: a porn production studio that aims to favorably represent a sexual subculture, that holds free sex parties and (paid) public tours, that positions itself as a San Francisco institution with unironic civic pride.
In the years since, while Twitter was launching a short bike or BART ride away, while Facebook was opening up to the world outside the brick confines of the Ivies, Kink transformed the armory into its own platform, a fantasy-stocked retreat furnished by and for the pleasure and reward of CEO Peter Acworth. It’s Kink’s flags that fly now from the top of one of the armory’s brick turrets, with the company’s URL visible even on Google Street View. The armory stands at the corner of Mission and 14th Street, a few blocks from the lone fire hydrant that saved the neighborhood from the flames of the 1906 quake just six years before the armory was built, and also a few blocks from the salvaged-wood cafes and velvet-roped dive bars that herald, for many, a new form of siege. The long-abandoned property, which is said to resemble a “Moorish castle,” once housed the National Guard, stationed there to quash the city’s 1934 general strike. When the old San Francisco Armory was sold to the Internet porn production company in 2006, they paid $14.5 million. In the Parlor at Kink's Armory Studios (davitydave/Flickr) What happens when performances that once commanded a fee are done for free-and even the producers regard them not as work, but as sexual expression? Melissa Gira Grant ▪ Spring 2014 In the castle-like San Francisco Armory, the Internet porn production company hosts live-streamed sex parties where unpaid “guests” are invited to perform S&M scenes for the camera.