Sinnamon Love Interview

I call her Wednesday afternoon (her MySpace). Audio.

Sinnamon: "I’m leaving in 15 minutes to pick up my daughter."

Luke: "Let’s make this the most exciting 15 minutes of your life."

Sinnamon: "I’m so scared."

Luke: "When you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?"

Sinnamon: "I had a lot of different dreams. I wanted to be an astronaut. I went to space camp. I wanted to be a surgeon. I was a bit nerdy."

Love grew up in a middle class family in Flynt, Michigan. She regards Michael Moore as "a necessary evil. He intentionally exaggerates to prove a point."

"I fear the day he attacks the porn industry."

"I’m not an animal person. I have kids. I don’t need pets."

Luke: "What was your reputation in high school?"

Sinnamon: "I was a nerd. I was a science geek. And a math geek. I won several competitions. I was the kid who always threw off the curve. So everyone else hated my guts.

"At the same time, I ran track and was a gymnast. I had boyfriends. I wasn’t sleeping around."

She graduated from high school at 16 and moved to Santa Monica. She got married at 17 in a hippie wedding and had two kids. At 19, she got into porn.

"I got divorced. After having children, a lot of my beliefs changed. A lot of things I was into at 17 when I got married and was living a hippie lifestyle changed immediately. I could no longer be with someone who wasn’t focused and motivated.

"I was in school taking 13 units. I was working fulltime at Fred Segals and part-time at Bloomingdales. I had this rent-controlled apartment ($775 a month) in Santa Monica. I found myself struggling to study. It was so difficult to pull it off.

"Initially it crossed my mind to be an artist’s model. I knew other college students that did it. But I didn’t know much about the art scene. I started looking at ads in the LA Weekly. I came across ads for figure modeling. I thought it would be for artists’ models but it turned out to be porn.

"I came across Jim South and Reb at Pretty Girl International. I came across a couple of other directors. I turned them all down initially. That wasn’t what I was looking for. Eventually I came across Rodney Moore. He managed to give me enough information to make me think about it. He offered me enough money to make me think about it.

"I turned him down the first time but he kept coming back to me offering me more and more money until I said yes. I worked for him exclusively the first three months.

"I didn’t know anything about porn. I’d never seen any porn movies. It never crossed my mind to be a stripper. It was enough money to allow me to quit one of my jobs and still go to school and maintain my GPA and be home to take care of my kids."

"Welfare was never an option. I didn’t grow up on welfare. My dad was a supervisor for General Motors. My mom worked for the city.

"When I went to check about getting welfare, they said I earned too much. That I’d have to move out of my apartment, because it was too much. I wasn’t going to make those changes to get $440 welfare a month."

"I left the business for three years and worked at one of the L.A. County clinics and I was miserable. My entire family was affected. During the three years I worked a regular job, I couldn’t go see them."

"What I hate about the business is how mainstream society views people in the industry. I hate that there a handful of people who fulfill that stereotype and reflect on the rest of us. I wish there more people who were more conscientious about the business. I hate that the one girl who ODs at a convention is the one girl everybody wants to interview. Or the girl who was abused as a child…"

Luke: "What are you going to do when you can no longer shoot porn?"

Sinnamon: "I started working as a consultant a few years ago [to a porn company]. I edit videos and stills.

"I didn’t get into this for the fame. I’ve spoken at U.C. Santa Barbara twice, once to a women’s study class on pornography, and once to a film class, for professor Constance Penley. I’ve been speaking to a company that provides speakers for different engagements. I’m trying to get more involved in working with academia. I’ve had an offer to write a book specifically for use in academia on women in porn and my experience as a black woman in porn. I’ve had people interview me a lot for their doctoral thesis…

"I had ovarian cancer in 2004. It came back last year. They found another tumor and I had to have surgery."

Sinnamon Love appears in fewer than 200 titles, including compilations.