“All right,” she said when I told her. “Why do you want to do it?”

The answer was complicated. The whole situation had started when a friend emailed me a link to an NSFW short film making the rounds on the Internet. He described it as “hipster guys talking and having sex with each other” -- but awesome. Amazingly, he was right.

Most porn had little to no narrative, unrealistic body types and a severe lack of condoms. But this film was beautifully shot and naturalistic and had a clear artistic vision, in which safe, explicit sex was a companion to sincere filmmaking. I didn’t realize until then what a void had existed in my rampant media consumption: These were people like me … having sex.

I work as a film journalist for an online magazine, and after I wrote a little article about the short film, I began corresponding with the director, Travis, who was starting work on a feature version of the short. I was only half-joking when I said to him, “If you’re ever stuck for a role, keep me in mind. Journalism isn’t quite cutting it for me these days.”

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