Sex: The Annabel Chong Story (1999)

Director: Gough Lewis

Writer: Kelly A. Morris

Cast: Annabel Chong, John T. Bone, Ed Powers, Walter Williams, Charles Conn, Dick James, Monica Moran, Steve Austin, Jim South, Al Goldstein, Ron Jeremy, Lanisha Shanthi Easter, Mr. Quek, Mrs. Quek, Allenina W.

Ephemeral Waves

 

If Armageddon's going to hit the world, it's going to be in L.A.

This documentary is one I knew of for a long time, back in the early era of DVD when it became popular in the United Kingdom as a film storage medium. Ironically, likely the first time I learnt of said film was a DVD review section of a Playstation 2 magazine, one for the newly released console in a time, talking of its launch titles, when both pieces of tech were brand new. This trivial ancedote is useful to keep in as, whilst that was of the early 2000s in my youth, a time long ago, likewise this 1999 documentary is a time capsule.

Set around a porn actress' most infamous production in 1995, this is a snapshot of the nineties passing us by. The film starts with another standard bearer of nineties culture, beginning with a segment of the Jerry Springer Show. The woman being interviewed, who has had 251 men have sex with her within one day's shooting in ten hours, is Annabel Chong, an Asian porn actress with her perfectly cub bob of black hair and makeup playing up to a glamorous, hyper sexualised image, all whilst she talks of this act, The World's Biggest Gangbang, with complete pride. The pride will still be there, but the hair is a wig, hiding very short dyed red hair, the makeup will be wiped away, and Annabel Chong peels away to show Grace Quek a gender studies student at the University of Southern California, born of a Protestant Singaporean Chinese family and also a gender studies student at the University of Southern California. Why she came to also be a porn actress varies per the testimonies of her fellow students, but Quek proves a much more complex and interesting figure than the film will allow.

Tragically this documentary, which I was optimistic to return to, is one she would disown publically with good reason, leaving a fascinating woman without a good chronicle of her life. But the little we get points nonetheless to a picture of note, or else this opinion would not be found either. Certainly it shows that, for the entire conflict adult cinema has had to struggle through in representation, including clearly using that term over pornography for respectability, it is also still a banal day job with as much cheese as there is sleaziness. With the film structured around the filming of The World's Biggest Gangbang, you see the banality of porn filmmaking. This era, the production in the mid-nineties, is the VHS era. Quek, as Chong with two other Asian actresses, are seen in cheerleader outfits in one clip, about to act out a sex scene together, in a small locker room for a film called I Can't Believe I Did the Whole Team (1994). The head of her fan club is a modest balding man appropriately named Dick James, head of the Annabel Chong Fan Club, even if he is the more sympathetic male in the entire documentary. The film, in one of its good moments, has the absurd image in the midst of a shoot with Chong and another actress pegging a male actor, as female prison wardens punishing a rapist, stood around as a trio. They are all naked, baring strap-ons daggling off the actresses' waists, drinking from disposable cups and smoking, all whilst the other actress talks to the male actor about certain sex positions which are painful for them as female performers. Adult cinema, porn, has to fight both the moral image but also whether it can be artistic, and whilst scenes like this one are humbling in a positive way, such scenes also show the absurdity of the work too.

In the middle of this, you have Grace Quek herself. From a country, Singapore, established in the film of immense religious conservatism and conformity, you see her rebellious nature as well as the fact she is a very intelligent woman. She was already open-minded about sexuality before her career, talking to a teacher of the ancient customs of "temple prostitution" with admiration for the shrine maidens. On The Girlie Show in the United Kingdom, which definitely evokes the nineties, she is seen wearing glasses and a bob hair cut arguing her gangbang has her skewer the image of men being studs, believing they could bed many women at once, whilst she herself has managed to be more of a stud, physically able to actually bed many men at once. Considering how that fantasy from the male perspective is always with a problematic view depending on the context, whether it is from the desire to please the female participants equally or from a desire to dominate, the entire question of endurance and whether it would be physically possible also comes to mind here, something which makes Quek's act more subversive than it already is still.

The shoot itself does look tacky, jarring to witness and looking like the lobby of a casino with its ancient Roman pillars. Many naked men have been herded along like cattle, occasionally stroking themselves, many of which are members of the public offered to come participate, all on a set which also reminds me of a low rent version of the Bob Guccione production of Caligula (1979) if hosted by Ron Jeremy. The film avoids actual shots of real sexual penetration on camera but is still showing the work Grace Quek had to do as Annabel Chong physically, sandwiched in the middle of many men at once in performance, reinforcing that question of whether men would have the endurance to do what she had filmed over ten hours, as well as underlying the complacency of how much the actresses in this industry have to be the faces and do the heavy lifting. It can be problematic as an image, again, depending on the perspective of the images of Quek, as this character, having real sex with many men at once, but there should still be admiration for the women willingly able to bend themselves and act out real sex acts like this, when it is someone like her who is even in this documentary still a person proud of her sexuality and participating as a driving force.

Far more problematically for this production as well, and worthy of thinking about as is continually brought up, is the issues of trying to shot a production with un-trained male participants. Not only does the shoot have to end due to someone's long fingernails scratching her internally, even though they were warned ahead of time, there is a far more serious concern of whether the men were properly tested for sexually transmitted diseases, especially HIV and AIDs. Considering how much the adult industry rigorously tests its participants, and that a decade before in the eighties AIDs and HIV were phantoms which scared society and tragically killed many people, that this is still something not thought about carefully in the mid-nineties is a really inexcusable blunder for Quek and many others involved.

Quek throughout this is utterly sympathetic. Her sexual desires and view to be proud of them are sincere. It is also clear she has been alienated by her background, embracing her desires when she came to the United States and even having grown from originally being uncomfortable with her own body, changing over time this opinion including after a stint of nude modelling for art classes. Without the facade, she is a tomboy who is awkward at times, at times emotionally affected by the world around, but also proud. The real Grace Quek, seen waking up and doing what every other man and woman does, including going to the bathroom, is a real person, someone has had male and female relationships, is for more stronger and charismatic away from the archetype of her Annabel Chong character. Especially when you meet Andy, a trans/gay male friend who does his interview in woman's clothes and a long haired wig like a champion, you see even her friends outside the porn we briefly see are more memorable characters, completely comfortable in his own skin as well as in the scene where Andy and Grace dress in drag just for fun.

In contrast, whilst it never really comes up, Annabel Chong is very much the stereotype of the exotic Asian woman. Slightly simple, and one unfortunate moment (for the promo video asking for men to join the gangbang) calling herself the "newest fortune cookie". The men around her, all men, are usually much older or sway with cocky bravado. The banal truth, that porn is still work that has to take place in offices and be negotiated over phones, is contrasted by the creepy weirdness of interviews where she is asked to peel clothes off at a whim. John T. Bone, the British born director of The World's Biggest Gangbang, comes off as well spoken but the film says he never paid Quek her fee for the film, whilst his choices of words makes him also a hypocrite.

Beyond this, not a lot is actually told to the viewer. The documentary is under ninety minutes which leaves a lot on the table. We get some responses from other adult actors like Ona Zee and Michael J. Cox who are scathing about Chong making their work look bad, but not a lot of whether Chong was actually a big figure at all in this area. Her parents do not know about her career, and whilst this leads to the very real and uncomfortable moment when her mother does find out, this is merely a fragment. Few in her family or old teachers in Singapore do know of her career, and those who do hide the fact, and again that is merely a little fragment. There is however much of this undiscovered or elaborated upon - there is a lot that is left about a cultural divide, between the United States and Singapore, the later with very negative views of pornography and having ideas of "saving face". There is also the entire fact her record would be broken by Jasmine St. Clair a year later. Looking completely alien to St. Clair, with insane amounts of enhancement and visually more exaggerated, St. Clair is barely dealt with either. This is of note as, in contrast to the simple figure here, St. Claire including her weird and constant connection to professional wrestling is a lot more fascinating than what we are provided with here when her shoot is tackled.

There is a suspicion of the film in structure when a phone call between a porn producer and Quek has intercut scenes between both, as unless you could have two cameras at two locations, it would be entirely or partially constructed. Then the film, when dealing with the darkness of the business, crosses a line. Around the time of Jasmine St. Claire taking her record, the film abruptly skips t a scene of Quek cutting herself in a lounge, the act of self harm (to the arm). It is without context, expect as shorthand to show her depression, but as someone (without discussing personal details) who has seen this and depression from a personal place, I question filming this material, especially with the abruptness it is depicted with and how casually it is never brought up again. Just as one morally problematic moment happens, as if to enforce this, the film in its trip to London abruptly tackles how she was sexually assaulted by multiple men one night during an incident. Never tactfully talked of, but with footage of her at the location, with the subtitle "Rape Site Revisited" actually used, and never elaborated on in a meaningful way.

In fact, when you dig a little deeply into the film's background, Quek's own disownment of the documentary includes the details that she and the director Gough Lewis were in a relationship at the time. On one hand, it explains some of the intimate sequences, of her in the bath at her parents' home or dressed down by herself, but it rises some uncomfortable issues of what Lewis intended with the footage, including the fact he creates a work only with the bare essentials from a fascinating figure. Instead, it goes to the generic old hat conclusion of the perils of porn as it ends with Grace Quek going back to work as a depressed ending.  

As a result, everything when you learn of this is tainted. Returning to the film an era later for me, without this context initially Sex was already problematic for how the director paints the same story of porn chewing out actresses without any sense of weight to it. It returns to her donning the wig, the makeup too, out for another shot, but when you consider it, is this just instead redundant. The only detail which success with Sex, now a relic, is the paradox, one what Grace Quek is happens to be an honest-to-God a pro sex feminist, whose act (when you get to the conclusion of the shoot) to have sex with two hundred and fifty one men in one day is still subversive, but is put together by a group of heterosexual older cis-white men, not really thinking subversively at all about the concept let alone any unsavoury details to their business practices.

It is also a relic because Grace Quek's story has a better ending now. That, retiring in 2003, she would kill off the character of Annabel Chong, rarely discussing her career after becoming a web developer of yore baring 251, a 2007 play written by male LGBT writer Ng Yi Sheng and directed by Loretta Chen based upon Quek's story, leading to some communication to the outside world if not a great deal¹. Within recent years, she has thankfully softened her views on her past as a certain quote below from her Twitter attests too...

 

I am digging myself from a deep hole in terms of my ability to be a #hardcore athlete and a software engineer at a high level – I am not there yet. I am working on it. And I will make it because being #hardcore is fun – and I like fun.²

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1) HERE.

2) HERE