Every story has a beginning.  This is how the story of Lux Nightmare began.

I was lying in bed with my then-boyfriend, in his two room studio in pre-gentrification Fort Greene, and he asked me if I wanted to be a porn star.

More specifically, he asked me if I wanted to model for this site, Nakkid Nerds, because it looked pretty cool and they apparently recruited girls just like me to be models. And wouldn’t it be cool and fun and good?

This was back in spring of 2001: before SuicideGirls made altporn a household word, before Joanna Angel became the darling of the porn world — before altporn peaked; before it was defined (and derided) as little more than hot, skinny girls with tattoos; before altporn even really existed as a concept.

This was back when EroticBPM was still RaverPorn, when social networking meant drinks after work, when Nerve.com was edgy and cool, when the Internet still seemed like a haven of anonymity.

I was eighteen and idealistic, with all sorts of ideas about the power of sexual imagery. I adamantly believed that there was, that there could be, such a thing as pornography that wasn’t exploitative, pornography that celebrated human sexuality, pornography that made people feel beautiful and wonderful and horny rather than dirty and ashamed.

Nakkid Nerds, despite the horribly mispelled name, seemed like it might be that kind of site.

For one thing, it was run by a woman.

For another, that woman was one of the site’s models.

So one day, while I was at my prestigious internship, I sent Cloei an email expressing my interest in becoming a porn star.

A few weeks later she was in my living room, photographing me naked on my couch.

A few weeks after that, I was officially naked on the Internet.

At the time, I thought it was just another crazy adventure, a lark, if you will.  At the time I expected to be involved in porn for a year at the most, that I would model a couple of times and then go back to life as normal.

At the time, I had no idea of what a transformative experience that photo shoot would be for me.

Back in the beginning, it was a simple matter of a digital camera, a room, and the removal of clothes.  Then it went live, and suddenly everything changed.