Over the weekend, a vintage clip of Hillary Clinton went viral. In the two-minute footage, the former Democratic presidential nominee echoed a familiar strain of liberal logic: “If you don’t want to support Democrats,” she said, referring to progressive critics of Kamala Harris, “go somewhere else.” The quote came from a 2017 interview, but users responded as if Clinton said it yesterday. “One more time for the Bros in the back,” an account with the display name ExistentialCliche wrote. A guy called BernieBro Sub-Commander shot back: “Can’t wait until Bernie wins the primary. Then you can ‘go somewhere else.’” The exchange rehashed a two-year-old sticking point between Clintonites and so-called “Bernie Bros”—namely, that the ex-first lady, pretty unambiguously, disavows progressives and Democratic Socialists.
But as the clip garnered comments in the thousands, some 2,500 miles from D.C. in Las Vegas, Nevada, a different kind of Hillary Clinton was saying almost the opposite.
Nina Hartley, the sex educator and adult industry veteran, who played Clinton in the political porno Who’s Nailin’ Paylin and a number of other XXX films, was walking the red carpet of the 36th annual AVN Awards, the Oscars of Porn. Hartley’s politics are considerably left of Hillary’s, to say the least, as she slips between casual dirty talk and quoting Marx: “I’ve seen a lot of change since I first began 35 years ago,” Hartley told The Daily Beast, “from video, to digital, to internet, to direct-to-the-fans consumer opportunities, to the workers owning the means of production.”
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Hartley, who played a Clinton knock-off named “Hilly” in the 2008 satire, self-identifies as a progressive. “I’m a red diaper baby,” she said. “I’m a Democratic Socialist. There are some things the federal government is essential for and some things best left to local government.”
On the red carpet Saturday night, the alt-Hillary argued for many positions the real Hillary would take umbrage with. She’s brazenly pro-union. She supports Medicare for All. She's also a vocal skeptic of Kamala Harris and the presidential hopeful’s prosecutorial past.
“I’m not for Kamala Harris, because she’s very anti-sex work,” Hartley said. “She’s a prosecutor. She supported SESTA/FOSTA, the anti-sex-trafficking bill.”
SESTA/FOSTA, which passed in April 2018, amended the law to hold internet providers accountable for any “trafficking” that takes place on their sites. It has been sharply criticized by sex workers, who claim online arenas like the personal ad website Backpage provided them with a safe outlet to advertise their services and screen potential clients.
“[Harris] would not talk to sex workers,” Hartley continued. “She has the criminal model of sex work. I have the harm-reduction model—give us the opportunity and ability to take care of ourselves. But closing down the internet and Backpage and making internet providers responsible has pushed women back onto the streets, back into the arms of their pimps. People have died because of SESTA/FOSTA. That doesn’t bother her. I do not approve of her for president.”
Born to avowed communists (her father was blacklisted in 1957), Hartley grew up in '70s-era San Francisco, on the fringes of the civil rights movement, the gay rights movement, women’s liberation, the sexual revolution and the human potential movement (as a result of the latter, she also identifies as a “quasi-neo-pagan”). Hartley’s parents, as she once told the journalist Cenk Uygur on one of several appearances on leftist talk show The Young Turks, were “right in the thick of it.”
After sneaking into a screening Autobiography of a Flea at age 17, a young Hartley set her sights on a career in the adult world, in part, she told The Daily Beast, because the dynamics were so politically rich.
“When I first got into porn, I was the only one in the business with a political attitude,” she said. “Now, I’m old enough to have children the age of the sex workers now, 25-35, and they’re banding together, getting on their legs and saying no way, rights not rescue. Sex work is real work. Let us survive.”
Hartley, a pro-union diehard, has long been involved in the Adult Performer Advocacy Committee (APAC), one of the closest things sex workers have to a union. “We’re not really suited for unionization,” Hartley said, “But now that people are staying for longer than two years, it is becoming a career for people, so we do need some kind of organization, that’s just a peer-to-peer support group, if only. APAC gives talks about tax information, mental health information, information on how to manage relationships off camera. We do a lot of support for performers.”
Over the years, Hartley says, she’s seen sex workers start organizing more and more. “They’re politicized,” she said. “They’re out and proud. There’s a wonderful saying in French, I don’t know how to say it in French: when prostitutes unite, powerful men tremble. Because sex workers keep sexual secrets, and in a country as poisoned as ours is about sexuality, secrets are toxic.”
Hartley does have one thing in common with Hillary: she’s not in the Bernie 2020 camp. But not for ideological reasons. She agrees, more or less, with his platform: “I’m Jewish, and I think it will be a long time before America elects an atheist Jew.”
Updated 1/28 to correct the name of the film to Autobiography of a Flea.
