Gallery Carre
RKB interviews Lux Nightmare for Gothamist
Mar 16th, 2025 by Viviane
The pseudonymous Lux Nightmare burst onto the alt porn scene as a college student at Columbia where she launched the naked-guy-and-girl site That Strange Girl, featuring stills and video of herself and numerous other models who looked like they could be her fellow classmates. At a time when Suicide Girls and Burning Angel were coming to prominence, That Strange Girl (who, full disclosure, this interviewer posed for) was a homegrown, indie entry in the genre. Cut to the present, where Nightmare has since folded her XXX business and is a member of Gotham Girls Roller Derby, teaches sex ed to teenagers in East Harlem, and runs the smarty-pants sex site Sexerati, where she conducts interviews, explores Dating 2.0, and explains terms like “the pink ghetto.” (Warning: many of the links in this interview are NSFW.) Currently, the “non porn star” is working on a book proposal about her time in the alt porn trenches.
You say on your site that you’ve been obsessed with sex since 1982. How has your sex obsession grown and changed over the years?
I’ve been interested in sex, in one way or another, for as long as I can remember. My parents were pretty good about being honest about sex and sexuality (my first book about sex: Where Do I Come From?, featuring illustrations of fat naked people and information on sex, baby making, and orgasms) and I never really got the message that sex was something I should be ashamed about or afraid of talking about.
I started doing work around sex at the age of fourteen, doing HIV/AIDS education for the Red Cross as part of a peer education program. When I got to college, I continued work in the sex education vein (working at the health education center, working as an HIV pretest counselor), but also started to branch out into other areas of work around sexuality. College was where I really started to get interested in the “sex positive” movement: I got involved with queer culture, and learned a lot about sex-positive feminism—and, in some ways, that was what really paved the way towards my work in porn.
These days, I’m more interested in being academic about sex, and examining sex and sexuality as a part of our culture as a whole. I find sex endlessly fascinating: no matter where you look, or what subject you’re discussing, there’s probably some way that sex has an effect, an impact. I find that pretty awesome, and still don’t quite get why it is that people think I’m odd for wanting to devote my life to the study of this topic.
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