I Studied Queer Pornography in Law School and Was Told the Subject Would Ruin My Career

“Because Fat Girl” author Lauren Marie Fleming on pursuing her career passions despite the naysayers

Because Fat Girl author Lauren Marie Fleming; photo by Alicia Garzon

When I first started writing about sex, people warned me it would ruin my career. I was in law school at the time, doing my thesis paper on queer pornography, and in their defense, most judges and firms would frown upon hiring an expert on such a risqué topic.

But I was fascinated by obscenity and queer pornography. Not necessarily the images and videos themselves—although those can be great when done well—but what sex means on a social and political level. You can tell a lot about a person by the way they react to the topic of pornography. And you can tell a lot about a society by how they try to regulate it.

Did you know that for a long time the legally deciding factor of whether something was obscene or not was “I know it when I see it?” Which meant that the United States Supreme Court Justices would go down into the courthouse basement and watch porn to decide whether it was obscene and should be banned.

Just imagine that for a moment.

Old, conservative, white guys in robes.

Sitting in a basement of a government building.

Watching porn that’s been deemed too obscene for the general public.

That’s the kind of hypocrisy that drew me to this topic.

So while my fellow law students found their niches of environmental law or trusts and estates, I did a deep dive into obscenity laws, specifically how they related to the super queer, hairy, kinky queer porn revolution that was happening around 2010.

I was good at this offbeat research—really good at it. My love and respect for this topic shone through and soon I had columns in multiple magazines, was being interviewed by news outlets, and received invites to speak at conferences and colleges, including Yale.

Yes, I was invited to speak about queer pornography at Yale.

Try explaining that to your grandparents.

The context changed depending on my audience—embracing your niche for the mommy bloggers, protecting yourself from lawsuits for the sex educators, the way obscenity laws adversely affect marginalized groups for the activists—and I found ways to make conversations about pornography accessible to those who would otherwise have avoided the topic.

I became the kind of success story they talk about in business school. I found a hole in the market, created a niche for myself out of that hole, and dominated that niche.

At the relatively young age of 30, my credits included writing columns for VICE, Huffington Post, and Curve magazine, and being featured in Cosmopolitan, xoJane, Jezebel, Bustle, and Glamour, to name a few, all because I’d chosen a topic no one else was talking about. That’s not to mention the conferences and colleges I was invited to speak at. That prestige and exposure led me to get jobs, launch programs, and speak at other conferences.

What people said would destroy my career ended up making it.

Eventually my curiosity about the subject was satiated and I turned my attention to other topics—writing about body image, starting my company SchoolForWriters.com, and publishing romance novels with a cast of diverse characters—but the connections and professional credibility I gained through writing and speaking about pornography still benefit me today.

I say all of this not to brag, although I proudly wave my hard-earned receipts. I say this because throughout all of this, every mentor, professor, career coach, and random person I met told me I was absolutely insane for following this path.

Never mind that I loved it. Never mind that I was making decent to good money from it. Never mind that it opened so many doors for me.

I just had to say “I write about queer porn” and the lectures would come. They never stopped to hear what came after that.

Sometimes, I felt like the “I’m a writer” part offended people more than the topic itself.

Once, about a year after law school, I attended the wedding of two fellow graduates. I was minding my own business, waiting in line for a drink, when an older lady behind me asked me how I knew the couple.

“I went to law school with them,” I said.

“Oh, my husband is a judge.” She glowed as bright as the giant diamond on her finger. “What type of law do you practice?”

“I’m a writer.” I beamed back.

“Why would you throw away your degree like that?” she scolded, her face stern. “You wasted a space in a prestigious law school that someone could have used to make a difference in this world, and you have debt you’ll never be able to pay back. How dare you.”

She didn’t care that at the table where I sat with eight other graduates, I was the only one with steady work. She didn’t care that I was working with the National Center for Lesbian Rights to help legalize gay marriage. She didn’t care that I was following my passion and full of joy for the first time after my brother died.

She heard “writer” and instantly assumed I was a starving, tortured, drain on society.

What do you say to someone like that? Do you defend yourself? Educate her on how wrong she was? Apologize for offending her, even though that would kill a part of your soul that was tired of people defining your worth to you?

I didn’t know what to say. So I said nothing. Instead, in very Lauren fashion, I started to dance around her—literally.

It was slow at first, a tap of my foot and sway of my head. But soon I was cutting a rug, bopping and swinging and just letting all of that negativity leave my body through movement. Instead of responding, I just continued to dance around her, letting her words wash over and out of me, choosing to embody queer joy instead.

Now, whenever someone tries to put their own limiting beliefs on me—beliefs they absorbed from others before them—I just start dancing.

Yes, it looks ridiculous. Yes, they stare at me like I’m mentally unstable.

But that moment of pure embodied joy is worth it.

It’s the same pure embodied joy I feel when I teach programs through SchoolForWriters.com or promote my upcoming queer romance novel Because Fat Girl.

It’s that feeling of following your passion no matter how niche, risqué, or hard the road.

Now, 11 years later, I’m a full-time writer, speaker, and coach helping people and companies discover their unique stories and telling them to the world. Each time I take on a new coaching client, I tell them my history of talking about porn. I do this for a few reasons. First off, it eliminates people I wouldn’t want to work with anyways. But more importantly, it gives them permission to get specific, to go niche, and to be daring in their creative and professional pursuits.

It’s all about context, I tell them.

Find a subject you love and you’ll find a way to make others love it too.

So I encourage you, dear reader, to do the same, to dig a little deeper, go a little farther into your niche, and to have the audacity to follow your curiosity, wherever it might take you.

Because the world needs your story now more than ever.

Lauren Marie Fleming (xe/her) is the author of the novel Because Fat Girl and the self-help book Bawdy Love: 10 Steps to Profoundly Loving Your Body. Lauren is also the founder of SchoolForWriters.com where she helps diverse storytellers thrive. Xe has been featured in prominent media outlets including Good Morning America, Glamour, and Cosmopolitan, and has had columns for Curve magazine, VICE, and the Huffington Post. Xe is an entertaining and educating keynote speaker and has spoken at prestigious conferences and colleges including Yale, Brown, Wordstock, BinderCon, and BlogHer. When not traveling, Lauren can be found walking her dog on the beach in San Diego listening to a good audiobook. Learn more about Lauren's writing and courses at LaurenMarieFleming.com.