Even among hard-core pornographers, Rob Black is considered a sleazebag. His movies are packed with images that the porn industry itself has long censored (rape, drug use, hitting women with dead fish), and he gleefully rebels against the industry's recent agreement to have its stars use condoms. At last month's Video Software Dealers Association convention, held in 115[degree] Las Vegas heat, Black, 25, stands in a black suit with a black sweater, his face multipierced and satanically goateed. His mother, a plump, pleasant-looking nurse from Rochester, N.Y., bursts into the curtained-off adult section of the convention floor toting her favorite actor, Shemar Moore, who plays Malcolm on The Young and the Restless. "I said to him, 'I'm Rob Black's mother. Do you know who he is?'" she squeals to her son. "And he said, 'Yeah.' I said, 'You want to meet him?' And he said, 'Sure!'"
Although emotional mother-son scenes are still rare in the porn industry, the conflation of mainstream entertainment and hard-core films is not. As porn-video rentals and sales have steadily grown into a $4.2 billion-a-year business (nearly 14% of all video transactions and more than a quarter of the home-video industry's revenue), the mainstream media have started to cash in on the growing celebrity of hard-core performers. Howard Stern, Jerry Springer and the E! channel regularly feature porn stars as guests on their TV shows, while film directors like Spike Lee and John Frankenheimer use them in cameos as a hip name check. The industry's reigning star, Jenna Jameson, told TIME she's quitting the business to pursue a clothes-on acting career. Having become a World Wrestling Federation manager and landed a speaking part in Stern's film Private Parts, Jameson says she is receiving scripts unsolicited. "Nowadays it's kind of a cool thing to have adult stars in other movies," she says. "It's the right time for someone like me to hit in Hollywood."
The major players in the porn industry are so confident of their growing acceptability that they seemed unfazed when New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani padlocked sex shops this month in Times Square. That's because most of the industry's money is made in suburban video stores. Almost as much is earned on cable-TV systems that make sexually explicit films available on pay-per-view and adult channels. Steve Hirsch, president of Los Angeles-based Vivid Video, the world's largest producer of adult films, dismisses the loss of Times Square: "We're not going to lose any customers."
Vivid, with $25 million in annual sales, has focused on producing couples-friendly, plot-heavy 35-mm films costing up to $200,000 and selling them to the Playboy Channel, the Spice Channel, Spectravision systems in hotel rooms, and foreign television. With Playboy, Vivid co-owns AdulTVision, an adult-movie channel available on many cable systems. And Vivid is negotiating with Playboy to buy Hot Spice, a new hard-core cable channel.