Women Leading the Labor Movement: Alana Evans

Meet Alana Evans

Alana Evans has been a performer and producer in the adult entertainment industry for twenty years. She first joined the industry in 1998 to help support her family after her husband was injured at work. The adult entertainment industry makes billions in profits each year. The industry has honored her by inducting Evans into the Adult Video News Hall of Fame and the Urban X Awards Hall of Fame. Today Evans is retired and serves as the President of the Adult Performance Artists Guild. Adult Performers Actors Guild (APAG), a union whose goals are “to earn employee rights, set performer responsibilities, negotiate fair practices, and help performers provide themselves with a better future.” As a union president Evans deals with the same topics as other union officials; wages, benefits, and working conditions. Unlike most other union presidents Evans must deal with those who would make her industry illegal. Evans has opposed regulations that could lead to the criminalization of the adult entertainment industry with the First Amendment as her backbone.

Defining First Amendment Rights

In the 1957 case Roth v. United States, the Supreme Court considered the constitutionality of mailing obscene material. Justice William J. Brennan noted that

“obscenity is not within the area of constitutionally protected speech or press.”

But how do we define what is obscene? Is it possible to establish a national definition of obscenity? If material was considered obscene when the country was founded, is it still obscene? When Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart was asked to describe obscenity in 1964, he responded: “I know it when I see it.”

In the 1973 case Miller v. California the Supreme Court created the ‘Miller Test’ for obscenity:

• Would the average person, applying contemporary community standards, find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest;
• Whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law;
• And whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.

So, in applying the Miller Test, who will define concepts such as ‘average’, ‘community standards’, ‘purient interest’, ‘offensive way’, and what should be considered serious ‘literary, artistic, political, or scientific value’?

“If despite the Constitution . . . , this Nation is to embark on the dangerous road of censorship, . . . this Court is about the most inappropriate Supreme Board of Censors that could be found.”

Justice Black

Morality Crusaders

“Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”

H.L. Mecken

Pornography is viewed by some religious conservatives as a moral crisis. Right wing authoritarians hold views on masculinity that are toxic. Homophobic authoritarians resent the LGBTQ+ movement for demanding constitutional rights and equality in mainstream culture. Extremists have banned literature, even some of the works of Shakespeare. Dylan Mulvaney endorsing Bud Light beer caused a meltdown on the political Right. One of the authors of Trump’s Project 2025, John McEntee calls for the imprisonment of those who produce and distribute pornography. Republican Senator J.D. Vance has said that pornography, along with abortion and birth control, should be banned because it is destructive of marriage and families. The 2016 Republican platform referred to pornography as a public health crisis. Republican Senator Mike Lee supports legislation that would outlaw pornography nationwide through the Internet Obscenity Definition Act (IODA) and Shielding Children’s Retinas from Egregious Exposure on the Net (SCREEN) Act.

There is an old fable about a camel whose owner lets him slip his nose under a tent to keep warm. The camel then slowly slides his head and then the rest of his entire body into the tent, crowding the owner out. The story’s moral is that making small, seemingly unimportant exceptions may lead to great and unwanted exceptions. Proposed adult entertainment laws to require condoms, licensing, certification, and harassment training, could serve to create a data base of performers, who could then be targeted. An inexact definition of obscenity may lead to censorship of what should be constitutionally protected expression.

Alana Evans and the APAG will be on the front lines of battle to define what the First Amendment means.

For more see:
https://apagunion.com/ and https://www.freespeechcoalition.com/.
Sources:
https://history.wustl.edu/i-know-it-when-i-see-it-history-obscenity-pornography-united-states
https://apagunion.com/who-are-apag/officers-of-apag/
https://thehill.com/business-a-lobbying/lobbyist-profiles/572077-organizing-for-adult-entertainers/
https://www.thedailybeast.com/author/alana-evans
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/34745-puritanism-the-haunting-fear-that-someone-somewhere-may-be-happy
https://www.techdirt.com/2023/08/17/masculine-policy-the-gops-plan-to-outlaw-porn-and-suspend-the-first-amendment/
https://meidasnews.com/news/trump-aide-promises-ban-on-pornography-in-2nd-trump-term
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/jd-vance-senate-pornography_n_628d3ba1e4b05cfc2692705b
https://www.newsweek.com/republican-senator-pushes-law-effectively-outlaw-online-porn-nationwide-1767819

Thanks and a tip of the hat to https://apagunion.com/ for the image.