Shelley Lubben paints herself as the savior of the working girl, a former porn star and prostitute who fell as far as a person can into drug, alcohol, and sex addiction, then found Jesus and cleaned herself up. She tells an inspiring story about how God picked her up from the pit of despair and lifted her to where she is now—apparently morally elevated enough to come swooping back into the world of porn and perversion to tell all the broken-down degenerates about the errors of their ways. She runs The Pink Cross Foundation, a charitable organization that helps sex industry workers clean up and get respectable with the help of counseling, monetary funding, and (of course) the helping hand of our Lord and Savior. The Pink Cross also offers help with porn and drug addiction and is actively seeking to change legislation and enforcement of health and safety laws in the sex industry in order to protect performers and prostitutes from sexually transmitted diseases.
While it’s true that Shelley’s story is a terrifying one, and that she is to be respected for getting her life together after her trials… And while it’s also true that we here at WHACK! support her goals of getting better protection and regulation of health and safety for porn performers and of helping those who want to get out of the industry do so in a positive way… It’s also true that the woman is obviously an unrepentant attention whore (I guess some habits do die hard) with more of a Christ-inspired personal vendetta against porn than a real understanding of the industry she told us she’s out to slander.
We caught up with Ms. Lubben at Exxxotica, NY in late September, where she had a booth set up between Burning Angel and the Fantasy Island sex-star-vaganza, like a DP scene with a slutty saint in the middle. Just as dolled up as the still-active porn whores around her, at 41, in heavy makeup and huge heels, St. Lubben stood at her booth looking like a busted up MILF, but a MILF with a message. We didn’t speak to her our first day there, choosing instead to hang out with the porn stars with fewer bugs up their asses (although if you ask Shelley, we’re sure she’ll tell you they’re all dripping with anal diseases). But we ran into her, interestingly enough, in the wee hours of the morning in the VIP after-after party, a drug- and booze-fueled sin-fest of epic proportions. St. Lubben was dressed to the nines in a tight, glittery pink gown far and away more dressy than anything the twenty-something sluts around her were wearing, and she was dancing dirty with porn stars in the corner while the rest of us looked on in amazement. For a woman who’s out to get the porn industry for the horrific abominations it put her through, she sure seemed eager to get in with ‘the cool kids,’ as herpes-infested and abused as they may be.
We were caught in our debauchery only a short while later by the hotel management and asked to leave the lounge we’d taken over. In the elevator on the way downstairs, I ended up face to face with St. Lubben and some of her similarly decked out Christ lovers. It was awkward. I was drunk and stoned and confused about what they were doing there, but they nevertheless tried to start a conversation, probably assuming I was a performer and slobbering at the chance to save my soul. I bolted out of the elevator at my floor and passed out.
The next day, intrigued by the display we’d seen the night before (we didn’t actually catch her boozing or smoking, but if our hangovers were any indication, she was probably feeling pretty rough, too) WHACK! Magazine approached the saintly street walker for a short interview:
Woah. Wait. What? Besides looking and talking like someone in the depths of a hysteria-inducing meth binge while carrying a weighty personal chip on her shoulder easily as large as Jesus’s cross, the woman seems to be on a rampage to get the industry shut down because of what it did to her? Based on a bunch of trumped up “facts” she gleaned selectively from reality and the inner doldrums of her own dementia? Shelley, honey, the numbers are all wrong. You’re delusional; obscenity cases seeking to shut down the porn biz have come and gone and have never worked. Even if you were to win and get the industry outlawed, do you think that would stop amateurs with no AIM tests for HIV from fucking each other in risky and demeaning ways on film? No—because porn is as old as humanity itself, and it doesn’t matter how much you hate it personally—it will keep right on ramming its diseased dick up the assholes of wannabe whores the world over. Oh, and by the way, the wild-eyed look and mile-a-minute delivery are not earning you any credibility.
When we got home from more debauching, we checked out the Pink Cross website. Well, shit. Apart from being a terrible writer with a very bad grasp of grammar or spelling, it appears St. Lubben is also embarrassingly bad at using that bleached blond head of hers for…well, thinking. She seems to be much better at laying all her problems and worries at God’s feet and insisting others do the same.
For instance, she claims that the porn industry caused her to develop bipolar disorder, depressive disorder, and impulse control disorder, for which she was prescribed medicine and hardcore psychiatric counseling. Now, nobody is going to say that it doesn’t suck that she went through such vile debasement – all whores do. But she might have wanted to check into how people go about getting these disorders before blaming them on porn; they’re mostly genetically based issues that come to the surface after adulthood, no matter what line of work you’re in. She’d still be bipolar and impulsive if she’d become an accountant.
In a similarly sense-free turn of illogic ideas, she claimed to us that most female porn stars were abused as children, trying to imply that this inherently reflects badly on the porn industry. And while we of course agree that it’s terrible that these women were abused, we just can’t wrap our heads around how this is supposed to incriminate their career paths. Sure, the industry might prey upon damaged people with unorthodox views about their sexuality, but so does most of the world and porn itself can’t be blamed for the abuse these women have suffered. And, hell, even abused and broken people have to make a living somehow. Everybody’s gotta eat.
Really, what it comes down to is this: making a big stink about how porn hurt you and how it’s a bad industry that people shouldn’t support is not going to get you headlines. Shelley, people have been telling the public for centuries that porn is morally reprehensible, that it’s made for viewing by the scum of the earth by the only scum scummier than they are, that it’s evil and vile and terrible and dehumanizing and so on. We’ve all heard it a million times.
Which, my sweet St. Lubben, is why porn is in the state it’s in. It’s because of people like you—who go around threatening to have it shut down and calling it names—that porn has been relegated to such a corner of moral degeneracy. People have been told your message for their whole lives, and the result is that they flock to ever more secretive ways of fulfilling their desire for it, darker corners, deeper pits of degrading sex acts, more and more violent, abusive videos. We support your desire to raise awareness of the pitfalls of porn, but we are begging you to get off your high horse for just a second and look around. Porn as a product for people to consume is not going to go away, and neither is the public’s desire to consume it. Raising awareness is good—seeking change for the better in the industry is good. Trying to outlaw it, drag its name through the mud…all you’ll end up doing is making it dirtier than it was before, and maybe even getting your pink sparkly gown muddy in the process.
— Miss Lagsalot