Bad Kat comes to K Street
- Bad Kat comes to K Street
- By Jim Snyder [1]
The road Kat Sunlove took to becoming a lobbyist was both typical and unusual. Master’s degree in political science. Campaign consultant and grassroots organizer. Erotic dominance practitioner.
Sunlove, who worked on several political campaigns in California in the 1970s, dates her interest in government to “eighth-grade civics class." But she took a big detour during the 1980s: S&M advice columnist, lecturer at bondage workshops, publisher of a soft-core sex magazine, and an on-again, off-again, six-month stint as a professional dominatrix.
“I was like, ‘Oh, that sounds like fun. I think I’ll go play with some people,’" says Sunlove, who went by Mistress Kat back then.
However she got here, she is here, eating buttered whole-wheat toast and sipping cappuccino in a hotel restaurant within walking distance of Capitol Hill. Last week she flew in from California for a series of quiet visits with House and Senate offices to explain the wants and needs of her only client: the pornography industry.
Worried about being typecast, Sunlove would rather focus on bills that would harm her industry, which she likes to portray as just regular folks looking for respect.
Sunlove, who went by Penny before she changed her name to Kat, says she spent an idyllic childhood in Kilgore, Texas. She says her experience with sadism and masochism has helped her in the rough-and-tumble world of politics. This polite, friendly grandmother with a sly sense of humor is no pushover.
“One of the things about playing around in that arena is that it opened up for me parts of myself as a good girl from Texas I would really have squelched. The ability to wield power; the ability to make the world move in the direction that I wanted it to," Sunlove says.
Trading society’s restraints for leather ones, Sunlove stresses, doesn’t make her a bad person.
“There is a sense that we are sleazy and underground and don’t run real businesses. That’s totally contradictory from the reality," she says.
The pornography industry, once limited to scratchy film and a few magazines, is now everywhere: video, DVDs, home computers, and iPods. But its presence doesn’t extend to national politics. There’s no PAC, zero junkets and just one K Street firm working on the industry’s behalf.
Sunlove is trying to push the industry into the political mainstream as the lead lobbyist for the Free Speech Coalition (FSC), a group founded in the early 1990s that has grown to 3,000 members - pornographers, bookstore owners, DVD distributors, porn stars, etc.
“Working with this industry, I get the sense that there is this great paradox," says Robert Raben, a former assistant attorney general for legislative affairs who founded his own lobbying shop, the Raben Group. The firm represents the FSC.
Pornography “is among the most popular products in the country. The participation rate by adults is enormous," Raben says.
“But there is so much of a lack of education about what the modern industry is. There is a lot of concern and preconceived notions about what it means to work with them."
Over the past decade, in large part through Sunlove’s efforts, the FSC has become a bit of a player in the California political scene. Sunlove and the FSC pushed through a bill to keep law-enforcement officials from indefinitely holding computers seized under suspicion that they hold illegal material.
Sunlove insists that some bookstores selling pornography had been driven out of business because they didn’t get their computers back for six months, even though no illegal material had been found.
If that seems like a modest victory, consider that a decade earlier Sunlove threw a coming-out party for the FSC in Sacramento, inviting state legislators and their staffs to mingle with porn industry lobbyists and stars. Despite receiving RSVPs from many of them saying they planned to attend, no one showed. Sunlove went outside to investigate.
“There was the right-wing with a video camera ready to videotape any member who had the audacity to come to my event," she says. “I was really offended."
So now the FSC holds an annual lobbying day, at which stars and Sunlove knock on doors to increasingly warm receptions. Her yearly party is now the “hot ticket," says Sunlove, who cut her teeth on grassroots political campaigns in California before becoming either a lobbyist or a dominatrix.
She dreams of holding a similar event in Washington but is treading carefully. “I find myself trying to be a little more circumspect" in D.C., she says. “California is California, after all."
She not only turned down a reporter’s offer to accompany her on visits to the House and Senate but wouldn’t disclose which offices she visited except to say that there were five. She focused her visits on Judiciary Committee members, but during her visit on a recent Monday, she didn’t speak to any lawmakers.
A few bills are of particular concern to her and the FSC. Sens. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) and Mark Pryor (D-Ark.) are introducing legislation that would create a .xxx Internet domain for pornographic material, to “facilitate the protection of minors." The FSC believes a .xxx domain would only shunt American-produced content to a new realm and therefore disadvantage homegrown smut.
Another bill would put a 25 percent tax on pornographic materials bought online. And still, another, sponsored by Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.), would expand labeling and record-keeping laws to what the FSC says would be an impossible standard to meet. The bill is intended to protect children against sexual abuse.
While Sensenbrenner’s intentions are “undoubtedly good, he really focuses on the wrong problem," Sunlove says. “We are not the problem. Child pornographers don’t keep records."
Like any lobbyist, Sunlove carries with her a white paper that explains the extensive economic benefits her client offers. DVD and videos sales reach close to $4 billion; hotel adult-movie rentals account for $190 million; fantasy phone-sex lines generate as much as $1 billion in revenue.
Part of Sunlove’s mission is to activate this substantial base, a job in which the obstacles are obvious. The FSC runs a political action center at pornography trade shows such as LA Erotica. At its booth, the group offers a computer on which users can type in their ZIP codes and see how to contact their members of Congress.
If they pledge to contact their lawmakers, in return they get autographs from porn stars.
And what of these porn stars, paid to have sex on camera? Aren’t they exploited?
Sunlove, who used to be an organizer for the Hotel Restaurant Employees and Bartenders Union, says this in response:
“Let me tell you about some oppressed women. That hotel maid who is up there cleaning my bathroom works for not much more than minimum wage. She may or may not have benefits. She has no control over her hours of operation. She has no flexibility in her schedule.
“That is not the case for women in the adult entertainment industry."
But she acknowledges, “I brought this dominant aura with me, and everybody was slightly intimidated. I never got exploited at all."
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