Shine Louise Houston

Shine Louise Houston's films have screened at film festivals around the world. Houston speaks widely on issues of representation and sexual freedom of expression.[3] She is heavily involved with the feminist and queer art community as well as doing sexual health work and sex worker activism.[1][3] In her work, Houston features a diverse range of ethnicities, body types, non-conforming genders, and sexual identities[4][1] Houston has been written about widely in numerous publications on the intersections of race, pornography, and desire. Ariane Cruz, a professor of women's studies at Penn State, writes in her book, The Color of Kink,

[Houston's] films showcase stunning cinematography, inventive narratives, and incredibly diverse performers with respect to race, gender, and body. Houston's work critically queers representations of black [women's] sexual desire, offering modes of pleasure outside hegemonic, heteronormative representations of black female sexuality in pornography.[2]

Critics have stated that Houston's work counters inauthentic representations of women, trans, gender nonconforming, and queer folks of color's sexuality and desire in mainstream porn.[5] They also feel that Houston incorporates her own pleasure and desire as a black women into her pornography acting as a self-aware voyeur and camera operator.[1][5]

Houston received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Film from the San Francisco Art Institute.[2]

After graduating, Houston worked at a Good Vibrations sex shop in the San Francisco Bay area for five years.[3] While at Good Vibrations, Houston found an underserved need for queer-made pornography when customers asked for recommendations on the search for representation of their own sexual communities.[1] Community demand inspired Houston to band together with friends to make their own queer pornography.[5] Houston founded Pink and White Productions and in 2008 launched the queer pornography distribution site CrashPadSeries.com.[1] The company's first queer porn feature, Crash Pad, starring Jiz Lee, establishes the location of all the subsequent CrashPadSeries episodes.[1] The Crash Pad is an apartment located in San Francisco dedicated to mutual pleasure based queer sex and Houston acts as Key Keeper to the Crash Pad.[5] Houston incorporates into the scene her presence behind the camera via her own kink, and participation, as a voyeur.[1] In the feature SuperFreak she stars as the ghost of Rick James.[4] The ghost possesses people on a mission to turn the whole world into SuperFreaks having great sex.[2] All models in Pink and White Productions videos seek them out, and Houston organizes scenes around the model's personal fantasies.[2] CrashPadSeries.com debuts episodic, reality-based queer pornography videos.[5] The site is set up like a blog, featuring photos and identity profiles of the stars to make visible the alternate gender identities and sexualities represented in their videos.[1] As of 2017, Houston is in post-production for their next feature, Snapshot, a horror film dedicated to complicating the limited "coming out" narrative predominantly featured in mainstream media.[6]

• A Taste for Brown Sugar: Black Women in Pornography by Mireille Miller-Young
• Black Female Sexualities edited by Trimiko Melancon
• Freeing Ourselves: A guide to Health and Self Love for Brown Bois by The Brown Boi Project
• Porn After Porn, "Mighty Real," Shine Louise Houston, Sept 2014 (Reprinted with Permission in XBIZ Fall 2014 Issue)
• Porn for Pussies: Representations of Queer Female Sexuality in Shine Louise Houston's Pornography by Engel Nicole, Presented at the National Women's Studies Association

• Annie Sprinkle[1]
• Joani Blank[1]
• Rick James[4]
• Radley Metzger[7]
• Jim Jarmusch[7]
• Alfred Hitchcock[6]
• Michelangelo Antonioni[6]

• Official website
• Shine Louise Houston at IMDb