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A change in US Obscenity Law went into effect making it more difficult to legally post adult material on the web. Previously, 18 USC Section 2257 only required producers of pornographic material (such as porn studios) to keep proof on file of legal age of all models depicted, but the new version of the law redefines "producer" as ANYONE WHO PUBLISHES ADULT MATERIAL, EVEN MERELY IN AN ELECTRONIC FORMAT. This sweeping and comprehensive change requires web sites to provide links to or documentation for everyone pictured on them engaged in a “sexual act”—which was redefined as merely touching oneself! The galleries here featured many such images, and it would have been an impossible task to track down all this information for every single person from every single studio. The other option was to delete all images now deemed “obscene” which had previously been permissible. Failure to do so could have resulted in hefty fines and jail time.
Who was behind the clampdown? The United States Department of Justice under Attorney General Roberto Gonzales. Many in the Adult Industry expected the Religious Right to launch an assault on pornography as soon as Bush got into the White House. The so-called “War or Terror” quickly became an assault on Free Speech. As always, they claim the necessity of such measures to "protect children from pornography" even though expert after expert has testified repeatedly that internet filtering software achieves that aim in a more effective way. This new law puts a HUGE (and some lawyers have argued impossible) burden on adult web site operators, that will probably achieve little more than driving adult web hosting abroad to circumvent such overreaching restrictions. A similar measure was attempted in Australia, and it failed to limit access from within that country to adult content as well. Children certainly need to be shielded from inappropriate material, but if the US Government does so by effectively censoring what people can and can't see we might as well be living in Burma.
Years later, it’s clear to many that the Department of Justice is now an authoritarian arm of an executive branch trying to control everything Americans do. Their harassment of law-abiding citizens for political reasons has made national headlines, but the legal quagmire created by the Bush administration only deepens. The constitutionality of the law that shut down this site is now being argued in the courts, and it’s a protracted and expensive battle like many this government has initiated. So control over the fate of this tiny slice of the web was taken away from Steve then, and remains that way now.
So what did I, Steve Pierce, do when my site disappeared? Once out of the public eye, I took the opportunity to work on something I always wanted to do: write a book. I’m thrilled to announce that’s it’s been published and is now available. Is it sexy? It was written by a porn star—of course it is! But to classify it as erotica would be an understatement—there’s so much more to it than that. I created a brand new web site to let people know about the book, and there are some new photos of me there as well. I wasn’t going to sit idly by while the Bush government unleashed all this havoc, so I took on an issue that’s very close to my heart, and I hope my notoriety will help shine the limelight on it. You can find out a lot more about it, and about me, by following the link below: