"I'm not Joe Camel. I'm just going out and doing my job."

caitlin@sfbg.com

SEX "I was basically wearing a wet sock full of sweat," porn crossover star of the year James Deen tells me. "There was hair everywhere, I was pulling hair out of the girl's mouth."

Perhaps another interviewer would not have led with questions about Deen's recent involvement in an offbeat Kink.com panda gang bang production. Hey, this isn't TMZ. And who doesn't already know the standard gossip about the 26-year old, who has shot porn nearly every day of his life since turning 18?

(Just in case:) This year, Deen became the youngest performer ever to take home the industry's vaunted AVN Award for Best Male Performer. He recently landed a starring role alongside Lindsay Lohan in a new, non-porn feature film penned by Brett Easton Ellis and directed by Paul Schrader, writer of Taxi Driver, American Gigolo, and Raging Bull.

Anyone remotely familiar with the Deen canon knows about the Deenagers, the actor's legions of underage fans who fill Tumblr with odes to his dick and smile. These superfans were immortalized in epic fashion by an ABC Nightline segment which host Terry Moran introduced with this warning of corruption and apocalypse: "For any parent concerned about what their teen does online, the huge popularity of the young man you are about to meet may be deeply disturbing."

But like I said, these facts have been written into public record, and dammit, I want to talk about panda porn. Because although Deen's crossover from Simpsons porn parodies (he played Moe the Bartender, and fucked Cookie Kwan) to The Lohan and Perez Hilton coverage is certainly interesting, the fact that he has also been shooting brutal BDSM porn for years says something else entirely. And he doesn't think anything of it! Perhaps this flip, blogging, boy-door-faced individual is the first real sign that BDSM porn is coming out of the closet (dungeon, steel-barred cage), and into mainstream consciousness.

BAMBOOZLED

In PANDAMONIUM!!! PANDA LULLABY!!! PANDA PORNO!!!!! adult star Ashli Orion is subjected to the penises of six, raping panda bears. One of these panda bears was Deen, in a furry suit with a custom-made dick hole.

"But I thought pandas were supposed to be nice!" Orion pants, surrounded by hazy pink lighting, artfully-placed bamboo shoots, and silent pandas who mostly remove their furry paws by the end of the scene because their fluffy baseball mitts turned out to be prohibitive to the nitty-gritty of sex acts.

The mini-movie could be considered the first Kink.com furry shoot — a wry twist on director Princess Donna's usual product released through Kink subsite Bound Gang Bangs.

Not all of Kink's regulars, and especially not the Bound Gang Bang enthusiasts found PANDAMONIUM!!! to their liking. User comments expressed their concern that Orion wasn't even bound. Given the limited mobility of the men in the panda suits, she had to be mobile for copulation to even be possible. "I spent a lot of time holding fur out of the shot so we could see the penetration on camera," said Princess Donna in an email interview.

"Some people think it's the best thing that ever happened, some people think it's the worst porn ever made," she continued. "That's what happens when you take risks."

But Deen says he did the panda gang bang — just like every other project he takes — less because of the viewers, or for the chance to express himself creatively, as much as the kicks. "Princess Donna said she had this idea, I said that's amazing. While it was going on, I just wanted it to end. There was hair everywhere. But the second it was done and we were all hanging out after I was like, I wanna do it again."