Porn performer with AS?

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To be honest, I’ve never had that many friends. I’m always on my own and I’m probably quite socially odd. I don’t like going out or drinking, and find
people my own age immature.

As the epiphany of adult diagnosis continued to explode until 2010, I [...] started receiving confidential communiques from adult film actors, and sex workers, who themselves were getting diagnoses of Asperger’s Syndrome. From my standpoint, I had quite the elephant in the bathtub – as the clinical world grappled with spectrumites’ relationship to porn, the idea that the actors we watched were often us was really not on anyone’s radar but mine.

What to do with such knowledge? I sought advice from a few colleagues, trying to open this can of worms as gently as I could. But the autism world didn’t just say, “Maybe not now.” The autism world made it clear, “Michael John, we love you. But on this one? Shut the $%#! up.”

This directive? I partially obeyed, as I also continued to support these adults as I would any GRASP members. Many of them wanted out of their professions. But equally vexing was that many others didn’t. They liked sex, and whether they wanted primary romantic partners or not, they were sure they stunk at relationships anyway – so why not? The diagnosis, as with all of us, felt like a positive validation for why they were who they were.

For the first time I too was challenged by the idea that not everyone who engaged in these lives was, as I had been steered to believe, a trafficking victim, someone who “didn’t know what they were doing,” a person ruining their potential for love, a drug addict, or even a sex addict (p.s. similar to “porn addiction,” there is no such thing). If you can believe this, I actually felt that these sex workers adhered more to the desired ideals of spectrumfolk for diet and exercise than any other spectrumite sub-grouping – they were extremely health-conscious. And their takes on our (non-sex worker) attitudes towards them were memorable: one even laughed at me and retorted, “Please. How many non-porn actors like their jobs?” Many were LGBTQ folks, whose voices were still immensely marginalized (despite their unproven, yet undisputed higher prevalence) in the autism world.

But many of them (like their neurotypical colleagues, as I would learn) were single mothers; women who had achieved the pay scale and flexible hours that the single mother who long ago raised me…could only dream of.

I couldn’t address these concerns until I left GRASP in 2013.