With all of the butterflies and excitement of a new relationship, Joe Gow and Carmen Wilson were eager to find a hobby they could share. They both wanted to make home videos, so they went to Best Buy and bought a camera.
Not just any old home videos. The couple wanted to film themselves having sex. Over the next 10 years, they made 18 such films, often depicting exactly the kind of erotic situations you might expect of a married couple in the upper Midwest: no whips or orgies, just post-dinner coitus, Valentine’s Day lovemaking. In 2023, they uploaded five of their favorites to tube sites, figuring that amidst the millions of other adult videos on the internet, no one would notice.
But notice they did–by the millions. Apparently, a married couple in late middle age being intimate hit a cultural nerve. Most of the response they got was overwhelmingly positive. Some, however, would be professionally ruinous.
By December last year, Gow and Wilson’s private hobby had become international news. Gow, then the chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, was fired from his position for what the Board of Regents called “abhorrent” behavior. What’s more, he faced being terminated from his tenured position as a professor of communications as well, an irony not lost on Gow, an expert in the First Amendment.
I reached out to Gow in March, hoping to talk with him for a story I was working on about college-age adult-content creators facing workplace discrimination. After our first conversation, I immediately shifted my focus to Gow and Wilson. What follows is the product of several conversations I had with the couple, as well as other content creators, legal scholars, and academics focusing on human sexuality.
Headlines since December have focused on Gow’s termination. This is the story behind the story, and it’s even more complicated than you might expect.
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Joe Gow, 63, and Carmen Wilson, 56, met in 2006. Wilson, then head of the faculty senate of the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, led the committee that hired Gow as the 10th chancellor of the institution. They would work together for a few years before she left to take a role as dean at the University of Wisconsin-Rock County. She and Gow reconnected in 2012, at a meeting on UW’s main campus in Madison.
By then, Gow and Wilson’s previous marriages had come to an end, and they began dating. Gow was married once before and Wilson twice, so they decided to be up front with what they were looking for in their partners, including what they were into. They shared an interest in pornography.
“When we started dating, we got into what it would be like to make a video and went to Best Buy, bought a camera, and made a video,” Gow told me. They would sometimes invite other adult performers and the couple would interview them. Eventually, one of the performers suggested they attend the Exotica conference.
At the conference, Gow and Wilson were introduced to the idea of improving the production value of their home sex tapes. The couple, who got married in 2015, hired an editor and a sound engineer. They uploaded some of their videos to OnlyFans, PornHub, and XHamster.
Gow was planning to retire from his chancellorship at the end of the 2023-24 school year, and Wilson decided her career in higher education was over anyway. If not now, when? Gow thought of something Amazon founder Jeff Bezos said: “It's not an experiment if you know that it'll work.” The couple figured they’d give it a shot, and just “see what happens.”
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Earlier this spring, I met with Joe Gow via Zoom. He struck me as a regular guy. He was soft spoken, charismatic, friendly: fitting for a university chancellor. But Gow was not shy about his extracurricular activities. He showed no anger or shock or shame, as if sharing his story was as matter-of-fact as what he ate for breakfast.
He and Wilson wrote and self published two e-books under the names Geri and Jay Hart, and created video content under the tag “Sexy Happy Couple.” In their first book, Monogamy with Benefits: How Porn Enriched Our Relationship, they wrote that they were “fairly certain a scandal would ensue if our peers were to know about what we’ve been doing. ... our careers likely would be ruined.” Regardless, in 2023, they took their secret hobby and went public.
There was no conversation before Gow was fired, he told me. He simply joined a virtual meeting from his home office, anticipating that it would concern some unrelated matter, and was shocked to find himself the subject of that meeting. The Board of Regents had gotten wind of his and his wife’s online presence, and within days he was fired. Wilson lost her administrative job with the university, too. The media flocked to the story, and before long articles appeared in outlets such as the New York Times, CNN, and the Washington Post, as well as numerous local publications in Wisconsin.
“They’re basically treating me like a criminal,” Gow told me of the University of Wisconsin. “They said that your office is locked and for you to get back in, you have to go to the chief of university police and be escorted in.” He said they confiscated his work computers and banned him from campus for the rest of the semester. “It's really weird.”
Gow felt as though the institution he’d served for nearly 17 years had turned its back on him. Wilson could relate. “I had some really bad experiences and it really soured me on higher ed,” she told me. A career college administrator, Wilson’s last full-time job was serving as vice president of academic affairs at Medaille University, a private college in Buffalo, New York. Just one year into her tenure there the school shut down due to financial hardship, a likelihood that was not disclosed to her when she took the job.
“I think it's safe to say we've been treated better by people in the world of adult entertainment than people in higher ed,” Gow said. “I think there are people in adult entertainment [who are] a lot more honorable and honest.”
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There is currently an investigation to determine the fate of Gow’s faculty position. After speaking with lawyers, he believes that if it does not end in his favor, he has a real case. I reached out to the Board of Regents director, Karen Walsh, for comment, but she declined my request, stating: “I can’t comment on a personnel issue.”
As of now, Gow still plans to teach in the fall, and stated that attempting to terminate his tenured status is a violation of not only his First Amendment rights, but also of the school’s own policy on academic freedom and expression.
Indeed, the Universities of Wisconsin policy on academic freedom and freedom of expression states that “students and employees shall be permitted to assemble and engage in spontaneous expressive activity as long as such activity does not materially and substantially disrupt the functioning of an institution.”
In Gow’s view, he did not act in any way to adversely affect the school. On the contrary, he said, “the point of the university is to promote free speech, free expression, to search for the truth–deal in unpopular ideas, you know. So I would argue that what my wife and I have done is not inconsistent with the interests of the university.”
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Gow’s situation, as scandalous as it may be, raises an important question: Is adult entertainment, created and distributed by oneself, protected by the First Amendment?
The short answer is yes and no. The First Amendment states that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press…”
Your freedom of speech, in other words, protects you from the government, but not from an employer. In fact, in the latter case, it doesn’t even apply. But what if that employer is a public institution, one whose purpose, ostensibly, is to teach critical, independent thought?
Lee Rowland, a First Amendment attorney and president of the National Coalition of Censorship, a free expression advocacy group, told me that “a private employer generally is not legally required to honor, or is not legally required to accept or protect, any speech you may issue as an employee, period.”
Many people falsely believe themselves to be protected because they don’t understand the parameters of the First Amendment, or really anything about it. In fact, according to a survey conducted by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, nearly a third of Americans can’t name even one of the five freedoms protected by the amendment.
But Gow does understand the First Amendment–after all, he teaches it. And he’s ready to fight. In late May, Gow published an account of his ordeal in the Chronicle of Higher Education, stating: “I look forward" to defending myself. “I understand why UW leaders didn’t want me to continue as chancellor, but I am puzzled by their determination to keep me from returning to the classroom. After all, these are the same people who, at a board meeting held just weeks before my firing, energetically affirmed the importance of promoting free speech on our campuses.”
Nevertheless, Gow’s case reveals the power of not just a huge institution like the University of Wisconsin, but of any employer in limiting employees’ freedom of expression. Some employers have a code of conduct or morality clause that covers such things as employees’ “online presence.” Gow’s termination was decided on the grounds that his behavior, according to the Universities of Wisconsin President Jay Rotham, “subjected the university to significant reputational harm. His actions were abhorrent.”
Despite this, the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse is hardly anti-sex. The school offers a variety of courses on human sexuality, and even one titled “Sex/Work,” which looks at sex work in the US through sociopolitical, feminist, and regulatory lenses, according to the university’s website.
A student petition to rehire Gow, which began as a joke, garnered 657 signatures as of January 11th. Students also shared sentiments in the Racquet Press, a UW-La Crosse publication, that his tenure shouldn’t be terminated, but also that his First Amendment defense was hypocritical. Anna Giese, a fourth-year student at the university, said that in April 2022 Gow emailed students about why messages they’d chalked on campus sidewalks had been removed, calling them “obscene, lewd, or profane.”
But Gow also noted that some of these messages targeted individuals on campus, highlighting that free speech does not equate saying whatever you want, about whomever you want. Writing those messages was very different than uploading porn to adult websites, in other words, and calling him a hypocrite for doing the latter while also policing student behavior on campus hinges on a false equivalency.
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Americans consume online and digital pornography at astronomical rates. According to a study published by The Journal of Sex Research, XVideos has 700 million more monthly visits than Amazon, 900 million more than TikTok, and 1.5 billion more than Netflix.
One of the most popular sites for creators to self-publish adult content is OnlyFans. Since it launched in July of 2016, the subscription platform has garnered over 120 million registered users and has between 1.5 and 2 million creators.
In August of 2021, the company declared a ban on pornography, which made up 98 percent of the content on the platform. Creators made an uproar, claiming to have built the platform, and OnlyFans reversed the ban in a matter of days.
Now, according to Tech Report, some creators make tens of thousands of dollars a month on OnlyFans, and in February of 2023 the platform's monthly traffic topped one billion visitors.
The numbers alone reveal the hypocrisy of American society: People clearly like to watch porn, and yet those who create it face discrimination, shaming, and even termination from their jobs if they’re found out. Put more starkly: following the media coverage of his termination, Gow and Wilson’s videos went viral; their OnlyFans page alone garnered 10,000 new subscribers virtually overnight.
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Although there are career creators on OnlyFans, many use the site to moonlight in adult entertainment and make some extra money.
Marie began making content for OnlyFans during the pandemic. “There was no money and bills kept coming,” she told me. Her content ranges from topless photos to private messages for which her subscribers pay an additional fee. Yet, the consequences that she might face have lingered in the back of her mind. And for good reason.
A study produced by the Free Speech Coalition showed that three in five adult entertainment performers are subjected to employment discrimination. According to this study, 63 percent of people who participate in the amateur adult content industry have lost a bank account or financial tool based on their source of income.
For creators like Marie, this was a big point of worry. When Chase Bank announced it would be closing accounts for anyone who had income generated from platforms such as OnlyFans, she directed the money she made on the platform into CashApp.
When I asked her why she didn’t just change banks, she explained that when a bank closes an account for that reason, it's often flagged in another data bank, so it would follow her around. “I don't want to have a label on my forehead that says OnlyFans creator,” she said.
Because Marie is worried about the stigma of being a sex worker, she asked not to be identified by her full name. She has her future to think about. Not only did OnlyFans keep Marie afloat throughout the pandemic, it also helped her move to Florida, where she now attends nursing school.
Hunter Kincaid, a professor of psychology at Hunter College who focuses on human sexuality, told me that a society’s attitude and ideas around sex start with the way its children are taught sex ed. At an institutional level, sexuality is discussed as something to be repressed. From that, he said, stigmas and taboos surrounding sex begin. Pornography, which depicts sex for pleasure, flouts ideas that are ingrained in Judeo-Christian society: that sex is for procreation, and to be experienced only by people in monogamous relationships, ideally marriage.
Another factor that propagates the stigma surrounding the online pornscape is the shift in power from male-led studios and corporations to the performers, creators, and self-contractors. The Hugh Hefners and Larry Flynts of generations past have given way to independent producers making porn on their own–and keeping the profits. This has empowered historically disenfranchised groups, like women and the BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ communities.
According to Kincaid, “OnlyFans allows it so that women can directly take money from the clients, [and] so that gay men can directly take money from the clients. It's not all owned by the straight white men that historically controlled pornography.”
This has elicited backlash. “When you combine that economic lens of what happened with our past of stigmatizing sex for pleasure, you just get a public that says, ‘Ew, this is gross,’” Kincaid said, “and a business industry that distances itself, like banks that refuse to let people use accounts if they're making money through certain sites, like OnlyFans.”
Besides the financial concerns, content creators often face ostracization by their families as well. When Brock Barajas’ family learned of his side hustle creating OnlyFans content, they were disgusted. “My mom called me a prostitute, which sucks but it's whatever,” he told me.
Every content creator I spoke to in reporting this story referred to the “societal stigma” surrounding sex and adult entertainment in some way. But for some, this just means there’s an opportunity to have more open, honest conversations about sex and adult content. Carmen Wilson told me that she and Gow hope to visit colleges and give talks about sexuality and pornography.
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On June 19th, the UW-La Crosse Faculty Senate will decide whether or not Gow will lose his tenure. The president of the Universities of Wisconsin called for his wholesale termination. Gow is ready to fight it. And while his situation is hardly singular, it shines a harsh light on the professional consequences of a person’s online presence, and the murky waters of free speech.
I spoke to Gow and Wilson on the phone in late May as they were getting ready for a vacation. Equally vulnerable and honest, they struck me, more than anything, as a couple very much in love. They spoke about one another with admiration and respect. They often finished one another's sentences, cutting in to add details, offer a compliment, or explain another side of the story.
Most apparent, though, was that they didn’t get into making online porn for fame or money, but simply because it made them happy. Wilson said that a podcast host recently referred to them as “sexual freedom fighters.” She liked it.
What’s gotten lost in the story, Gow said, is that “a married couple can have an exciting relationship.”
Just before we hung up, Gow reflected on how that excitement was met by the University of Wisconsin. “It's no fun having people that are trying to get you kicked out of your job,” he said. “But it brought us closer together. I wouldn’t change a thing.”
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