Kate Sinclaire has created a feminist, body-positive indie porn empire. Through her websites Cherrystems and the newly launched Ciné Sinclaire, she’s creating empowering erotic material on her own inclusive terms. 

“I laid the foundations (for Cherrystems) about a decade ago,” Sinclaire says. “I was coming out of a relationship where a guy I was with had published videos of us online without my consent. I found them and the associated comments, and I was like, ‘OK, so that’s out there. There’s no controlling that. So how can I control the way my own body is being represented on the Internet?’” 

Sinclaire took that control by creating her own options when mainstream porn came up short. 

“I started looking for websites to work for, but nothing fit the bill for me,” she says. “Everything was, ‘Cis women only. You have to have a certain body type.’ Suicide Girls was like, ‘Yeah, it’s alternative!’ But it’s the same women, with tattoos. That’s fine, but that wasn’t where I belonged. So I said, ‘Well, I’ll start my own stuff!’” 

Sinclaire’s West End home, which she shares with husband Aaron Klaassen, is a reflection of their respective styles and interests. 

“It’s definitely a blending of our two personalities,” Sinclaire says of their approach to decorating. “We have Battlestar Galactica and Star Wars-type stuff. But there are also butt plugs!”

 

1) TINY DEER ORNAMENTS 

“We walked into a pop-up store and I pointed these out. I made little comments about them. Whenever I was feeling angry or sad, I’d say, ‘Aaron, tell me a story!’ So he would tell me stories about these three little deer. Then, as it turns out, he bought them and gave them to me on the day we got married. I got them and I was like, ‘(sobbing sounds),’” Sinclaire says. 

2) DEER’S HEAD 

“Richard is on the wall there. That’s his name. Dick for short. I got him on Kijiji. He came with the pheasant you’ll see later,” Sinclaire says.

3) HOT DATE BANNER 

“I won a date with Sara Atnikov, a friend of mine. She was part of the Rainbow Trout Music Festival’s date auction. We told her it was going to be a me-and-her date, but when she showed up it was a surprise party with all of our friends,” Sinclaire says. 

4) AARON THE PHEASANT 

“She named it Aaron because I hate it so much,” Klaassen says. 

5) OPEN-CONCEPT KITCHEN 

“People come over and it’s like, ‘Go get yourself a glass of water. You can figure it out,” Sinclaire says. 

6) CHALKBOARD DOOR 

“Every year we erase it. So it’s still early 2016 stuff. I had a pizza party for my birthday party, so this was the sign-up list,” Sinclaire says. 

7) CLAPTRAP MODEL 

“This is a character called Claptrap from the video game Borderlands. I was playing it a lot and I thought, ‘I’d like to build a model of Claptrap. I wonder if a kit like that exists.’ Of course it doesn’t. Why would it? The intersection of people who play Borderlands and who build model kids is just me, probably. So this was my first scratch building model,” Klaassen says. 

8) BARREL TOP CERTIFICATE 

“We were in Kentucky checking out distilleries. We thought, ‘Once you’ve seen one big one, you’ve seen them all.’ So we thought we’d check out a bunch of small ones. The first one we went to was literally in a garage. They said, ‘Here’s a new passport for the Kentucky Craft Bourbon Trail. It launches next week.’ We were like, ‘We were going to visit all these anyway!’ So we were the first people in the world to finish (the passport), and we got this prize,” Sinclaire says.

Published in Volume 70, Number 25 of The Uniter (March 24, 2016)