Kat Sunlove, publisher of a sex magazine and a retired dominatrix, is hugging the most powerful man in the state Senate.
Having just missed him at his office, the nation's top porn lobbyist spots President Pro Tem John Burton--a close personal friend, she calls him--in one of the grand foyers of the Capitol and receives a warm embrace, plus a little help on a troublesome bill.
A Sacramento power broker meeting with a porn industry lobbyist, let alone plotting strategy with her, would have been unthinkable a few years ago. But a group calling itself the Free Speech Coalition, which is headquartered in the San Fernando Valley, has entered the lobbying game in pursuit of an audacious goal--the mainstreaming of the multibillion-dollar adult entertainment industry.
Critics see that aim as something far more sinister. It is, as one legislator put it, "turning perversion into politics."
The coalition, often shunned and frequently ridiculed, is no political heavyweight. But Sunlove, the group's paid lobbyist, has learned that even if lawmakers are no friends of pornography, she can enlist their aid against some bills threatening freedom of speech. That certainly is the case the day she runs into Burton, a San Francisco Democrat.
"I'm worried about this one," she tells him. The bill would empower local governments to restrict sexually oriented businesses and potentially banish them to a far corner of the state.
The legislation, sponsored by Assemblyman Martin Gallegos (D-Baldwin Park), had cruised out of the Assembly and this day appears headed for a favorable vote in the Senate Public Safety Committee.
"That's not a good place for it," says Burton, chairman of the body that makes committee assignments. "Let's see if we can't get it in the Judiciary Committee."
And a few days after this May meeting, that's exactly where the bill goes.
Sunlove considered the original Gallegos bill an illegal limit on free speech. Burton had his doubts too. But by the time a much-watered-down proposal emerges from the Judiciary Committee, which Burton also chairs, it poses no new legal threat to sex businesses.
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The attenuation of the Gallegos bill was one of many small victories for the coalition, the nation's first adult entertainment trade group. Based in Chatsworth, the nonprofit organization claims 600 dues-paying members, from Web site operators to porn actresses.
