David Aaron Clark: Screw, Dominatrix Novels, and Evil Angel

David Aaron Clark (September 5, 1960 – November 28, 2009) was an American writer, musician, porn actor, and director. Readers who treat erotic literature and hardcore video as one trade can use him as a bridge. He started with campus journalism prizes, passed through Al Goldstein’s Screw, and ended up in Los Angeles feature porn, including extreme work near the Evil Angel style. He directed BDSM-flavored sex films and wrote novels with literary ambition, Greenery-era erotic fiction energy set next to AVN-level screenwriting. His private life kept spilling into tabloids and industry talk.

He studied at Rutgers, a double major in journalism and art, and graduated with the journalism degree in 1986. He was editor-in-chief of the student paper The Daily Targum and won multiple College Gold Circle Awards from the Columbia Scholastic Press Association. After school he was a stringer at The Bergen Record and at New Brunswick’s Home News Tribune, then an online editor at Dow Jones News Service. For two years he covered planning commissions, missing children, and gun shows, got bored, and went looking for something else to write. A college roommate who edited Genesis opened that door. Clark joined Genesis, then spent five years at Screw.

In a Luke Ford interview he sketched the same arc: he had decided he could not paint or draw well enough and turned to serious journalism, then the planning-commission and human-interest work at Dow Jones bored him and he wanted a different subject. He also played in the band False Virgins, produced by Sonic Youth guitarist Lee Ranaldo. Around the turn of the decade the band released two albums: Skin Job in 1990, engineered by the Brooklyn producer Martin Bisi, and Infernal Doll in 1991 on Enemy Records. After the lead singer died by suicide, Clark broke the band up and stopped playing.

The novels are the literary half of the résumé. The Wet Forever (1991, reissued in 1995) follows a hedonist, Janus, and a dominatrix, Mädchen. It is heterosexual D/s fiction with literary ambition, not stroke-book filler. The others include Sister Radiance (1992), The Marquis de Sade’s Juliette: Vengeance On The Lord (1993), and Into the Black (1995). He co-edited Ritual Sex with Tristan Taormino and published True Blood with photographs by Charles Gatewood. The graphic novels The Fallen: The Pale Door and The Fallen: Cold Religion were drawn by Miran Kim and David Rankin. His work also showed up in anthologies, including Gahan Wilson’s the Ultimate Haunted House.

In 1995 he moved to San Francisco and edited the now-defunct Spectator. The flamboyant private life and the job were tangled together. In 1998 he moved to Los Angeles and directed videos for John T. Bone’s Cream Studios. His screenplay for Brad Armstrong’s Euphoria won the AVN Award for Best Screenplay in 2000. He then directed features for companies from Extreme Associates to Vivid Video. PURE, made for Evil Angel, picked up several AVN nominations, including Best Director – Feature and Best Screenplay. The nominated performers included Best Actor Keni Styles, Best Actress Asa Akira, and Best Supporting Actor Jake Malone. The list shows how far a former Screw editor had moved into industrial feature porn while keeping the byline that started with dominatrix novels and the Taormino collaboration.

Clark died suddenly of a pulmonary embolism on November 28, 2009. Mid-2000s profiles and interviews — Spectator-era writing about S&M dates, RogReviews coverage, and Peter Landau’s “Sex Wrecks” profile — show him treating pornography, sadomasochistic relationships, and prose as one continuous project. The résumé is unusual and complete: Gold Circle student journalism, Goldstein’s Screw, dominatrix-centered novels, an AVN screenplay win, Evil Angel nominations, then a stop. In his case the literary wing and the video wing of American adult culture shared one body. Kink writing and hardcore directing were the same job.